The Milwaukee Bucks should be rolling. After a 4-9 start, they won seven games in a row. They triumphed at the NBA Cup final in Las Vegas. Giannis Antetokounmpo leads the league in scoring, while the Giannis–Damian Lillard combination also leads all scoring duos by a comfortable margin.
Highest-Scoring NBA Duos
And yet, taken as a whole, the Bucks are still stuck in neutral, with an 18-16 record and a net rating of plus-1.5 points per 100 possessions. Since Christmas, they’ve lost to the Bulls, the Trail Blazers, and the Nets twice. With their NBA Cup victory, the Bucks demonstrated their potential and high ceiling—but as they prepare for a national TV showcase against Victor Wembanyama and the Spurs on Wednesday, their whole body of work suggests that they don’t belong in the top tier of contenders.
It’s tempting to attribute Milwaukee’s underperformance to star absences, as Antetokounmpo and Lillard missed four games apiece in late December and Khris Middleton continues his slow comeback from various injuries. “It would be nice if we could have a stretch of health, just one stretch where all three of our guys are playing,” coach Doc Rivers said in late December. The Bucks’ Big Three have played just 96 minutes together this season, which is tied for the 1,366th-most playing time among all three-man combinations in the NBA.
But that’s not the true culprit behind Milwaukee’s season-long struggles: The Bucks actually have a plus-3.9 net rating when both Giannis and Lillard are off the court, per Cleaning the Glass. Milwaukee’s held up just fine without its stars, with a 3-3 record when Giannis doesn’t play and a 4-3 record when Lillard sits.
The actual problem is more unexpected: The Bucks aren’t dominating like they should when their stars are playing. Compare Giannis to the other two MVP candidates who finished among the top three in ESPN’s straw poll in December. The Nuggets play like championship contenders when Nikola Jokic is on the floor but are the worst team in the league when he rests; the Thunder play like the best team in NBA history with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander but fall to merely average without him. The Bucks, by contrast, are merely mediocre—both when Giannis plays and when he doesn’t.
MVP Candidates On and Off the Court
That’s out of the norm for Milwaukee and its leader. In each of the past six seasons, the Bucks were plus-seven or better with Giannis on the court, per CtG. That rating hasn’t been this low since 2017-18, before Giannis won his first MVP, and Giannis’s on/off gap hasn’t been this low since 2014-15, before he first became an All-Star.
Put simply, superstars are supposed to win their minutes by a lot, but Giannis isn’t doing so. It’s worth emphasizing how strange this is: The typical issue for teams with an MVP candidate is an inability to survive without him, à la the Nuggets without Jokic. Even last season, Milwaukee’s first after exchanging Jrue Holiday for Lillard, the Bucks fit that pattern. They were great with Giannis on the floor but struggled without him and then lost when he—and Lillard, for a couple of games—was injured in the playoffs.
Now they’ve seemingly solved one problem while creating another. On the plus side, unlike Denver when Jokic rests, Milwaukee can reliably tread water without Giannis, thanks largely to its array of shooters and the still-productive big-man combo of Brook Lopez and Bobby Portis. The two bigs are effective when “playing off each other, playing the inside-outside game,” Rivers said. “You look at our team [when the stars are out], who gets downhill for us? We thought, well, post it, that’s the same thing as getting into the paint. They help, we throw it out, we get shots that way. So we kind of invert the game that way.”
Led by a resurgent Lillard and three new rotation players, the Bucks rank second in 3-point percentage, at 38.7 percent. Free agent pickups Taurean Prince and Gary Trent Jr. and third-year guard A.J. Green—who’s already played more minutes this season than he did in either of his first two campaigns—are all north of 40 percent from deep. Six Bucks have attempted at least 100 3s this season, and all six have made them at an above-average rate.
It helps that Giannis is taking only 0.7 3s per game, furthering a multiyear trend as the career 28.5 percent 3-point shooter moves away from that persistent weakness. That, along with his continued dominance at the rim, is how Giannis has maintained excellent efficiency despite shooting a career-worst 60.5 percent on free throws.
Yet the Bucks are still less than the sum of their parts. Here’s one concise case of this confusion: The Cavaliers rank first in 3-point percentage, so it makes sense that they also rank first in offensive rating; the Bucks rank second in 3-point percentage … and are tied for only 14th in offensive rating.
They’ve been stuck in the middle for a while now. Since Rivers took over as head coach midway through the 2023-24 campaign, the Bucks are 35-35 in the regular season, or 38-39 if you add in their NBA Cup final victory and first-round playoff defeat last spring. Rivers rightly points out that team record isn’t always the best indicator of progress—“You don’t care much about [the standings], you really just focus on how you’re playing and how you’re trending”—but not much has changed underneath the hood, even after a summer to find roster reinforcements and give Rivers time to implement his tactics.
Nor does it seem like change is coming, barring a big swing at the trade deadline. ESPN’s BPI projection system forecasts the Bucks to finish with just 44 wins, which would match their record in 2017-18—the last season before they hired Mike Budenholzer as coach, signed Lopez, and saw Giannis ascend to an MVP level.
The Bucks have some wiggle room in a top-heavy Eastern Conference, but not that much. BPI gives Milwaukee a 73 percent chance of finishing in the top six of the Eastern standings, meaning a roughly 1-in-4 chance of falling to the play-in bracket. And if the Bucks qualify for the postseason as the sixth, seventh, or eighth seed, they’ll be underdogs against the Cavaliers, Celtics, or Knicks in the first round. That’s the same problem facing other underwhelming Eastern contenders, like Indiana and Philadelphia.
Milwaukee might have a better 2024-25 outlook than the Pacers or 76ers, but it also has more existential roster-building issues. The Bucks clearly don’t have enough two-way players; estimated plus-minus rates Giannis as the only Buck who’s above average on both offense and defense. And they don’t have many avenues to find more: Even with Rivers playing some youngsters, the Bucks are the oldest team in the NBA, they’re above the second apron, and they still owe a number of future picks as a result of the Holiday and Lillard trades.
All those factors mean the Bucks are operating with an all-in, win-now mentality. The Vegas victory over Oklahoma City provided a fleeting glimpse of that potential—they’re the only team to beat the Thunder in the past five weeks!—but the season as a whole has been a frustrating campaign, full of fits and starts, reminiscent of the last NBA Cup champion. The 2023-24 Lakers were another aging team with two stars and a middling profile that won in Vegas and slipped into a post-Cup tailspin; they were ultimately bounced in the first round in April. There’s a huge difference between dominating a quick, single-elimination tournament and being consistent enough to win consecutive best-of-seven series.
“Hopefully we get everybody back, we start playing well, and get back to the way we were playing,” Rivers said, “but we haven’t returned to the way we were playing [in Las Vegas] yet.”
Stats through Monday’s games.
