How the NBA Cup may have saved Giannis and the Bucks’ season

MOMENTS BEFORE THE Milwaukee Bucks were set to take the floor Saturday, the players and coaches gathered inside a tight hallway outside their locker room at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.

It was a familiar stage to them; they are the only team to reach the semifinals in both NBA Cup tournaments. And remembering how that trip ended one year ago spurred a renewed focus. This year, the tournament has served as more than just a catalyst for a team that started the season winning two of its first 10 games. It just might have saved Milwaukee’s season.

“Forty-eight f—ing minutes,” Giannis Antetokounmpo implored the team ahead of its semifinal. “Keep one another accountable. Somebody missed a shot, pick him up. Make him feel good about himself, so he can make the next one.

“We owe them one,” Antetokounmpo continued, referring to Milwaukee’s opponent that afternoon, the Atlanta Hawks, who had beaten the Bucks in Milwaukee a few weeks prior. “There’s no tomorrow. We need this s— tonight. Build good habits from 0 to 48. Right now, let’s go.”

Antetokounmpo’s intensity in the huddle pregame begat another in what has been a series of MVP-level performances this season: 32 points, 14 rebounds, 9 assists, 4 blocks, 68% shooting, with just one turnover. He extended his streak of scoring at least 20 points while shooting 50% to 23 consecutive games (two shy of an NBA record) — and sealed the win with two fourth-quarter plays that exemplified the kind of effort he pleaded with his team to show hours earlier.

With 6:35 remaining, and the Bucks leading 91-90, his 6-foot-11-inch frame crashed to the floor as he dove to secure a loose ball. Four minutes later, in a clip that went viral, he out-leaped teammate Brook Lopez to swat an alley-oop attempt. The Bucks won the game, 110-102, securing a spot in the NBA Cup finals.

For most of his 11-year career, Antetokounmpo has been comfortable allowing his play to speak for itself. But when the Bucks got off to a disastrous start — winning two of their first 10 games, and inviting rival executives to speculate about the team’s aging core and whether that group could support Antetokounmpo’s desire to remain competitive — it was Antetokounmpo who quieted the noise, at least internally.

“From the start of [the winning streak], he was really intentional with it,” Bucks guard AJ Green told ESPN. “Using his voice in huddles, in the locker room and he’s continued to do that throughout this stretch for us.

“We need it as a team. I think that’s definitely part of the reason why we’ve went on to win some games.”

Bucks forward Bobby Portis has seen Antetokounmpo grow into a more outspoken leader in recent years.

“He was being vocal, talking about things he wanted [on the court], talking before the game, things that the first couple years he didn’t really do as often as he does now,” Portis, who has played with Antetokounmpo since 2020, told ESPN.

“It’s cool to see guys’ leadership go to another level. Especially at a time of the season when it was critical for us to get back to at least playing some good ball.”

After the disastrous start, Milwaukee won 12 of its next 15 games, compiling the best record in the NBA since Nov. 12. Damian Lillard has found a groove as a co-star. Khris Middleton is back after missing the first 21 games while recovering from offseason surgeries on his ankles. And over that span, the Bucks are eighth in defense after ranking 22nd through the first 10 games.

Antetokounmpo has been leading the way, refusing to let this season go to waste. For the second straight year, he and the Bucks have used the NBA Cup as a pivot point — this time to salvage a season on the brink and quiet league-wide questions about his future with the franchise.

“I would be texting with Giannis, and we’d be talking at practice or whatever, his mind was never shut off,” Lillard said Friday in Las Vegas. “He was never discouraged. He was never overly concerned. It was always, fight. Our conversations had always been, like, we’re going to turn it around. We’re going to figure it out. We’re going to lead. We’ve got to keep going. We’ve got to dominate.

“I wasn’t overly concerned because I knew that eventually it would turn around just based off of that.”

