Milwaukee Bucks: 5 goals following 2019 NBA All-Star break

The Milwaukee Bucks have to set their goals higher after the All-Star Break after a dominant and unexpected first half to the season.

The Milwaukee Bucks are in a position they have not been in since the days of Lew Alcindor. At 43-14 the Bucks sport the league’s best record, and are projected to finish with 62 wins, the most since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar led the team to 63 in 1972. The team hasn’t even cleared 50 wins since 2001.

That means that the calculus for what this team is trying to accomplish needs to change. The goals of the preseason are changed. This is no longer a team aiming to simply win a playoff series. With Giannis Antetokounmpo in the midst of an MVP-caliber season, this team’s goals are much higher than anyone expected.

Here on this site, we published a number of preseason pieces on the Bucks looking ahead to this season. In the season preview we asked three questions:

Can Giannis Antetokounmpo become the best player in the world?

Will Mike Budenholzer help this team significantly?

Can the Bucks finally win a playoff series?

The answer to all three appears to be yes (if by “best player” one means “MVP frontrunner”).

In the “three bold predictions” piece we predicted that Milwaukee would get a top-4 seed, Khris Middleton would be an All-Star and Giannis Antetokounmpo would win MVP — those are all looking like hits as well. Perhaps we should have been bolder?

The season resumed for the Bucks Thursday when they hosted the Boston Celtics. The same Celtics, of course, who seem to give the Bucks more trouble than anyone else in the league. Goal No. 1 for the rest of the season was to beat Boston. Check.

Goal #2 is to beat Minnesota on Saturday. But looking past individual games, this team has lofty goals in place for the next few months.

What are the top five goals for the Milwaukee Bucks for the remainder of the 2018-19 NBA season?