When reporters from outside of Milwaukee ask Bucks coach Mike Budenholzer for a scouting report on an opposing player or team, or a specific game plan they have drawn up for an opponent, the long-time NBA coach gives some version of the exact same answer.
“As the reporters here in Milwaukee know, I just focus on us,” Budenholzer replies. “We tend to just focus on ourselves.”
That approach made the Bucks uniquely well-prepared for this week. For five days, the Bucks did not know who they would play in their first-round series, as they waited for the NBA’s Play-In Tournament to wrap up. All they could do this week was work on themselves and try to get their bodies ready for the postseason.
But with the Heat’s 102-91 victory over the Bulls on Friday night, the waiting game is over. On Sunday at 4:30 p.m. CT, the Bucks tip off their series against Miami.
So let’s get into everything that matters. And just like the Bucks, our series preview will start with a focus on the team in Milwaukee before branching out to their opponent.
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This may end up being the biggest question for the Bucks, not only for this series, but also for the entire postseason.
When the Bucks got back on the floor on Tuesday this week, Budenholzer told reporters that Middleton was not able to fully participate in practice after Middleton re-aggravated his right knee soreness in the first quarter of the Bucks’ game against the Bulls on Apr. 5. Middleton then missed the Bucks’ final two regular season games. With that, though, Budenholzer informed reporters Middleton did individual work and he was on schedule to practice on Thursday, the Bucks’ second day on the floor as a team this week, after an off day on Wednesday.
On Thursday, Budenholzer confirmed that Middleton got back on the floor and “did everything” at practice, which is more significant than normal considering Grayson Allen and Brook Lopez said it featured the team’s most intense scrimmaging sessions since the All-Star break.
“Jrue and Brook and Giannis and those guys, after the Chicago game, didn’t play, so (Middleton) most likely was not going to play a lot more,” Budenholzer said, when asked about the severity of setback Middleton suffered. “I think, (he was) able to get some work done and some stuff that hopefully keeps him strong. So, there is an acknowledgement that there was a little bit of an aggravation, things like that, but there’s also been, I think, some positive to prepare him for playing and being his best.”
Fair or not, this question will likely linger from round-to-round if the Bucks continue to advance because the intensity will continue to ramp up and Middleton will be asked to do things he did not do in the regular season.
For the season, Middleton played in just 33 games. He missed the first month and a half (20 games) as he rehabbed left wrist surgery from the offseason, which eventually led to him needing to work on his lower body and get his legs ready for action. After making his season debut on Dec. 2, 2022 and playing seven games, Middleton went back to the injury report for right knee soreness, which kept him off the floor for another 17 games until he returned on Jan. 23.
And the Bucks have been overwhelmingly cautious with Middleton since the start of that second return. It took 15 games before the Bucks played him more than 30 minutes in a game (30 minutes and 34 seconds against the Magic on Mar. 7). The Bucks never played him in a back-to-back and Middleton never played more than 34 minutes in a game this season. In the end, Middleton averaged just 24.3 minutes per game in the 33 games he played this season.
Middleton’s lack of heavy minutes in any game this season raises serious questions about what he will be able to do this postseason, especially considering the load he carried in the Bucks’ championship run in 2021. Middleton was an absolute workhorse during the 2021 playoffs and it was clear how much the Bucks missed him last postseason. Look at the minutes he played game-by-game over the last two postseasons:
Some quick stats:
- Middleton led the Bucks in minutes in the 2021 playoffs with 922, compared to 912 for Jrue Holiday, who was in second place.
- He played 40.1 minutes per game in the 2021 postseason, which bested Holiday (39.7) and Antetokounmpo (38.1).
- In the Mike Budenholzer era, a Bucks player has played 44 minutes or more in a playoff game 16 times. Middleton has nine of those 16 games and seven of those nine games came in 2021. (Antetokounmpo and Holiday each have three of the 16, while Lopez rounds out the last with a single such game.)
