Bucks feeling effect of schedule
Wearing a Milwaukee Brewers jersey in a postgame interview late Thursday night in Dallas, Thanasis Antetokounmpo said he had a Friday outfit stuffed into a backpack. That was it. He wasn’t going to touch his luggage, as the Milwaukee Bucks were heading right back out on the road Saturday.
Donte DiVincenzo grinned – he at least was going to try and reset in the brief window he got to spend at home.
“I don’t know what T.A.’s doing,” he laughed. “But, I’m definitely doing some laundry and re-packing.”
It was a needed light-hearted moment as the Bucks had just lost a physical game to the Mavericks and then stopped at home for one game at Fiserv Forum against the Charlotte Hornets. That was a tough second game of a back-to-back against a team that, even without stars LaMelo Ball and Gordon Hayward, had climbed to the No. 4 seed in the Eastern Conference.
The Bucks (32-20) took the court Friday night without their entire starting lineup and lost to the Hornets, 127119, dropping a third straight game, and losing six of the last nine.
Then, the Bucks had to turn around and skip out for another three-game road trip.
NBA players are used to back-tobacks, long trips on each coast, and this season they’re used to playing twice in three days.
But the weird part of this section of the Bucks’ schedule was the routing and placement of the off days. First, they played every other day in Los Angeles and played a back-to-back in Portland and Sacramento. They had two days off before playing Golden State, bounced down to Dallas and overnight up to Milwaukee.