MILWAUKEE — Thursday night was the Milwaukee Bucks’ their third consecutive game without Giannis Antetokounmpo and Damian Lillard. After winning the last two comfortably, playing without the NBA’s top scoring duo finally caught up to them. The Brooklyn Nets outplayed the Bucks in crunch time to earn a 111-105 win following a mistake-filled final five minutes.
Milwaukee scored just eight points in the final five minutes and 55 seconds of Thursday’s game. In that time, they committed six of their 23 turnovers on the night and surrendered 19 points, enabling the Nets to flip the game. Milwaukee is now 16-13 and fifth in the East.
The Bucks could have used the absence of their top two scorers as a reasonable explanation for their poor clutch-time performance, but they showed little interest in running from the result.
“Ain’t no excuses made,” said Bucks forward Bobby Portis, who had 18 points, eight rebounds and four assists. “Ain’t no saying, ‘Oh, we should’ve did this or that.’ No, we just lost the f—ing game. We gotta be better. Straight up. We gotta be better as a team. We can win. We could’ve won that game tonight.
“We were up, we had momentum, they jumped on us in the fourth quarter, got momentum and we didn’t recover. It’s that simple. The turnovers in the first quarter, or second or third quarter, didn’t determine what happened to start the fourth. We gotta be better as a team. We should’ve won the game, point blank and simple. We should’ve won that game. But we lost and now we move on.”
Things started to unravel for the Bucks when they allowed reserve Nets guard Shake Milton to score 14 of his 20 points in the first five minutes of the fourth quarter, helping Brooklyn cut a nine-point deficit to one. The Bucks stabilized and built up a five-lead, only to watch it immediately disappear after Middleton was called for a flagrant foul for catching Nets forward Cam Johnson with an elbow while trying to clear out space.
The turnover, free throws and Nets bucket on the ensuing possession cut the Bucks’ lead to one, and Brooklyn would eventually take the lead.
“I thought (Middleton) got fouled first,” Bucks coach Doc Rivers said. “Which, they probably kind of acknowledged but they didn’t call it. I thought (Johnson) was in to Khris’ air space. You get to be able to move. Unfortunately, Khris did hit him, so I get the flagrant. You gotta call something.”
After Middleton tied the game at 99 with a strong take to the basket, the Bucks had a rough final three minutes. They forced a jump ball with 1.5 seconds remaining on the shot clock, with Portis going up against a smaller player. Rather than risk giving the Nets a chance for a close shot at the basket, Portis tapped the ball as far away from the rim as he could. Unfortunately for the Bucks, that tap went right to Nets forward Noah Clowney, who rose up and banked in a 3.
Following Clowney’s desperation heave, Ryan Rollins threw the ball out of bounds as he tried to get the Bucks into their offensive set.
Rollins, the 22-year-old point guard on a two-way contract starting in Lillard’s absence, struggled with the Nets’ pressure all night and committed four turnovers. He was far from alone: Backup point guard Delon Wright struggled to get Milwaukee into its offense as well, while Middleton had the most turnovers on the night with seven.
“I thought for two and a half quarters, even though they were pressuring, we were moving the ball. The ball was swinging around the floor, getting guys wide open,” Rivers said. “Then I thought it sped us up and everybody was going one-on-one. We just can’t have that many turnovers and mental mistakes.”
Despite his struggles on Thursday, Rollins has played well as Lillard has missed time with a right calf strain and illness. Middleton said he and the rest of the veterans will make sure Rollins doesn’t dwell on his mistakes late in Thursday’s game.
“I mean, I had the most turnovers tonight, so there’s no reason why he should feel like he had the worst game, so just keep his confidence up,” said Middleton, who posted 21 points, five rebounds and five assists.
The Nets only added one point to their lead following Rollins’ turnover, but the Bucks’ next offensive possession stagnated as Middleton struggled to get past Nic Claxton on a switch and Rivers was forced to call a timeout with 3.6 seconds left on the shot clock. Out of the timeout, the Bucks ran sharpshooter AJ Green off a screen to try to get him a look from 3, using the same action that enabled Green to get a shot off with 1.8 seconds left in the third quarter.
This time though, the screen did not free Green and he did not attempt a 3. Instead, he tried to pitch the ball back to Middleton and the Bucks committed a shot-clock violation.
“I just gotta know time and score,” Green said of the play. “I didn’t feel open right away, so I just made a play. Not really enough time to make a pass or anything else, so just gotta learn from it. Be better.”
The Nets scored on their next possession to take a six-point lead, but Middleton answered with a pull-up 3 to make it a one-possession game again. If the Bucks executed defensively, they could have had a chance to tie the game with roughly 45 seconds remaining. Instead, another mental mistake sank any chances of a comeback.
As the shot clock ran down, Johnson made his way up the floor to set a screen for Ben Simmons. Because Simmons is not much of a scoring threat, the Bucks spent much of the night sagging well off him to clog up the lane and dare Simmons to beat them as a scorer.
That is not what happened on this crunch-time possession though.
Rather than giving Simmons space, Portis went out beyond the 3-point line to apply more pressure. When Johnson set the screen for Simmons, Green decided to switch, something the Bucks had not done against Simmons to that point. That left Johnson, a 42.9-percent 3-point shooter, open for a game-sealing 3.
While Portis didn’t sag off Simmons as much as the Bucks had throughout the night, Rivers placed the blame for that mistake on Green.
“It was a switch that we shouldn’t have switched,” Rivers said. “We hadn’t switched that all night. Whenever Ben had the ball, the guy guarding Ben was supposed to just go under. That was what Bobby was doing. The guy guarding Cam decided to switch.”
Green admitted the mistake after the game.
“I should have just not switched it, probably,” Green said. “Because Simmons isn’t — like there was contact and you could switch, but Ben wasn’t really in a spot of where he had Bobby, so I should have stayed connected, stayed with Johnson. So gotta be better.”
Heading into Thursday’s game, the Bucks were the NBA’s seventh-best team in clutch situations. In 13 games with clutch-time possessions, they had posted an 8-5 record and outscored opponents by 7.7 points per 100 possessions. After Thursday’s calamitous performance, they have dropped all the way to 18th in clutch-time performance and are now being outscored by 2.2 points per 100 possessions.
“We just made a lot of mistakes that we haven’t made,” Rivers said. “And we certainly haven’t made them at the end of games, but we did them all tonight, so let’s get them all out of the way in one game.”
As Portis made clear after the game, the Bucks could make excuses for their loss, but they just need to be better.
(Photo of Khris Middleton and Ben Simmons: Stacy Revere / Getty Images)
