To push the Milwaukee Bucks towards a title, Mike Budenholzer must work to find new ways to maximize Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Championship contenders don’t typically look inward when finding ways to better their hopes. After all, the key contributors of rosters usually good enough to go after the title are comprised of veterans in or around their prime. They’re not exactly adding layers to their game in the offseason.
They are who they are. If that’s not good enough, you bring in reinforcements. That logic is what has linked the Milwaukee Bucks to Chris Paul ever since the Miami Heat took them out in the second round.
Yet even after amassing the most regular-season wins over the last two seasons, the Bucks don’t have to engage in trade talks or free agency negotiations to improve. Not when their two-time MVP has only scratched the surface of potential his head coach has yet to fully comprehend.
Much of Milwaukee’s disappointing finish to the season stems from a lack of tactical savviness from Mike Budenholzer. When Miami took away the bread and butter of a top-10 offense, Bud had no counters to reposition his team in the driver’s seat.
How many adjustments a team can make is only as high as its personnel allows. Even as Miami’s shooters torched them off hand-offs, having Brook Lopez abandon his traditional drop coverage for a switch-heavy scheme would create issues the Bucks would rather avoid to make Tyler Herro and Duncan Robinson beat them beyond the arc.
It’s in those situations where a player like Giannis Antetokounmpo would come in handy. He’s the ideal foundation for any switch-heavy scheme, the type who could make an already top-ranked defense far more terrifying by rendering any two-man game ineffective. Just think of the ways Draymond Green unlocked the Death Lineup for the Golden State Warriors.
But Bud never saw Antetokounmpo as his Draymond Green. He was more of the LeBron James of recent years, a free safety offering incredible weakside held. It netted Giannis Defensive Player of the Year but wasn’t the right formula to bring home a championship.
Per Cleaning The Glass, the Bucks surrendered just 98.5 points per 100 possessions with Giannis at center during the regular season (compared to 99.4 at power forward). Those minutes were scarce, making up just 11 percent of his non-garbage playing time.
Even in the playoff minutes where Antetokounmpo was the largest Buck on the floor, Budenholzer failed to adjust to the personnel at his disposal. It burned Milwaukee in ways that could’ve easily been avoided.
Lopez drops to the paint because he struggles to guard on the perimeter. Giannis has no such issues, which makes it inexcusable for him to be at the free-throw line before Herro pulls up for the 3-pointer, a product of Budenholzer’s insistence for his bigs to drop independent of circumstance.
Antetokounmpo is a force attacking the basket from the perimeter but defenses have been armed with answers in each of the last two playoffs. They wall off the paint and force him into tough shots. His shooting percentage within three feet of the rim dipped 6.3 percentage points in the 2020 playoffs compared to the regular season.
As effective a battering ram as Giannis is, he needs other means to turn to when that wall is inevitably formed.
He’s got the size to bully smaller defenders in the post, forcing defenses into a deeper collapse. Use him as the screener and he’s the decision-maker in a 4-on-3 situation, left with a favorable matchup switched onto him or catching the ball near the elbows with built-up momentum. He also adds a dimension of vertical spacing Milwaukee’s other bigs don’t provide.
Unfortunately, Antetokounmpo was scarcely used in either role, especially in the playoffs. Steven Adams and Serge Ibaka saw more post-ups per game. Marc Gasol and Kristaps Porzingis rolled off screens more times a night.
During the regular season, post-ups made up just 11.7 percent of his shot diet, by far the fewest of any player with at least 200 such plays. 6.6 percent of his plays came as the roll man, dead last among players with more than 100 instances.
Milwaukee generated 116.0 points per 100 possessions during the regular season with Giannis at center (113.2 at PF per CTG). The same quarter of floor-spacers are still present, but replacing Lopez matches Antetokounmpo up with the opposing team’s big man in a mismatch every time down or forces a favorable matchup elsewhere.
LeBron James’ epic collapse in the 2011 Finals was part fragile psyche and the magnificent defensive effort on the part of the Dallas Mavericks. However, a significant factor in those shortcomings should also be attributed to the struggles the Miami Heat faced in putting their superstar in ideal positions to thrive.
“‘He was just the small forward and that was it,’ says one of their coaches. Miami fell in the 2011 Finals to the Mavericks, with James marooned on the wing, clanking midrange jumpers,” wrote Lee Jenkins, then of Sports Illustrated’s in 2013.
James claimed the next two championships after Miami broke down its system and rebuilt it in his image, accentuating his gifts by making sure he was involved in every facet of the game.
“‘We went from plugging him into a system,’ the coach says, ‘to molding a system around him.’ The Heat wised up and handed LeBron the ball,” Jenkins wrote. “Location wasn’t all that important.”
The Bucks have perhaps the second-coming of James as an all-encompassing two-way force yet pigeonhole him into specific roles and responsibilities. He’s still the reigning two-time MVP. So was LeBron upon arriving in South Beach. And the differences between his arrival and departure are forever recognizable through his two rings.
Budenholzer holds some of the glory in pushing the Bucks to the league’s top record in each of the last two seasons and elevating an All-Star to MVP status. But if he can’t find ways to adapt his principles to accentuate one of the most adaptable superstars on the planet, he’ll shoulder all of the blame for anything short of a championship.