Bucks mired in mediocrity even with Giannis back

The Milwaukee Bucks welcomed back Giannis Antetokounmpo last Monday night against the Boston Celtics, who were without Jaylen Brown, Neemias Queta, and Jayson Tatum.

Milwaukee played the day before and lost horrifically against the Chicago Bulls, but that was without Giannis. And Boston played the night before and had farther to travel to the game in Milwaukee. This was about as winnable of a game as the beleaguered Bucks could ask for against a top team in the East.

Boston won 108-81 and the game wasn’t really close at any point after the first quarter. The Celtics won all four quarters and at one point led by 31, despite Giannis posting 19 points and 11 rebounds in 25 and a half minutes.

The game made clear an undeniable truth that has crystallized further in the week and a half since: the Bucks are stuck. Milwaukee is too far behind the Charlotte Hornets and Atlanta Hawks to make it into the play-in, and too far ahead of the dregs of the NBA to meaningfully improve their lottery odds.

Ever since Milwaukee fired Mike Budenholzer, the Bucks haven’t had any extended cohesion between their front office and coaching staff. That lack of cohesion has led to this point.

Budenholzer’s partnership with general manager Jon Horst was an immediate success. Horst signed Brook Lopez, the perfect drop center for Budenholzer’s favorite NBA defensive scheme, and with Giannis as the lurking help defender and elite point of attack guards including Eric Bledsoe and Jrue Holiday, the Bucks took away the rim on defense and relied on Giannis down low surrounded by shooters on the other end.

The formula may have been too predictable at times in the playoffs, but it sure did lead to a lot of wins. Milwaukee won 60 games that first season and never dipped below a 50-win pace with Budenholzer at the helm. The peak was the championship in 2021, but those Bucks teams had a clear identity and were competitive every season.

Adrian Griffin was tabbed as the coach to follow Budenholzer. Coming from Nick Nurse’s Raptors, Griffin planned to employ an aggressive defense with Jrue Holiday at the center wreaking havoc. Instead, in late September the Bucks sent Holiday plus draft compensation to bring back Damian Lillard. The Bucks more or less mutinied their rookie head coach and he was fired with a 30-13 record.

In came Doc Rivers, handed a huge $40 million contract signaling the clear desperation of the Bucks to find a proven coach in the middle of a pressure-packed season. Some of the failures of the Rivers tenure are beyond his control: being without Giannis in one postseason and then losing Lillard to a torn Achilles in the next one is pretty hard to work around.

This season, however, has laid bare how far behind the elite teams the Bucks coaching staff is. The Celtics made it abundantly clear. Boston’s available player pool was essentially Derrick White, Nikola Vucevic, and a bunch of unheralded young players. Within Joe Mazzulla’s potent offense, those players crashed the boards, opened up threes for each other, and dominated a Bucks team with Giannis active.

Milwaukee doesn’t have the same clear identity. The clearest thesis of the Bucks approach offensively is to surround Giannis with shooting, and the team has actually accomplished that goal. Giannis has been his usual dominant force when he’s been available, and the Bucks are second in team three-point shooting at 38.6%. That combo has led to a 24th ranked offense for Milwaukee.

Some of the issue has been all of the games and minutes without Giannis, but nobody expected him to play 40 minutes per night across all 82. Ironically, the Bucks went through training camp without Giannis due to a positive COVID test this year and Rivers remarked it gave the team a chance to work on the non-Giannis plays. So much for that.

The Bucks have a ghastly 108.2 offensive rating and 117.0 defensive rating with Giannis off court this season, good for a net rating of -8.7. For context, that means the Giannis-less Bucks have the worst offense, the 24th-ranked defense, and have been the fourth-worst overall team in the NBA.

Each end has been a huge disappointment this season in different ways. It’s no secret that Milwaukee wasn’t the deepest team in the world coming into the season, but the Bucks have a pair of guards averaging at least 16 points, four rebounds, and five assists per game in Ryan Rollins and Kevin Porter Jr.

