The Milwaukee Bucks’ Defense Is Not Postseason Ready

The NBA playoffs begin this week, and the defending Milwaukee Bucks enter as the third seed in the Eastern Conference. Although their 51-31 record trails that of the 53-29 record of the Miami Heat in first, and is far behind the 63-17 record of the NBA’s-best Phoenix Suns, the .622 winning percentage that this correlates to is entirely in line with the .636 regular season winning percentage and 46-26 record that they posted in last year’s championship run.

Considering that their, let’s say, strategic decision not to put the best product out there for the final regular season game has coincided with a win for the Boston Celtics, thus moving them into the third seed and a first-round match-up with a struggling Chicago Bulls team that they have dominated of late, everything on the surface seems well-positioned for a repeat performance. However, if the Bucks are to go deep again, they will have to conjure up some of last year’s defense. And this is something they have not been able to do much of so far this season.

On the season as a whole, the Bucks rank 14th in the NBA in defensive rating, a decidedly middle-of-the-pack placing in a 30-team league. This is a decline compared to their ninth-place in 2020-21, and only two teams with defenses worse than that (the Denver Nuggets and Chicago Bulls) are assured of playoff spots without needing the play-on tournament. Defense, as they say, wins championships.

Of course, quality defense starts with having quality defensive personnel, and while the Bucks proved they had that when at full strength with last season’s playoff performances, they have not always been at full strength this season with much of the same rotation. All-NBA Defensive First Team guard Jrue Holiday played only 66 games and 8 seconds on the season, and fellow Defensive Team member and world-beating talent Giannis Antetokounmpo managed only one more than that.

Most pertinently of all, starting center Brook Lopez appeared in only 13 contests and 298 minutes, a hundred fewer minutes than two-way rookie Sandro Mamukelashvili. Lopez and Giannis’s constant presence on the interior was at the core of the championship-winning defense of last season, but with them playing less than half of all available games combined this year, that core has been lacking.

The good news is that when Lopez is back in the fold, the defensive upside is still there. The more worrying news though is that it has yet to pay much in the way of dividends on the court. Over the team’s final 13 games – of which Lopez played 12 – the Bucks’ defensive rating actually drops to 18th in the league. It is perhaps true to say that they have been easing off (consciously or otherwise) down the stretch of the season with a playoff spot secure, yet it is not as though everything was entirely in order beforehand.

At times, the Bucks have put together good defensive runs. But the longer the season goes on, the less effective it seems to be – in the 2022 calendar year so far, the Bucks rank only 20th in defense, even behind the Oklahoma City Thunder. In the first half, they were eighth. In addition to not having the usual horses to protect the paint and the rim, they have given up a few too many good looks from the perimeter as well.

The rotation always being in flux has not helped in this regard, due to the absence through injuries/illness and mid-season transactions, yet the schematic choices seemed to be in flux as well. Where once they were blitz-heavy, the Bucks later returned to switching almost everything, before further easing back on that in the final few weeks and playing more straight man-to-man interspersed with some zones.

Perhaps they will benefit from having trialled a little bit of everything in this way. Or perhaps the consistent downward trajectory of their defense on the year is less through a conscious decision to pace themselves than we might like. The Bucks at their best proved themselves to be a dominant defensive unit, and while they might not need it against a Bulls team that will not be able to stop them going the other way, they will need that extra gear if they are to have a chance at repeating.