Bucks Face A Crossroads After Another Bitter Playoff Exit

If you’ve followed sports — at any level — for more than five minutes, you’ve probably heard at least one coach or player say “the better team won” after suffering a painful, unexpected defeat.

That age-old cliche, though, was not the case Wednesday night when the Milwaukee Bucks’ season and championship hopes came to a stunning and abrupt ended with a 128-126 overtime loss to the Miami Heat in Game 5 of their first-round Eastern Conference Playoff series.

No, the better team did not win that game, nor did the better team win the series. And in no way is that a knock against the Heat, which played basketball at an out-of-this-world-level to pull off a five-game upset against the top-seeded team this postseason.

Instead, it’s an indictment or, perhaps more accurately, a damnation of the Bucks’ themselves and their performance in a series that should have been not a cakewalk, but a first step toward their second championship in three seasons, one which would cement this version of the Bucks as a legitimate NBA powerhouse.

But with an aging — not to mention, expensive — roster, it stands to reason that big changes are on the horizon for Milwaukee where even head coach Mike Budenholzer could find himself out of a job when the team reconvenes later this summer, closing the book on a five-year run that is both among the best as well as the most disappointing in franchise history.

Over the last five seasons, since Budenholzer was hired to replace Jason Kidd and his interim replacement, Joe Prunty, no team has compiled a better record than the Bucks, who have gone 271-130 during that five-year stretch.

That success, though, simply hasn’t translated over to the postseason where the Bucks have won just one championship despite finishing with the league’s best record three times.

During that same stretch, Milwaukee has won eight of its 12 postseason series with half of those coming during their run to the championship in 2021 but even then. The rest have been a combination of first-round cakewalks and head-scratching disappointments.

Let’s take a trip down history lane, shall we?

After their rebuild stalled under Kidd, the Bucks went out and hired Budenholzer as head coach and the results were mind-blowing. Milwaukee blew through the regular season, finishing a league-best 60-22 to earn the No. 1 overall seed.

The Bucks followed that by sweeping Detroit in the first round, then bouncing back from a Game 1 loss to Boston with four straight victories in the Eastern Conference Semifinals before taking a 2-0 lead over Toronto in the conference finals.

But with a chance to advance to the NBA Finals for the first time since 1974, the Bucks instead dropped four straight to the Raptors, who went on to win their first-ever NBA Championship.

A year later, the Bucks were again a regular-season powerhouse and held the league’s best record when the burgeoning COVID-19 pandemic brought the schedule – and world – to a sudden stop in March.

When the league restarted in its Florida bubble, the Bucks won just two of five “seeding-round” games but after easily dispatching Orlando in the first round, dropped three straight to Miami in the conference semifinals before ultimately bowing out in five games.

Milwaukee finally got over the hump in 2021 but even then, the road to the title was far from dominant.

The Bucks finished with their worst record under Budenholzer, going 46-36 to earn the East’s No. 3 seed. After opening the postseason with an easy sweep of Miami, Milwaukee dropped two straight to Brooklyn in the second round. After evening the series with two straight victories at home, the teams split the next two to set up a decisive Game 7 in Brooklyn where the Bucks’ season likely would have ended had Kevin Durant’s size 14 foot not been on the 3-point line when he knocked down a long, game-tying 2-pointer at the end of regulation.

Milwaukee went on to win in overtime and got past Atlanta in six games to advance to the Finals. Again, the Bucks fell behind early with two straight losses to the Suns before rallying for four straight victories to clinch their first title in 50 years.

The Bucks’ title defense started with another first-round cakewalk, this time against the Bulls but Khris Middleton’s knee injury during that series left him unavailable when Milwaukee opened the second round against Boston.

Despite Middleton’s absence, the Bucks had a chance to close out the series at home in Game 6 but fell, 108-95, to force a Game 7 in Boston where the Celtics cruised to a 109-81 victory over the defending champs.

That brings us back to the present, and the aforementioned loss to Miami which might – and, perhaps, should – be the most painful loss of this era.

Plain and simple, the Bucks should have won that series. Of all the teams assembled during the last five years, this was the deepest and most talented group of them all — even more so than the squad that took the title two years ago.

To not just fall short, but to not even advance out of the first round is an utter and complete failure, no matter how Giannis Antetokounmpo tries to spin it and if this truly is the end of the Bucks in their current iteration, it’s fair to look at this five-year stretch not as a complete failure thanks to their 2021 title, but at the very least a disappointment because for all the Bucks accomplished, the chance to do more was there for the taking.