Bucks are on a roll since getting back to basics

Two weeks ago, the ebb and flow of the NBA season had the Milwaukee Bucks struggling for the first time since trading for Eric Bledsoe. They were 9-9 and coming off one of their worst stretches of the season, having dropped three of four games over an eight-day span.

Each loss had come by double digits and the lone win had not been a comfortable one.

With two practice days ahead of a game in Sacramento against the Kings, the Bucks made a stop in the Bay Area on their way from Salt Lake City to Sacramento. Coming off the down week and embarrassing display in Utah, they spent two days practicing at Haas Pavilion on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, where Milwaukee head coach Jason Kidd was an all-American in his college playing days.

Back in a place he strongly associates with winning, Kidd made it clear that he wasn’t going to tolerate the shaky play of his current team, especially on the defensive end. Now, two weeks after those practices, he and the team look back at those practices, which focused on getting back to basics, as a turning point. They’ve won six of seven games, including an undefeated three-game home stand at the BMO Harris Bradley Center.

“He basically killed us,” Antetokounmpo said of the practices at Cal. “That’s not a joke. He did. He told us, like, this is not what we do as a team. We’ve got to change it and we started in practice.

“And then we went to Sacramento and we played extremely hard. And he told us, this is what we do from now on. We’re not a bad team. We’re a good team and we’ve got to prove it to everybody and go out there and play as a good team.”

There’s little doubt now that the Bucks are a good team. They entered Sunday at 15-10, the fourth-best record in the Eastern Conference and seventh-best in the NBA. Their record through 25 games matches their best since 2005-’06 and as a team they’re five games over .500 for the first time since Feb. 28, 2015.

Over the past seven games, the Bucks have continued to build on their already strong offense. They’ve scored 100-plus points in each game and have an offensive rating of 115.8 points per 100 possessions.

But Milwaukee’s offense hasn’t been the biggest difference. On defense, the Bucks spent the first 18 games as one of the worst defensive units in the league. They were giving up 110.6 points per 100 possession, undercutting any positives on offense. Defensive issues from years past, namely giving up excessive numbers of open three-pointers and buckets at the rim, were cropping up again, with teams hitting a whopping 40.7% of their three-pointers over the first 18 games.

The Bucks still own the ignominious distinction of opponents hitting the highest percentage of their three-pointers against them (39.7%), but things have definitely changed. There’s been less aggressive trapping, more switching and better overall fluidity from Milwaukee’s defense.

“It’s something that we’ve been talking about for the last two weeks,” Kidd said of the defense. “Has there been a big change? The biggest change is just energy and effort; that’s the one thing we’ve changed. It’s no secret.

“If you watch, we haven’t done anything but got guys in the right spots and when we’re consistently in the right spot good things happen on the defensive end and it ends with a steal or a rebound and we go the other way.”

The results have been positive. Milwaukee has cut opponent three-point attempts from 27.4 per game in the first 18 contests to 23.3 in the past seven. More of those are being contested and opposing teams have made 36.8% of their threes in the past seven games, a number that’s around the middle of the pack on a league scale.

Any tension from two weeks ago, which publicly came to a head when Antetokounmpo got into a verbal altercation with assistant Sean Sweeney during the Bucks’ loss in Salt Lake City, is gone.

“Anytime you’re having fun, a lot of good things happen,” Kidd said. “I think on that West Coast trip we became a team.”