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Yesterday’s announcement that Giannis Antetokounmpo was signing a five-year, max extension with the Milwaukee Bucks was a remarkable anti-climactic end to months of hand-wringing and hypotheticals. We’ve become so used to the most chaotic possible ending to these scenarios that seeing things bend towards stability felt way more surprising than it should have.
The tension of the past few months hasn’t just been inflated by the possibility that Giannis would turn down the extension, implicitly or explicitly signaling his desire to play elsewhere. The botched sign-and-trade for Bogdan Bogdanovic raised the stakes. As did two consecutive disappointing playoff exits.
But that weight has been lifted, or at least rolled down the road for another four years. Their biggest question has been answered and now they can go back to answering the only slightly less pressing questions of who they are and what their ceiling is.
The answer to the first question is a damn fine basketball team. The Bucks’ early playoff exits have obscured just how dominant they were in the past two regular seasons. They won 60 games in 2018-19 and were on pace to fly past that total last year before the season was interrupted. Their strength-of-schedule adjusted point differential for both seasons was in the top-30 of all time and last season’s mark was the 11th-best ever. They have been an elite offense and an elite defense for back-to-back seasons. The upgrade from Eric Bledsoe to Jrue Holiday should pay dividends at both ends. And they added shooting and offensive skill to their bench, with the additions of D.J. Augustin, Bryn Forbes and Bobby Portis (with Torrey Craig for defensive depth).
All due respect to the Heat, Celtics and Raptors but the Bucks should enter this season as the favorites in the Eastern Conference. They’ve earned that distinction.
With Giannis Antetokounmpo locked into his extension, can the Bucks finally break through?
The second question, the one about their ceiling, is harder to answer. The tl;dr is that the Bucks are absolutely capable of winning it all this year. The conventional wisdom is that Milwaukee’s playoff losses — to the Raptors in 2019 and to the Heat in 2020 — are indicative of fundamental flaws in their personnel system, weaknesses that they are incapable of stopping opponents from exploiting. But, for as good as the Bucks were the past two seasons, there is a frame of reference for understanding their upset losses.
The Raptors were an elite team as well, one whose strong statistical indicators were depressed to some degree by Kawhi Leonard’s load management program. And the loss to the Heat last season, from a comparative strength standpoint, was one of those historic and inexplicable outliers. Look at this way — the difference between the strength-of-schedule adjusted point differentials of the Bucks and Heat last season, was about the same as the difference between the 2007 Dallas Mavericks and the We Believe Warriors who knocked them out of the first round.
Yes, Giannis still has very little offensive gravity outside the paint and strong, disciplined defenses can make it much harder for him to score inside in the playoffs. But Holiday is a tier ahead of Bledsoe as a complementary creator, meaning a focus on stopping Giannis will have far different consequences this year. And Mike Budenholzer is still the coach and his proclivity for sticking to obtuse substitution patterns was a problem last year. But if simply convincing him to play Giannis for more than 30 minutes per game in a playoff series is all that separates the Bucks from their ceiling, the rest of the East is in trouble.
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The Milwaukee Bucks finally moved on from Eric Bledsoe, and his replacement, Jrue Holiday, could be the playoff boost the Bucks have needed for a while.
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With Giannis off the board, the winter of James Harden’s discontent takes center stage in the NBA soap opera.