MILWAUKEE – Last April, the Milwaukee Bucks were a young team on the rise in the Eastern Conference, playing .500 basketball and happy to be in the playoffs.
Sound familiar?
The 41-41 Bucks finished just one game ahead of the 40-42 Celtics in the standings last season, giving them the sixth seed while Boston slid into the seventh spot. While both teams lost their first-round playoff matchups, both went into the offseason with expectations of building on their success.
But during their last 10 games, respectively Milwaukee and Boston have been on very different paths. The Celtics have won nine of their last 10 contests, while the Bucks have dropped five straight and seven of their last 10. In the Eastern Conference, only Brooklyn and Philadelphia have won fewer games than the 20-32 Bucks.
Still, Brad Stevens won’t let Milwaukee’s record fool him, even if the Celtics are 10.5 games ahead of them in the standings. The Bucks have already played 31 games on the road (7-24), the most in the entire league, and they’ve got a home-heavy schedule after the break. After all, before the All-Star Break last year, the Celtics weren’t exactly in the playoff picture either. Stevens remembers that his own team was 16-29 heading into last February.
“They’re a good basketball team. They’ve been injured a lot of the year, and they’ve played the least amount of home games in the NBA,” Stevens said. “They’re sitting in the same position we were in last year, and then we were able to make a run and get to the seventh seed.”
When they have actually had games at the BMO Harris Bradley Center, they’ve been pretty solid, posting a 13-8 record at home. They’ve got a promising young core of players, like the Celtics, but as Stevens noted, there’s a young core, and then there’s really, really young.
“We’ve got a lot of guys 22-25 (years old). They’ve got guys that are younger than that,” Stevens said.
The Bucks’ starting unit features two players under 22, Giannis Antetokounmpo (21) and Jabari Parker (20). And Parker, thanks to an ACL injury that cut his rookie year short, hasn’t even played a full season’s worth of games.
Meanwhile, the other three expected starters for tonight’s game, Khris Middleton (24), Michael Carter-Williams (24) and free agent signee Greg Monroe (25), aren’t exactly cagey veterans either.
The Bucks no longer have the services of experienced players like Ersan Ilyasova (Pistons), Jared Dudley (Wizards) and Zaza Pachulia (Mavericks), and their defense has suffered this season with those departures. Add to that the recent injuries to O.J. Mayo (missed the last 11 games) and John Henson (last five games), and the Bucks have had to rely on their young core too much as of late.
“Whether it’s confidence, or just being a leader in the locker room, it’s huge,” Celtics forward Jae Crowder said of the importance of having a veteran presence on a young team. “Last year we had Gerald Wallace, and he was a great leader, and he barely saw minutes on the court. But he’d been around the league, and it helps a lot to have older guys in the locker room.”
Also worth noting is that the Bucks don’t play at nearly the same pace that the Celtics do. The Bucks average just 81.7 field goal attempts per game, while the “pace and space” Celtics check in at 89.5. Combine that with a Bucks defense that allows 45 percent field goal shooting to opponents, and tonight’s game seems like a mismatch on paper.
Still, for as much as the Celtics’ recent play looks good on paper and in the standings, Stevens knows that his own team has things it needs to clean up if they want to stay near the top of the Eastern Conference.
“We’ve had moments where we’ve played really well, and moments where we’ve been really bad,” Stevens said. “We’ve got to be better for longer stretches for us to ultimately be good. This is all really fragile. There’s a reason the East goes back and forth.”
