It’s complicated.
Sometimes that’s the best answer, even when our instinct is to be as simple and reductive as possible.
With the Milwaukee Bucks shockingly trailing the Miami Heat 3-0 in their second-round playoffs series, the current knee-jerk reduction is that Mike Budenholzer is a horrible playoff coach, or that Giannis Antetokounmpo is overrated, or that Giannis’s future Heat teammates are awesome (sorry, just kidding. ‘Til next week, anyway.)
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In particular, Budenholzer has taken the brunt of the criticism. On the surface that seems a bit strange, given that the Bucks improved by 16 wins in his first season in Milwaukee and that he guided them to a 56-17 campaign this year – by far the best record in the league.
Alas, the current series shines a harsh light on Budenholzer’s methods, especially given the background murmurs from the Bucks defeat by Toronto in 2019 — one where the Bucks lost four straight games after going up 2-0.
Those murmurs turned into screams after Friday’s debacle, where the Bucks held a 14-point lead and had the ball late in the third quarter. Antetokounmpo dribbled it off his foot and out of bounds, and the Bucks completely collapsed from there, scoring just 13 points in the final 13 minutes.
As we’ll see, there are kernels of truth to all the criticisms. But also … well, it’s complicated.
Hypothesis 1: Bud Ball doesn’t work in the postseason
This seems like a no-brainer given the results of the past two playoffs, where Budenholzer was criticized in both for his general lack of adjustments, and for making the wrong ones when he did (such as switching on Kawhi Leonard in the last two games of the 2019 conference finals).
The kernel of truth here is that his focus on his own system has tended to blunt some options that might be more effective situationally. For example, why have Marvin Williams play a drop coverage?
This ointment has multiple flies in it, however. Let’s start with the fact that Regular Season Bud couldn’t beat this team either. Miami won both games that Jimmy Butler played against Milwaukee in the regular season; the Bucks’ only win came in the seeding games when Butler and Dragic sat out. In this case, the difficulty of the specific matchup for Milwaukee might be a far greater factor than Playoff Bud Disease.
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Second, there’s Budenholzer’s overall career. Budenholzer’s resume includes last year’s collapse against Toronto and the current disappointment, but it also includes several opposite outcomes. Most notably, in his playoff debut in 2014 with Atlanta, he took a 38-win team missing its best player to seven games against the top-seeded Indiana Pacers. He did it largely via the then-radical adjustment of having his centers bomb away from the 3-point line and drag Roy Hibbert from the hoop.
In 2016, his Hawks were basically a 50-50 proposition against a Boston team that, like his, had won 48-regular season games. Atlanta won the series in six fairly comfy games, and I don’t recall anybody killing Brad Stevens over it after the fact.
Even a year ago, Budenholzer’s Bucks were a playoff juggernaut that won 10 of 11 games, mostly by lopsided scores, and completely overwhelmed a good Boston team in the second round. Then they lost four straight to Toronto – one in double OT, two others by six points after the Bucks held leads, and with Kawhi Leonard playing at a superhuman level in all of them.
Any criticism has to acknowledge that for large stretches of recent postseasons, Bud’s stuff actually worked.
Alas, his best teams have been the most glaring exceptions. In addition to the past two Milwaukee clubs, there was his 60-win Atlanta team in 2014-15. The team stumbled and bumbled past a 46-win Washington team in six tense games despite an injury to John Wall, and then was blown off the floor by LeBron’s Cavs in four in the conference finals.
Finally, this year, Bud did actually make a few key adjustments in Game 3 (most notably, shortening his rotation to excise Pat Connaughton and Kyle Korver), although he was weirdly insistent on playing Marvin Williams as his backup 4 and 5 rather than sliding up Khris Middleton and Antetokounmpo.
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Which takes us to the next issue.
Hypothesis 2: He didn’t play his stars enough minutes
Let me give you some numbers: 36 minutes in Game 1. 36 minutes Game 2. 34 minutes in Game 3.
No, those aren’t Giannis’s minutes in this series. They’re Jimmy Butler’s.
