Is it already time to hit the panic button in Milwaukee?

After a rough 1-3 start to the season, Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Milwaukee Bucks needed a win — and the basketball gods lined one up for them Thursday night. A rested Bucks team was about to take on a Memphis squad on the second night of a back-to-back with six players out, including starters Desmond Bane and Marcus Smart.

The result? The Bucks got blown out by 23 points in a game they never led after three minutes and were never within 10 points by midway through the second quarter.

Milwaukee has now dropped four in a row, is 1-4 on the season, and has the third-worst net rating in the league (-8.2) thanks to a 24th-ranked offense and defense. Antetokounmpo was spot on when he said, “Right now, we don’t have an identity,” and Khris Middleton returning from surgery on both ankles isn’t going to fix things.

It may be a small sample size, but it’s time to start reaching for the panic button in Milwaukee.

WHAT IS WRONG?

Plenty. But it starts with this:

Missed jump shots and lousy transition defense are a losing combination.

Milwaukee is just flat-out missing shots. Against Memphis, the Bucks were 9-of-42 from 3 (21.4%), and for the season they are shooting 33.3% overall from beyond the arc and 28% on above-the-break 3s. It’s not just 3-pointers either, the Bucks are shooting 35.1% on jump shots this season (any shot outside the paint). They are shooting just 33.9% on shots in the floater range (inside the paint but outside the restricted area). If they don’t get to the rim, they don’t score, at least not consistently.

Now combine that with a 154.1 defensive net rating in transition, second worst in the league, and you have a real problem — the Bucks are missing shots, opponents are grabbing the board, racing out and scoring in transition.

“The defensive transition was still awful tonight and so that’s on me. Everything is on me until we get it right,” Coach Doc Rivers said postgame. “We gotta fix this.”

Rivers’ bigger problem may be the book is out on how to attack Milwaukee’s defense — bully Damian Lillard and other Bucks guards (as Zach Lowe noted). The defensive rotations behind them have not been…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/already-time-hit-panic-button-180554624.html

Author : NBC Sports

Publish date : 2024-11-01 18:05:00

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