Giannis’ patience rewarded in victory
Teammates benefit from Bucks star’s trust
TORONTO - Last spring, Giannis Antetokounmpo tried to make all the right plays. With Kawhi Leonard and the Toronto Raptors swarming him in paint, he kicked out time and again to his Milwaukee Bucks teammates, shooters who for four straight games went cold as the Bucks' 60-win season ended in four straight anguishing losses at Scotiabank Arena.
Entering Tuesday's game, the Bucks' first trip north of the border since getting eliminated in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals, Antetokounmpo was intent on dominating. Though both teams have changed, last year's playoffs were on his mind. More pressing was the memory of Monday night, when he fouled out in just 25 minutes and couldn't help his teammates in an overtime win in Washington, D.C.
As much as the reigning MVP wanted to unleash the full extent of his powers on the Raptors, he quickly realized that just wasn't going to happen. Toronto's game plan was to swarm Antetokounmpo with double and triple teams every time he touched the ball, inhibiting his movement and ability to exert his will.
“Coach Bud says that I'm stubthe
born,” Antetokounmpo said. “One of my best qualities is that I’m stubborn and one of my worst qualities is that I’m stubborn. When you start the game, I want to come out aggressive. …
“Obviously, the team didn’t let me be aggressive. They were sending a second guy, they were defending real well. There’s got to be some time you’ve got to mature and say, ‘OK, tonight is not the night.’”
If the Bucks were going to beat the Raptors this night, Antetokounmpo needed to exercise patience, be a playmaker and trust his teammates. That’s exactly what he did while helping the Bucks to a 108-97 victory while racking up 19 points on 5-of-14 shooting, 19 rebounds and a team-high eight assists.
However, it took some time for Antetokounmpo and the Bucks to get going. As the double-teams came, he fought the urge to put his head down and try to score through multiple defenders. Often he had trouble identifying the right pass as he got trapped on the block.
His only first-half assists came in the first quarter on kickouts to the Lopez twins in the corner, with Brook canning a pair of triples to start off his 15-point scoring night while Robin came off the bench and made a shot the first time he touched the ball.
Other than those plays, though, the Bucks had difficulty getting any rhythm going offensively. Antetokounmpo was tamped down and Khris Middleton — a 40-point scorer and hero of Monday’s game — opened the game 0 for 4.
Point guard Eric Bledsoe’s aggressiveness is what kept the Bucks afloat in the first quarter — he had nine points in the first and 15 on the night — but then things went dry for everyone in the second, a period that included a 71⁄2-minute stretch without a Bucks field goal as the Raptors bombed away from three, including three triples from Onalaska’s Matt Thomas, to build a 12-point lead.
Everything started to shift in the final three minutes of the second quarter when Marvin Williams, Antetokounmpo and Middleton all hit three-pointers in quick succession and Antetokounmpo ended the period with a strong driving layup. For as poorly as they had played, the Bucks were down just two points.
Giannis Antetokounmpo didn’t have his best offensive game against Toronto’s swarming pressure, but he got help from his teammates.
“Just settle down,” Middleton said when asked what the Bucks needed to do after halftime. “I think we played into their hands a little bit in the first quarter. I think we could use the back-to-back as an excuse, but we didn’t let it keep happening for the whole game.”
Antetokounmpo usually dominates coming out of halftime, so it wouldn’t have been surprising for him to do that again. Entering the game, he ranked second in the NBA in third-quarter points per game at 9.0.
In a way, he did it again, but not by scoring. Instead of calling his number, he found ways to get his teammates easier looks, racking up four assists as well as five rebounds.
“I thought his composure and just seeing the court, reading the court (was good),” Bucks coach Mike Budenholzer said. “Then you got to make some shots. Different guys stepped up and made shots.”
As opposed to getting trapped in the paint or on the block, Antetokounmpo moved out to different spaces on the court and ran pick-and-roll — as both the screener and the ball-handler — to try to pick apart Toronto’s overloaded defense.
“If you go from the top and you attack, attack, attack all the time the defense knows it, they get set and they do the same thing over and over again,” Antetokounmpo said. “You got to make them guess, keep them guessing.”
Early in the quarter, Antetokounmpo hit Bledsoe for a three-pointer that gave the Bucks their first lead since the early going.
Then Antetokounmpo and Middleton got into a good rhythm, the trust and chemistry they’ve built over seven years together fully evident. Middleton shook off his slow start with the help of a couple pretty feeds from Antetokounmpo for layups. Antetokounmpo was fully comfortable deferring to his all-star running mate, who scored 17 of his team-high 22 points on 7-of-14 shooting in the second half.
“I think for the most part we just played pick-and-roll and just read the defense,” Middleton said. “They were sending so many bodies at Giannis, bodies at me when I was in the post or just trying to force me to drive. I think we saw that and we realized we just had to try to make the right plays after that.”
With about three minutes left in the third quarter, shortly after Antetokounmpo hit Donte DiVincenzo with a pass in the corner leading to a drive and an acrobatic layup, the Bucks owned an eight-point lead.
In about a quarter’s worth of time, the Bucks had used a 36-16 run to totally change the complexion of the game — and Antetokounmpo had scored only seven of those points.
“They’re always in scramble mode,”
Bledsoe said of Toronto’s defense. “You get a team scrambling the whole game that’s bad. That’s bad. You can’t keep the ball out of the paint. You start to get open looks, starting to get fouls, starting to get layups, starting to get open threes.”
While Milwaukee’s offense started to get going, its defense began to settle in as well. Antetokounmpo and Brook Lopez anchored the interior with four blocks apiece, limiting the Raptors to 14 of 39 (35.9%) inside the arc, including 11 of 32 (34.4%) inside the paint. The hot shooting that had buoyed the Raptors in the second quarter dissipated over time, too, settling at 34.6%.
Yet, there was still a moment when things got dramatic down the stretch. Toronto, led by 22 points from Pascal Siakam, whittled Milwaukee’s 14-point lead down to just seven with under 21⁄2 minutes to go when their press yielded an OG Anunoby steal and a good look for Fred VanVleet on a deep three — the kind he definitely would have made during the Eastern Conference finals.
This one, though, bounced high off the iron and into Antetokounmpo’s hands. At the other end, Antetokounmpo planted himself in the corner where he caught a kick-out pass from Bledsoe. In a game where he had deferred so often and trusted his teammates so much, Antetokounmpo was repaid as the ball found him at crunch time and he confidently made the most of his opportunity, icing the game with the triple.
That shot was critically important, sure, but it wasn’t the most important or impressive part of Antetokounmpo’s performance. When the Raptors refused to let Antetokounmpo beat them by scoring, he found ways to put his teammates in a position to succeed. In a game he desperately wanted to dominate, he actively chose the more humble path, one that on this trip to Canada led to a victory.