I can’t believe nobody is talking about this. Any criticism of Budenholzer not playing his players enough in this series has to at least acknowledge that Erik Spoelstra is doing the exact same thing.
You know how many Miami players have played more than 36 minutes so far? One. Bam Adebayo played 38 minutes in Game 1. That’s it. That’s the list. Not one player on either team has played more than 38 minutes in a game in this series, with Brook Lopez’s 38 in Game 3 matching Adebayo’s Game 1.
Of course, this comes with an obvious asterisk: Spoelstra’s team is winning. Being ahead in the series, he has the luxury of perhaps playing things a bit more conservatively in terms of how hard he rides his star players.
Meanwhile, Budenholzer seems to have calcified a position that his best players shouldn’t go above 36 minutes, with last night’s jarring quote the hammer:
“If you’re going as hard as these guys are in a playoff game, (then) 35, 36 (minutes per game) — I think that’s pushing the ceiling,” he said after the game.
What’s odd is that this is new territory for Budenholzer. In game 7 in 2014, he played Kyle Korver 45 minutes and Paul Millsap 43. In an elimination game in 2017 against Washington, Paul Milsap played 46 minutes, while Dennis Schroder and Tim Hardaway Jr. each played 40.
Even last year, Antetokounmpo played 39 minutes in Game 5 against Toronto, and Giannis and Middleton both played 41 in Game 6. Heck, even against Boston he did it – in the seemingly crucial Game 3 last year with the series tied 1-1, both Milwaukee stars played 39 minutes.
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So it’s been truly bizarre to see him pull back on the minutes for his best players in such desperate times. He’s coaching like it’s a best-of-82 series.
In the most crucial game of the series, if not his entire tenure, Budenholzer played his two All-Stars 36 minutes apiece and rested each for stretches in the middle of the fourth quarter. It was a far cry from the desperation we saw from Toronto’s Nick Nurse the night before, when he was down 2-0 and went to the whip on his best players – Kyle Lowry played 46 minutes, O.G. Anunoby 45, and Fred Van Vleet 41, in a game the Raptors won by a single point.
That result also harkens back to Game 3 between Toronto and Milwaukee a year ago. In similar straights, Kawhi Leonard – he of the load management – played 52 of the game’s 58 minutes, while Pascal Siakam played 51. Milwaukee’s two stars only played 44 apiece, and it likely was the difference in the game … and in turn, the series.
Hypothesis 3: He played the wrong players at the end
Budenholzer has been criticized for leaving Wes Matthews off the floor at the end of Games 1 and 3 while Jimmy Butler took over. While he switched the match-up to put Giannis on Butler at the end of Game 3, it didn’t work out any better, with Butler pouring in 17 fourth-quarter points to complete a stunning reversal.
The ending of Game 1 was definitely bizarre, as the Bucks rode with Pat Connaughton in crunch time over defensive stopper Matthews. To be fair, Matthews hasn’t exactly blazed with glory in this series either; the Bucks are -27 in his minutes and he’s scored 17 points total. Nearly any sequence that begins with him dribbling has ended horribly.
However, Connaughton wouldn’t even have been most people’s second choice for that role, with Donte DiVincenzo being a more athletic and dynamic threat on both sides of the ball. (Eric Bledsoe, remember, was out for Game 1).
Also sitting on the table waiting for him is the adjustment to stop playing Marvin Williams so much. He can move Giannis to 5 and Middleton to 4 when Brook Lopez is out of the game, using Middleton as his backup 4 when Giannis is out, and ride the rest of the minutes with his perimeter players. But that type of lineup shuffle is much easier to pull off when the stars are taking shorter and less frequent rests.
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Regardless, the commitment to Williams is weird. The sixth-best player on a Charlotte team shouldn’t be averaging 22 minutes a game in a series like this, especially when he’s 4-of-15 from the field in that time.
Again, though, annoying facts get in the way of our narrative. The cruel truth is that even with their best players on the court, the Bucks haven’t been good enough. Lineups with any of their starting five or George Hill – his six best players, basically – are minus-6 in 41 minutes. The Lopez-Middleton-Giannis trio – which shockingly have just 54 minutes together in the three games – is minus-4.