There is no denying the role Middleton played in 2021 nor how much the Bucks missed his presence, let alone his All-Star contribution, on the wing last postseason. The Bucks simply didn’t have enough against the Boston Celtics in the second round.
This season, the Bucks are built differently and GM Jon Horst went out of his way to add more size on the perimeter. But Middleton is the only player on the wing with elite upside, and they will need him to regularly contribute to make a deep postseason run.
At Saturday’s practice, Middleton spoke with reporters for the first time since aggravating his right knee against the Bulls.
“Yeah. I mean, look, if we need to be playing all these minutes — hopefully we won’t — I think that’s what the playoffs are for,” Middleton said, when asked by The Athletic if he felt he could play 40-plus minutes in a game right now. “We gotta be ready for any type of circumstances, playing any amount of minutes, so if need be, I’d play 55 minutes. Hopefully, I’ll be out there and able to do it.”
When told about Middleton’s seven 44-plus minute outings in the 2021 championship run and asked if he would feel comfortable playing Middleton 40 or more minutes in a game, Budenholzer seemed similarly optimistic.
“My guess is he didn’t do it in the first game of the first round and I’m a little surprised to hear there were seven of them, but you know this time of year, you do what it takes to win games,” Budenholzer said. “And sometimes, it includes the first game of the first round. I think Khris is ready to go and we’re going to do whatever it takes to win. And he is too.”
How is Budenholzer going to assemble a rotation?
Because of Horst’s roster building, Budenholzer is going to have some difficult decisions to make.
In an ideal world, it will work out as Lopez described earlier this week.
“We have a very deep roster and we have high IQ basketball players and professionals,” Lopez said. “Everyone understands the minutes situation and how that works in the playoffs. I can’t help, but give the best example as a positive to that type of situation where it can be tough losing minutes in the playoffs for a game or a round or whatever it is, but Bobby (Portis), at the end of the Brooklyn series, wasn’t playing at all and he was still the best teammate.
“He was a professional, getting his work in, he was ready, he was there on the bench, he was supporting us and then come the Finals, he comes in and completely changes the game. We probably don’t win a championship if it’s not for Bobby, so just the importance of staying ready and how matchups can differ from series to series. We need that depth. Everyone’s going to come in handy in the playoffs in different situations. You may not know when, but that depth is absolutely going to be crucial for us.”
While the Bucks hope Lopez is correct, things get more difficult in the postseason, when a team’s best players play more minutes than in the regular season. Rhythm is critical, so fewer players are asked to step on the floor each night at the end of the rotation.
For the Bucks, everything starts with Antetokounmpo. As his minutes chart from the last two postseasons shows below, barring an injury, foul trouble or a blowout in either direction, Antetokounmpo will rarely be off the floor for more than four minutes at a time and will start almost every single quarter.
In his first two postseason runs as Bucks coach, Budenholzer was reluctant to play Antetokounmpo heavy minutes and kept his playoff minutes (34.3 mpg in 2019 and 30.8 mpg in 2020) close to his regular season tally. That cautiousness has disappeared in the last two postseasons. As evidenced by Antetokounmpo’s rotation chart in his last six series above, Budenholzer has pushed Antetokounmpo’s minutes per game tallies — 38.1 in the 2021 championship run and 37.3 in 2022 — higher in the postseason.
From there, Budenholzer will stagger his stars and make sure that at least one of the Bucks’ big 3 will be on the floor at all times. Last season, with Middleton out for the Celtics’ series, Budenholzer staggered Antetokounmpo and Holiday’s minutes in such a way that the Bucks almost never played without one of his two stars on the floor. (According to Cleaning the Glass, which excludes “garbage time” possessions, there were only 13 possessions last postseason with both Holiday and Antetokounmpo off the floor.)
Here is Holiday’s postseason minutes chart from the last two postseasons:
After sorting out minutes for Antetokounmpo, Holiday and Middleton, Budenholzer has to decide how many minutes Lopez will play each series. While Budenholzer is more willing to lean into small lineups in the postseason, Lopez still tends to play quite a bit for the Bucks (typically 28-32 minutes per game in a series) in the postseason. His lowest minutes-per-game tally in a series in the last two postseasons came in the 2021 NBA Finals, when he played just 24.4 minutes per game.
