Doc Rivers Shares Latest Excuses As Bucks Are Officially Eliminated from the Playoffs

Who was in charge here?

Doc Rivers during a recent game. | Troy Wayrynen-Imagn Images

The Bucks have been officially eliminated from the playoffs after a 32-point loss to the Spurs on Saturday. While it appears the team has won the battle with Giannis Antetokounmpo about whether or not he will return to the court this season, there are still some decisions to be made. First, will Giannis sign an extension or will the team trade him? And no matter what happens there, will they fire Doc Rivers, who is now 94-97 in Milwaukee without ever getting the team out of the first round?

Rivers spoke to the press after the game and explained how he never had a healthy team in his two-plus years since he replaced Adrian Griffin after a 30-13 start to the '23-'24 season. Griffin had replaced Mike Budenholzer, who had been fired two years after coaching the team to the NBA title.

Anyway, here's Rivers on what went wrong:

"It's been disappointing, obviously," said Rivers. "Since I've been here, I haven't had healthy stretch and it's been your key guys. It's been Giannis. It's been Dame. And you hope you can play through that, but we just haven't had the ability. This year, having only one quote-unquote star. Every other team has two and three. We needed health. We were thin. We knew that before the season started and it just didn't go our way. All the talk and all that stuff probably didn't help either."

Rivers said he tries to "look at silver linings" saying that Ryan Rollins, Pete Nance and Ousmane Dieng as bright spots in the season before saying AJ Green had played too much.

"And we gotta rehabilitate or get AJ Green going again," Rivers continued. "He's a good player. He's played too many minutes. We've had no choice and I think that's put him in a tough spot and I feel bad for him at times."

Green, in his fourth season, played a career-high 28.5 minutes a game and has started 61 games so far. That doesn't sound too unfair, but it also didn't sound very unfair when Rivers took the job in the first place. And yet he seemingly made it sound like he was being punished back then when he said, "I’ve never done this. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone."

When his stint in Milwaukee started with four losses in his first five games as head coach he blamed a number of factors, including the schedule and playing too hard on defense. When the team failed to play up to expectations heading into the All-Star break he blamed the players saying, "We had some guys in Cabo."

After a loss to the Wizards later in the season, he said he'd been "sitting back and watching everything" and seemed to put the blame for the team's road woes on the travel staff. 

Injuries, travel plans and travel staff aside, things have not worked out under Rivers in Milwaukee. There's no way he gets a new deal with or without Giannis signing an extension. The only real question seems to be whether the team wants to pay one or two coaches next season when there's a decent chance they're going to be tanking anyway.

Either way, the Bucks will continue to pay for the Rivers hire. There's plenty of blame to go around for that, but it seems like Rivers is never going to take any.

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