Milwaukee Bucks Building Strong Future Despite Likely First-Round Playoff Exit
MILWAUKEE—The NBA playoffs are where champions are crowned. They’re also where weaknesses are exposed, inexperience is illuminated and ultimately, where truly great teams grow to reach their full potential.
Before the Chicago Bulls were a team with perennial championship expectations, they were the team on the receiving end of superior performances by the true contenders of the Eastern Conference. In Derrick Rose’s rookie year, they lost an epic first-round series to the defending champion Boston Celtics. The following year, they lost a second-round series to LeBron James’ Cleveland Cavaliers.
Those formative playoff losses were necessary learning experiences, lumps the Bulls needed to take. They came into those series as underdogs and ultimately met their expected fate, but not before making their presence felt.
It’s a similar position to the one currently occupied by their current first-round opponents. The Milwaukee Bucks are not going to win this series—after Thursday’s 113-106 double-overtime loss, they trail 3-0 and face elimination with one more loss. But they were never supposed to win the series. The Bulls have insurmountable advantages in talent and experience. But the Bucks aren’t going down without a fight.
“Nobody expected anything from them all year long,” Bulls forward Mike Dunleavy said this week at practice. “They had the worst record in the league last year but here they are, sixth seed in the East. We’re prepared for a battle. They’re young, energetic, well coached.”
After finishing with the worst record in the NBA last season, the Bucks have completed one of the more impressive, and unexpected, turnarounds in recent memory, making the playoffs this season as the sixth seed. Part of their out-of-nowhere playoff run comes from the good fortune of playing in the weak Eastern Conference, but even though they’re not at contender status yet, there’s plenty to indicate that this isn’t a fluke.
The Bucks have all the raw ingredients of a team that’s going to be in the playoffs for years to come. They have length and athleticism for days. Head coach Jason Kidd has instilled a toughness and defensive focus in his first season that created the league’s second-best defense. Giannis Antetokounmpo, John Henson and Khris Middleton, in particular, comprise a collection of young talents that have made significant strides in their first year under Kidd. And that’s to say nothing of Jabari Parker, the No. 2 overall pick and future foundational scorer, who has missed most of the season with a torn ACL.
This Bucks team isn't the one they had in January—they traded borderline All-Star Brandon Knight for 2014 Rookie of the Year Michael Carter-Williams at the trade deadline. It's also not the team they will have a year from now. But it's the start of something real.
It’s a promising group, albeit one that’s a couple of years away. The young players need to be thrown into the fire like this to reach their full potential.
“Being in the playoffs, overtime games, it’s really going to help us in the future,” said Carter-Williams after Thursday's contest. “It’s a learning experience.”
In the meantime, these playoffs are a process of learning what they don’t know, little things that they won’t grasp until they’ve failed a few times.
“You can’t over-coach or over-teach,” said veteran forward Jared Dudley “It’s just giving guys one or two things here or there. For Giannis, I might tell him to drive, sometimes he might look to pass. Defensively, they learn how valuable the ball is in the playoffs. It’s a close game. We were up one or two points in the fourth quarter, and then Jimmy Butler goes on a little 8-0 run by himself, and then boom, it’s basically game over.”
Dudley is full of this kind of wisdom—he’s only 29, but he’s already playing the part of the grizzled old vet to the rookies, drawing on his formative years of playoff runs with the final incarnations of the Steve Nash/Amar’e Stoudemire-era Phoenix Suns. He’s uniquely equipped to give the likes of Antetokounmpo and Carter-Williams pointers about the differences between regular-season and playoff basketball.
“Each possession is so big, when you’re up in the fourth quarter, trying to get a great shot,” Dudley said. “The Bulls are a veteran team, they know they’re going to sag off us, they’re going to let us shoot contested twos, and if a young player is thinking, ‘Hey, I’m open, I’m going to shoot.’ Well, sometimes you’re open for a reason. You have to think, maybe I’m open here but I’m going to drive to the paint and make them have to guard me or try to get fouled and get to the free-throw line. That’s something we’re learning on the fly.”
The presence of veterans like Dudley and Zaza Pachulia to complement the stable of young players is another reason this organization is in good shape for the long haul, no matter how overmatched they may be in this series with the Bulls.
“This is just the beginning,” said Dudley. “This is the foundation they’ve set for themselves. J-Kidd coming in, this is the worst that the Bucks are going to be in the next four or five years. We lost the No. 2 pick in the draft for basically the whole year, and next year he’s coming back. So you’re getting that, plus a pick, we’ve got a lot of cap space, and Giannis—you’ve got two possible franchise players on the team. So the future is bright for the Bucks.”
Sean Highkin covers the Chicago Bulls for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter @highkin
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