Bucks need to apply lessons from close losses
In Mike Budenholzer's mind, Friday night's game in New Orleans was on the edge.
It's a mathematical precipice NBA head coaches walk when their team is losing big on a given night, to calculate the deficit, the minutes remaining and to factor in the feel on the court to make the decision to pull the starters and to move on to the next — which in the case of his Milwaukee
Bucks was the next night in Charlotte.
“It was like really right on the edge of where you've got to make some tough decisions whether you're going to play guys extended minutes and try and make a run,” Budenholzer said after the game. “It felt like a game we could maybe come back and flip it all the way from whatever we were down.”
The Pelicans were up 29 at one point late in the first half, but there was some fight early in the third quarter for Budenholzer to measure as the Bucks got it down to 15.
But when Lonzo Ball hit a 12-foot jumper with 4 minutes, 35 seconds left in the third quarter, it gave the Pelicans a 28-point lead.
Yet ...
“It just felt like a game that could flip and we could win,” Budenholzer said. “Just wanted to give the guys a chance to do that. I think it's good for us to play down, to play from behind a little bit to get that experience. But it was certainly, I'm sure it's the reason for the question, it was close. Not easy to decide to extend those guys but we went with it.”
Bucks at Hornets, late
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So the race was on. But would 16 and a half minutes be enough time?
Khris Middleton and Jrue Holiday said of course, that if they were on the court that had to be the thinking.
“You cannot get discouraged, you gotta keep fighting, keep believing in yourself,” Giannis Antetokounmpo said. “Even if you lose the game, you gotta lose the right way. You gotta play basketball the right way. The mindset is ‘get it to 20.’ If you get it to 20, you get it to 15. When you get it to 15, you get it to 10. That’s the mindset we had.”
Beginning with Antetokounmpo, Middleton, Brook Lopez, Pat Connaughton and Bryn Forbes on the court, the Bucks went on a 10-0 run — punctuated by an Antetokounmpo corner 3.
Ball hit a 3 to push the lead back over 20 at 96-75, but the Bucks answered with a 14-2 run that brought it to single digits at 98-89.
Only, Pelicans reserves Josh Hart and Nicolò Melli hit 3s to extend the lead again, this time to 103-89.
The teams traded baskets for much of the fourth quarter and perhaps Budenholzer saw the edge again.
After all that work, the Bucks still trailed by 13 with 6:05 to go.
“Leave me in,” Holiday said of their head space. “I know the type of competitors that our guys are, so we definitely want to stay in and try and make a push.”
The Bucks’ starters were on the court coming out of a timeout — and after mixing up offense-and-defense substitutions — they got it to 127-121 with 48 seconds left.
“I kind of like the way we came out in the second half, we were hungry,” Antetokounmpo said. “We said we gotta do it for a longer period of the game. We cannot play and get down 28. It’s going to be hard for us to come back. If you’re down 14, you have a chance.
“If you’re down 28, if you get back to eight, that’s a 20-0 run, that’s a 25-5 run. That’s a 30-10 run. We gotta be the team we were in the second half, more.”
It’s not the first time the Bucks crossed the finish line a stride short in this early part of the season. They came back from 17 down in Boston in the fourth quarter to lose by one. They came back from 11 down in Brooklyn in the third quarter to lose by two. They came back from down 11 in the fourth quarter to the Los Angeles Lakers to lose by seven.
Twenty-nine points is, obviously, a much longer race to run. And Budenholzer and the three team leaders who spoke after the game said there is something to be gained from the pride of competition, to play from behind, rally, and push an opponent.
But to get over the hump? Holiday stated the obvious and said to not fall behind much, but that it was a learning experience and “Even if it’s out of reach, at that point it’s not about this game, it’s about the next one, getting the rhythm, feeling good going into tomorrow because these games come pretty quickly.”
Indeed.
Milwaukee will play eight games in the next two weeks, six of which will be on the road where the Bucks dropped to 4-5 on Friday. They are 3-4 in games decided by fewer than nine points and are 2-4 against teams with winning records. In this upcoming stretch to begin February, five opponents currently have a winning mark and Cleveland and Oklahoma City are a combined two games under .500.
“We gotta do it consistently,” Antetokounmpo said. “Obviously it’s early in the season but that’s not an excuse, we gotta keep working to improve. Tomorrow we have another one. This is already over with. We’ll watch film tomorrow, our clips, and hopefully we can get better tomorrow and hopefully we’ll play good basketball for longer stretches.”
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