They have Myles Turner, who just started for the Eastern Conference champion Indiana Pacers on their Finals run. We already covered that the team has shot the three better than any team besides Denver. The offense shouldn’t be THIS bad when Giannis sits.

On the other end, the Bucks defense actually hasn’t been much better with the Greek Freak plays. While the offense ranks worse, the defense might be the more frustrating part of the equation. Rivers recently said that Milwaukee has tried five different schemes and none of them have worked.

The Bucks are currently 26th in defensive rating, so getting stops is something they've struggled to do all season. So, I asked Doc Rivers what they can realistically do at this point in the season to get more stops.

Rivers: https://t.co/10x7uSnK4q pic.twitter.com/OSn12Wo8hl
— Eric Nehm (@eric_nehm) March 5, 2026

Ironically, it doesn’t seem like the conservative Budenholzer defense that led the Bucks to a title was one of the five. Milwaukee regularly picks up non-shooters far beyond the three-point like and has Turner up at the level of the screen, leaving the rim unprotected and offering disadvantageous switches to opposing offenses.

Speaking of Turner, the monumental price the Bucks gave up to acquire him is the clearest signal that the chemistry and cohesion the Bucks had in place between Horst and Budenholzer hasn’t been maintained with the addition of Rivers. In addition to waiving and stretching Damian Lillard and incurring a huge dead cap hit for the next five seasons, the Bucks also traded their remaining second round picks to dump Pat Connaughton to Charlotte.

All of that for a player regularly watching Jericho Sims from the bench in fourth quarters. Turner is fifth on the Bucks in minutes per game and seventh in points per game, and trending downward. Since January 1 Turner is down to 25.8 minutes per game, the fewest he’s played in any full season since he was a rookie.

There shouldn’t be a world where a player prioritized so heavily by the Bucks front office could fall out of favor with the coaching staff so quickly.

Turner hasn’t felt like a priority at all this season, with most of his offense being catching and shooting open threes that aren’t usually schemed up purposefully for him. That isn’t just my opinion — Kyle Kuzma said the same earlier in the season.

One thing I wrote about this morning was making sure the Bucks started getting the players that will be here in the future more shots and more reps offensively.

Tonight, Myles Turner took a season-high 16 shots and scored a season-high 31 points.

Kyle Kuzma, on Turner: https://t.co/qZhbEqSle5 pic.twitter.com/B0oE5sdDjx
— Eric Nehm (@eric_nehm) January 28, 2026

So while Turner’s play has been a disappointment, the organization’s plan for him is the bigger red flag. This has been a trend in Milwaukee: the organization has leapt at opportunities too eagerly.

From adding Lillard right before the season and dooming Griffin’s defensive philosophy, to firing Griffin to jump at Rivers, to waiving Dame to add Turner just for Rivers to barely use him, the Bucks aren’t operating with a true plan in place. They’re desperately lunging at what’s available, likely to convince Giannis they are trying their damndest to win with him.

Ironically, the Bucks are as close as they’ve ever been to losing Giannis because of these moves. Milwaukee doesn’t just need a better coach, the organization needs a coach with a plan and a front office that’s capable of reshaping the team in that vision.

Lillard and Giannis — Dale Zanine-Imagn Images

Rivers is behind the times, but a new coach with the same front office disconnect isn’t going to work long-term either — especially if the team is totally reshaped days before camp because Ja Morant, or Zach LaVine, or Michael Porter Jr., or whoever else suddenly became available for the right price.

There are pieces in Milwaukee, and the draft pick coffer has some bullets in the chamber, but the Bucks need their front office and coaching staff aligned on a multi-year vision to have any shot at success either with or without Giannis. Especially given the importance of Milwaukee’s upcoming lottery pick, potentially their last shot at one of those for this decade with all of the pick capital the Bucks owe.