No. 1 Milwaukee Bucks on verge of all-time collapse vs. Miami Heat
Dan WolkenThe Milwaukee Bucks entered the NBA playoffs as the championship favorite, the surest bet to make the Eastern Conference finals and the aura of being the best team in the league with the most unguardable player.
And now it’s all on the verge of collapsing.
The Bucks are not done yet. There is still a path — a narrow but legitimate one — for Milwaukee to claw back from a 3-1 deficit against Miami...But the issues seem deeper than that. If anything, what this series has shown is that we might have already seen the best of the Milwaukee Bucks — with no clear path to get Antetokounmpo back to the NBA Finals.
That admittedly seems like a crazy thing to say about a team that just went a league-best 58-24 in the regular season and had the misfortune of losing Antetokounmpo early in Game 1. If that doesn’t happen, it’s a different series.
Wolken just used the excuse he dismissed two paragraphs earlier! Look, there is no. way. Milwaukee lost these games because Antetokounmpo got his ass bruised. Their roster is far more talented than Miami's. They were favored to win every one of those four games. They have lost three of them because they got hit by a force of nature, Jimmy Butler, and in their wonder they don't comprehend. Nobody comprehends what Jimmy Butler has done.
I bolded the comment about their coach because I think he is the most clueless. Budenholzer said after Game 4, "We didn't make plays down the stretch and they did." That is rote coach-speak from a bewildered coach. That's what you say when you lose a "normal" game to an equal. It's not what you say when Jimmy Butler happens. Before going to bed last night I thought about what Spo's post-game presser. I would have walked into the room and first thing would have said drolly, "That was great coaching you saw out there tonight." Then I would have gotten serious. "In fifteen years here I have coached some of the all-time greats, D-Wade, LeBron, Chris. In a lifetime in the game I have been opposite the greats, Hank Gathers in college, Kevin Garnett, Dirk Nowitzki, Kevin Durant, Tim Duncan, on and on. I have never seen a more heroic, willed performance than Jimmy Butler's tonight."
But Milwaukee’s roster is old, expensive and pretty fragile as we’ve come to find out.
Oh now they're old, expensive and fragile. Before April 16 that roster was the favorite to win the NBA title and it was Miami's roster, fresh off a blood-colding, decisive loss to Atlanta that was, and IS "old, expensive and pretty fragile."
Even without Antetokounmpo for a couple games, it would have been hard to believe when the series began that the Bucks would be in this much trouble against the Heat...
He lurches like a drunk finding his way home in the night and at long last stumbling into bed.
Instead, the Heat have just been better and more resilient than the Bucks, who got Antetokounmpo back in the lineup and led by 10 points with 5 1/2 minutes left but forgot how to play basketball for the next several possessions. Meanwhile, Butler carried Miami to a comeback win with a 56-point masterpiece that was truly one of the great playoff performances we’ll ever see.
True, that last; true that first. Not true that Milwaukee "forgot how to play basketball" down the stretch. Force of nature.
That’s why you can’t write Milwaukee off just yet. If that’s what it took for the Heat to pull off Game 4 at home, it will take a huge effort to close this series out. And if Milwaukee can just win the next two — one at home, one on the road where they almost won on Monday — they would be a significant favorite in a Game 7 situation.
All true.
But the short-term concerns for Milwaukee could breed some longer-term tension, even if they get by this series.
This is a team built around Antetokounmpo, Jrue Holiday and Khris Middleton, who delivered that title in 2021...
But Holiday will be 33 next season on a $35 million contract, with a $37 million player option for the following year. He has shot the ball poorly against the Heat and made several uncharacteristically harmful decisions in the closing minutes of Game 4.
Middleton has a player option for $40 million this summer that seems likely to be declined, making him an unrestricted free agent. After a series of injuries the last couple years, it’s hard to know exactly what kind of player you’re going to get as he also enters his mid-30s. Brook Lopez is going to be a 35-year-old unrestricted free agent.
That’s a lot of uncertainty and a lot of cap space for an aging roster with no real youth injection on the horizon. With their 2025 and 2027 first-round picks still owed to the New Orleans Pelicans from the trade that netted them Holiday, there’s no obvious way for the Bucks to pivot.
Antetokounmpo is just 28, and there’s a whole next chapter of his career that needs to be written.
In three years, he also will be a free agent. Are the Bucks really going to ride that out with the same if this group follows its championship by losing to the Celtics in the second-round in 2022 and suffering the indignity of a first-round upset to the Heat?
33 and 35? That's a youth movement at 601 Biscayne!
Maybe they won’t have any other choice. But the Bucks’ murky future highlights the desperate need to make the most out of what they have now....
As the "Heat" had no choice; as the "Heat" are "desperate...to make the most out of what they have now."
That reality underscores what a disaster it would be to lose this series to the Heat. If the Bucks can’t get out of the bind they’ve created for themselves right now, it’s not hyperbole to say that even with a force of nature like Antetokounmpo, their title-winning days might really be over.
Lolol.