Outside of the core four, things could get interesting this postseason.
When the Bucks played the 76ers and Celtics in back-to-back contests two weeks ago, Pat Connaughton found himself outside of the rotation with Grayson Allen, Joe Ingles, Bobby Portis, Jae Crowder, Jevon Carter and Wesley Matthews alongside the core four. Connaughton played a large role off the bench in the 2021 championship run and has performed well in the postseason as a member of the Bucks, but in those two games, Budenholzer went in a different direction.
Will that be the case in the postseason? How will players react when they do get to play? Who are the other players to get cut from the rotation when Budenholzer whittles down the rotation to only eight players?
These are the tough questions sitting in front of Budenholzer and the Bucks if they want to make a deep run in the next few months.
The Bucks’ depth played a major role in their league-best 58-24 record. When Middleton missed time, they had players that could eat up minutes on the wing. Even if those minutes were not played up to Middleton’s top standard, they were filled by capable NBA players. When Ingles missed time at the start of the year, the Bucks had players to fill the void. With some time off before the postseason, there is an outside chance the Bucks show up with a totally clean injury report for the first game of the postseason. That means Budenholzer will need to make difficult decisions and the role players will need to be accept them.
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As readers may remember from our story about the Bucks’ potential opponents, the Heat and Bucks’ regular season matchups might not end up serving as a great predictive tool for the postseason.
The Bucks and Heat split their season series, 2-2, but Antetokounmpo really only played in one of those four matchups. Antetokounmpo missed the Bucks’ first two meetings in Miami on Jan. 12 and 14 with left knee soreness, then only played six minutes in the Bucks’ final matchup with the Heat on Feb. 24, leaving the game early after knocking knees with an opponent. That leaves the final matchup between the two teams on Feb. 4 as the only real look at what the Heat might try to do against Antetokounmpo this season.
(For the sake of transparency, while the Heat only had nine available players on Feb. 4 and Heat coach Erik Spolestra only played eight of those nine in the game, six of those players — Bam Adebayo, Jimmy Butler, Tyler Herro, Caleb Martin, Max Strus and Gabe Vincent — played in the Play-In finale against the Bulls. Those six were also the top six in minutes played on Friday night as well, so the matchups won’t look overwhelmingly different on Sunday.)
On Feb. 4, Antetokounmpo put up 35 points on 13-of-19 shooting and also added 15 rebounds and 11 assists in a 123-115 win. It also was one of Middleton’s best performances of the season (24 points, 7 rebounds and 4 assists in 20 minutes), but Antetokounmpo was dominant.
Spoelstra has always been among the best coaches in the NBA at scheming against Antetokounmpo, so Spoelstra may cook up something devious in this matchup. But even the best schemes can be beaten if the personnel on the floor is not big, fast and strong enough to execute it, and that has to be a real concern for the Heat.
When the Heat beat the Bucks in the bubble in 2020, they could put Crowder, Andre Iguodala, Derrick Jones Jr. or Jimmy Butler on the ball, with one or two of those players reaching in to help against Antetokounmpo, all while Bam Adebayo waited at the rim. Last season, they could put PJ Tucker, who knows Antetokounmpo well, on the ball and Butler and Adebayo in help positions. This season, they just don’t seem to have enough size on the wing.
If Antetokounmpo does his work early against Butler, the Heat’s All-Star forward just doesn’t have enough size to slow down one of the NBA’s most dominant forces with deep post position.
And if Butler fights too hard early in the possession and fronts the entry pass, as Spoelstra will sometimes ask him to do, Holiday (and Middleton) have become experts at throwing passes over the top before defenders can get to the backside help position.
If Butler is not the primary matchup on Antetokounmpo and the Heat instead opt to go with a different wing player with more aggressive double teams, the Bucks have grown quite good at making teams pay for such a coverage.
