MILWAUKEE — On Wednesday night, for the first time in weeks, the Milwaukee Bucks locker room at Fiserv Forum was “extremely quiet” following a game.
After their seven-game win streak was snapped with a 119-104 loss to the Atlanta Hawks, that was how it should sound, according to Giannis Antetokounmpo.
“We don’t like the feeling of losing,” Antetokounmpo said after the Bucks’ first loss since Nov. 16. “That’s the feeling that you want to have as a team, that, ‘Yeah, we gave one away.’ But now we just gotta go back, watch the film, do our adjustments and we have one of the best teams in the East. We have a big one in two days and get ready to compete there and hopefully we can get one.”
After clinching a spot in the NBA Cup knockout rounds with a win in Detroit on Tuesday, the Bucks didn’t have it on Wednesday.
They delivered an opening punch and took a 25-15 lead through six and a half minutes, but failed to sustain the same energy and focus the rest of the way. The Hawks closed out the first quarter with a 23-10 run to take a 38-35 lead after one quarter, built a double-digit lead by halftime and then remained in control the rest of the way, even as the Bucks tried to claw back into the game.
“I thought we were dead-legged most of the game,” Bucks coach Doc Rivers said. “We didn’t think well, which is a direct sign of fatigue. Didn’t execute very well. Our passes were really late. I didn’t think we passed the ball well at all tonight. We had guys open and then we passed it. It felt like that the entire night.”
To Rivers’ point, the Bucks were not sharp.
As a team, they committed 18 turnovers. After shooting 45 percent or better from behind the 3-point line for five straight games, they made just 33.3 percent from 3 — their lowest 3-point percentage since making only 28.6 percent from deep in their Nov. 12 win over the Toronto Raptors. They gave up 16 offensive rebounds, which led to 21 points for the Hawks. Atlanta scored 30 fast-break points and tallied 64 points in the paint.
“Every once in a while, you have these games, these schedule games where my thought was, ‘Let’s get to the second half and be alive and then try to steal it,’” Rivers said. “You hate to say that at home, but it was just the feeling. That was an emotional, hard game yesterday and then to come in tonight, I didn’t think we had a lot.”
The issues that were prevalent throughout the Bucks’ 2-8 start returned against the Hawks. While the scoreline might have indicated that the Bucks were doing fine for the first 10 minutes, the warning signs were there from the opening tip.
Just look at the Hawks’ first basket on Wednesday night:
The Bucks technically got “back” on this play.
At one point, Taurean Prince and Brook Lopez are the two players furthest down the floor, but that didn’t matter as Prince turned to square up to the ball and rookie forward Zaccharie Risacher sprinted behind him for the easy two.
“I just think we didn’t get back with enough urgency,” Damian Lillard (25 points, four rebounds, five assists) said. “We were moving around, I just think sometimes you make a shot and you think ‘I’m going to have some time.’ But they’re one of those teams, they’re throwing it in — we talked about that as well — they advance the ball ahead and they’re running out.
“Tonight, we let them catch us by surprise too many times, just thinking we had time and then the ball is already right there and now we’re scrambling. So it just happened one too many times. We weren’t focused enough on that.”
For the Bucks though, it wasn’t just a problem with keeping up with the Hawks in transition.
With the threat of Trae Young’s 3-point shot and playmaking ability drawing the attention of every defender, the Hawks prey on teams that put too much focus on Young by aggressively cutting off the ball. Rather than standing and waiting for Young to create something off the bounce, the Hawks wait for help defenders to get drawn in by Young and then cut to break down defenses.
Watch how this cut by Dyson Daniels totally compromised the Bucks’ defense:
Daniels has made just 29.4 percent of his 3-point attempts this season. He is not a real threat to hurt the Bucks from out there, but the same cannot be said about Young. So, when the Hawks’ point guard dribbled toward Prince, the Bucks’ starting small forward took notice and lost his man, similarly to the way he lost Risacher in transition. Daniels cut into Brook Lopez, took the Bucks center out of the play, and let Clint Capela get an easy look in the middle of the lane.
On top of struggling to keep the Hawks from getting behind their defense in transition and half-court situations, the Bucks were not physical enough on the defensive glass.
The Bucks — now 12th in defensive rebounding percentage, per Cleaning the Glass — have largely cleaned up their defensive rebounding problems after a rough start to the season, but Wednesday was a night of lapses in focus and the Bucks just weren’t good enough at getting a body on the Hawks’ potential rebounders.
“Gotta do a better job smashing guys down there,” Giannis Antetokounmpo (31 points, 11 rebounds, five assists) said. “Whenever the floater goes up or layup goes up, we gotta do a better job doing that because they have guys that are going to go for the offensive rebound.”
After the game, Antetokounmpo was not interested in accepting any “excuses,” as he described them, about tired legs or the second night of a back-to-back sapping his team’s energy and leading to their loss, but his frustration was nowhere near the level it was following the Bucks’ last loss on a back-to-back in New York on Nov. 8.
While shots were not falling and the Bucks weren’t as crisp as they needed to be, they still at least fought back and cut the Hawks’ lead down to single digits multiple times in the fourth quarter. That left Rivers in a position where he didn’t feel as though he needed to belabor his team with any of his issues with their performance on Wednesday night, especially considering the vast improvement in the team’s play over the last month.
“You can play well or play bad, you’re going to lose a game at some point,” Rivers said. “We could have been fresh-legged tonight and Atlanta played well and beat us. It wouldn’t have turned around what we’ve been doing. It’s just one game, so we won’t overdo it. We’ll watch a little film. This is one that, my guess is I won’t watch a lot of film. I’ll start getting ready for Boston.”
When the Bucks dropped to 2-8 through 10 games with their loss to the Celtics on Nov. 10, the schedule made it clear what they needed to do to save their season. Before they met the Celtics again on Dec. 6, they had 11 games largely played at home against Eastern Conference teams with records below .500 and they needed to win a large majority of those games.
The Bucks went 9-2 in that stretch. They are now back over .500 themselves with an 11-10 record and their season is no longer a lost cause. They are only two games out of a top-four seed in the East, but that still leaves them far from being ready to compete for a championship.
It will only be one of 82 regular season games, but a test against the defending champions on the road seems like a good way to gauge how far they’ve come and just how far they have left to get where they want to be at the end of the season.