Hypothesis 4: His team was always flawed.
What if we turn the entire proposition upside down: That Budenholzer was able to ride an excellent, but flawed team to regular-season excellence by maximizing its strengths, but that the playoff crucible exposed all of its weaknesses.
This hypothesis would submit that Nick Nurse gave the league a roadmap to stopping the Giannis Bucks and Spoelstra made a letter-perfect copy. The formula: Have a player big enough and quick enough to withstand Giannis’s thrusts to the basket, crowd the paint and force anybody except Middleton and George Hill to shoot from distance, and take advantage of the Bucks’ drop coverage with infinite loops of drive-and-kicks.
The best counter to that strategy requires a guard good enough to break down defenses off the dribble and create mayhem on his own, which is the one thing Milwaukee lacks. Bledsoe’s periodic efforts to try this have generally ended badly (see below), while Hill is more effective as a shooter than a playmaker.
Last year’s decision to pay Bledsoe instead of Malcolm Brogdon looms large here, as Miami’s chief defensive vulnerability – shaky defense at the point of attack with guards Goran Dragic, Tyler Herro and Duncan Robinson – would have been much more vulnerable against Brogdon. Against this same Miami defense, Brogdon averaged 21.5 points and 10.0 assists in the first round for Indiana, mostly by attacking off the dribble.
The perimeter shortcomings really became obvious late in the last five minutes of Game 3, when the Bucks began to panic and their guards started trying to create quick shots off the dribble. Only, they couldn’t.
Let’s go back through the tape of six of their final seven possessions in the competitive portion of the game:
- A George Hill-Giannis pick and-roll led to a tough contested miss by Hill over Butler in the paint.
- A Middleton 3 off the dribble against pressure bounced off.
- Bledsoe drew a foul on a dribble drive — producing their only point in this stretch — but it was a tough look, too.
- A Middleton-Lopez pick-and-pop led to a long, above the break 3 from Lopez – the type of shot Milwaukee has forced from opponents all year — that missed.
- A wild drive from Bledsoe led to a scramble and a pressured 3 from Middleton several feet beyond the line.
- Another ill-advised drive by Bledsoe led to a turnover.
In that play-by-play above, you don’t see the name “Giannis” much. His own drive with 46 seconds left and the Bucks down nine produced a missed bunny under the rim.
Otherwise, Antetokounmpo had two touches in the last five minutes. Significantly, they both led to wide open corner 3s, one after rebounding Hill’s miss and another on a free-throw line iso – Milwaukee’s best play in that stretch. Alas, luck intervened and both shots rattled the rim before bouncing out.
Hypothesis 5: The perfect storm theory
Let’s go back to the top.
What’s my take on this? How about this one: That every hypothesis above contains kernels of truth, just in less staggering doses that some might have you believe. And that this series, against his opponent, came together at the absolute perfect time and perfect circumstances to expose the Bucks in this situation.
I submit that one can simultaneously hold all of the following beliefs about Bud Ball:
- That Budenholzer is generally an awesome coach.
- That his playoff failures might be a bit overblown.
- That he nonetheless has struggled to make the right playoff adjustments with his best teams.
- That his clinging to a 36-minute limit for his best players in this series is counterproductive, even if nobody wants to mention that the other coach is doing the same thing.
- That the Heat present a near-perfect “bad matchup” situation for how Milwaukee likes to play.
- That the lack of high-caliber offense from the guards exposes the Bucks weaknesses at the worst times.
- And that they still needed a couple of doses of misfortune (Giannis’s ankle, rattled-out 3s, the Game 2 ending) for all of this to come together so emphatically and put them down 3-0.
In the overall analysis then, it clearly hasn’t been a great week for Mike Budenholzer. If and when Miami finishes off the Bucks I have no doubt that the knee-jerk talk show circuit will be calling for his head on a pike.
But when you really dig deep on both his tenure and this series, the answers aren’t as simple. The unsatisfying conclusion from the hot take machine is that … it’s complicated.
(Top photo by Garrett Ellwood/NBAE via Getty Images)
