It’s been somewhat of a sleepy season for the defending champion Bucks. Their 3.6 net rating is the worst mark of a Milwaukee team since 2018. Injuries have kept the team’s best players from sharing the floor together, with only one (one!) Bucks lineup having logged more than 60 minutes together. (The NBA-best Suns have 10 such lineups.) And even Giannis Antetokounmpo seems perfectly happy perfecting his dad jokes as opposed to campaigning for his third MVP (though he’s arguably having the best season of his career). And yet, with only a handful of games left in the regular season, with all the question marks everywhere else in the East, the Bucks are starting to look more and more like the heavy favorite to return to the Finals.
First and foremost, Milwaukee is still an absolute force when its big three shares the floor. Lineups with Giannis, Jrue Holiday, and Khris Middleton have a 10.4 net rating. And while the Bucks have slipped overall defensively this year, they’re still stingy when their best three guys are on the court. The Giannis-Jrue-Kris trio has a 107.5 defensive rating, a better mark than the fifth-ranked Heat. Milwaukee is 33–9 when those three play together, a 64-win pace.
As far as Milwaukee’s defensive slippage goes, the return of Brook Lopez should help them in certain matchups. Lopez is often a lightning rod during the playoffs when his drop coverage can feel like a dice roll. Yet he’s still extremely effective at forcing many scorers out of the paint and into tough midrange shots, a generally worthwhile strategy against most players not named Kevin Durant. He’s also an effective one-on-one defender against the likes of Joel Embiid or Bam Adebayo. And when Lopez is on the floor, Giannis is more free to roam and cause havoc off the ball. After missing most of the season with a back injury, Lopez has played in the Bucks’ last seven games, including a 17-point outing against the Sixers on Tuesday. Milwaukee is 6–2 overall with Lopez in the lineup.