In Antetokounmpo early years as a primary playmaker, he would see a double team and quickly look for his closest open teammate, which would make defensive help rotations predictable. Then, he started throwing whip passes over the top of the defense. Now, he calmly surveys defenses as double teams approach and often correctly finds the perfect pass to fatally puncture a defense.
That assist was a product of Antetokounmpo’s processing and ability to remain calm under pressure, but it’s also a spectacular cut by Lopez.
This season, the Bucks have shown off this type of big-to-big passing with far greater regularity. Sometimes, it will be Antetokounmpo throwing a lob over the top of an overextended big man, which Lopez will set up by getting inside the backside perimeter defender (Herro on the play above) and pushing him out toward the 3-point line to create space. But other times, it will be Lopez ducking into the open space on the baseline, as he did on the play above, as his defender leaves to double-team or just help out against Antetokounmpo. (If you want to see more of it, go back and watch Lopez cut behind Joel Embiid on Apr. 2.)
The Heat’s last option would probably be using Adebayo as Antetokounmpo’s primary defender, but that runs the risk of putting Adebayo in foul trouble and giving Lopez too easy of a matchup on the block. With this roster, it just doesn’t seem like the Heat have the right mix of players to put together a cohesive plan.
Who will be most difficult for the Bucks to defend?
Butler is Miami’s best player and their best chance to find a pathway to enough offense in this series, but things have been difficult for the Heat offensively this season. The Heat scored 112.3 points per 100 possessions, which made them the 25th most efficient offense in the NBA. They struggled to hit 3-pointers this season and created shots around the rim at the third lowest frequency in the NBA, according to Cleaning the Glass.
For the Bucks to be successful against Butler, they will have to remember one thing: Butler desperately wants to shoot free throws.
Butler is a master of pump fakes. He likes to hang in the air in his jump shot and he’s talented enough to change his shot briefly to find an errant hand and then take his jumper. Butler is a physical driver that knows every trick to draw fouls, but he’s also strong enough to finish through contact. And he is a great free throw shooter (84.2 percent for his career).
Opponents fouled Butler on a staggering 23.1 percent of his shot attempts this season, which was easily the highest number for any non-big man, according to Cleaning the Glass. (Note: Antetokounmpo is classified as a big by that website and he was fouled on 24.6 percent of his shot attempts.) If the Bucks want to avoid trouble in this series, they will remain disciplined and composed against Butler.
What is a potential X-Factor?
For the most part this season, Antetokounmpo managed to avoid foul trouble. He fouled out of three games early in the season, but overall, it was not as serious of a problem for him as it has been in previous seasons. He especially improved his ability to avoid offensive fouls, as he has learned to play with more control over the years.
The Heat, however, have two rotation players that might make avoiding that type of trouble difficult, and neither of them played against the Bucks in the previously mentioned Feb. 4 matchup. This season, Kevin Love played in 62 games and drew 33 charges. Because he came off the bench, he drew .96 charges per 36 minutes, the league’s best rate by a massive margin. (Oklahoma City’s Isaiah Joe was second in the category at .52 charges drawn per 36 minutes.) Love is a prolific charge drawer and that is exactly the type of thing that might bother Antetokounmpo on drives.
Kyle Lowry, Antetokounmpo’s former charge-drawing nemesis in Toronto, is also on the Heat this season, though he left Friday’s Play-In game against Chicago with a knee injury.
Lowry doesn’t move his feet as quickly as he once did, but he is still just as much of a competitor and remains absolutely fearless. With both Love and Lowry on the prowl, Antetokounmpo will have to be careful as he makes moves to the basket and try his best to avoid getting whistled for unnecessary offensive fouls.
Prediction: Bucks in 5
The Bucks have been one of the best defensive teams in the NBA all season long and the Heat just haven’t been good offensively. It is tough to imagine them having enough offense to beat the Bucks’ defense, even if the Bucks need to shake off some rust or struggle with poor shooting the first few games of the series.
(Photo of Bam Adebayo and Giannis Antetokounmpo: John Fisher / Getty Images)