The Bucks have risen from the bottom of the Eastern Conference to sixth in the East, and just two games out of third. They are undefeated in NBA Cup games (6-0) this season and will face the Oklahoma City Thunder in the championship game Tuesday night (ABC, 8:30 p.m. ET).

“I’m trying to go out there and lead by example, which that’s what I love to do, but I know that my voice carries a lot of weight and is very important within the team,” Antetokounmpo said after Saturday’s game. “So I try to talk as much as I can without allowing my voice to go too much.”

Only three teams over the past 25 seasons have started as poorly as 1-6 or worse and still made the playoffs (the 2021-22 New Orleans Pelicans, the 04-05 Chicago Bulls and the 03-04 Miami Heat). And no team had responded to that adversity so resoundingly over the next 15 games. The Bucks are trying to join that group that made the postseason, and are hoping this run to the NBA Cup finals in Las Vegas will be a harbinger of things to come, both in the second half of the season and the playoffs.

AFTER A BUCKS shootaround in Miami on Nov. 26, in the middle of the team’s season-long seven-game winning streak, coach Doc Rivers sat in his chair on the sidelines of Kaseya Center. He leaned back with an easy grin. The sidelines were glistening in red, surrounding a golden court, a sign of the NBA Cup game scheduled later that night.

Rivers was preparing for a chance to guide his team back to .500, a notable feat after the worst start to a season in his 26-year coaching career. “It’s funny, the outside world was …” Rivers told ESPN, his voice trailing off. He threw up his hands. “Around here, no one was even f—ing phased. We all believe this is going to work for us.”

Throughout the slow start, Rivers repeatedly insisted that the noise surrounding his flailing franchise was external. He knew the players weren’t performing well — they were slow to get back in transition, the ball was sticking on offense and Rivers had to change his rotations to utilize the team’s young talent — but he remained confident in the team’s response to adversity.

Rivers wasn’t worried about the offense — several players were shooting below their career averages from 3 — but he was trying to get the Bucks to tighten their defense. What they had worked on in training camp had yet to come together.

“We weren’t picking up what we worked on,” Rivers said. “We did make some big changes with our bigs being in the paint, more guards having to guard the perimeter, and we didn’t do it very well and so that hurt us. That put a lot of stress on our offense, and our offense hadn’t caught up.”

Milwaukee reached its lowest point Nov. 10 after a loss at home to the Celtics. The Bucks were six games under .500 and sat 14th in the East entering their first NBA Cup game Nov. 12 at home against the Toronto Raptors, the only team worse than the Bucks in the standings.

Rivers saw an opportunity. The Bucks couldn’t climb out of their season-long record hole in an instant, he said, but they could start targeting wins in the tournament in the hopes of a trip to Las Vegas in the middle of a Milwaukee winter.

“It was just a chance to get into playoff mode,” Bucks forward Taurean Prince told ESPN. “Being able to lock in on those games, have something to play for. That’s part of what helps teams become good.”

Rivers was a broadcaster for ESPN last December when the Bucks arrived in Las Vegas for the tournament semifinals. Around that time, Bucks ownership arranged a meeting with Rivers to advise first-year coach Adrian Griffin, who, despite Milwaukee’s strong record (15-6) was not connecting with the players, sources told ESPN. Despite the meeting, Griffin was fired a little more than a month after his team’s trip to Vegas. Two weeks later, Rivers took the job.

Rivers, who is 31-30 in his Bucks tenure — with a first-round playoff exit, has been attempting to reshape the team. But he has remained steadfast in his belief in continuity, even in the face of widespread speculation and skepticism.

“It was cool not to have a coach that pressed,” Portis told ESPN. “We just did the same things that we’ve been doing and just sharpened up more so than anything, just trying to get on the same page.

“He instills confidence in his players. His ability to just stay even keel through the lows we were having earlier in the season made us even keel.”

It helped Rivers, too, that he knew he could coach his two stars hard, calling out Antetokounmpo and Lillard in film sessions before he directed his attention to role players.

“I can show them in film making mistakes and they own it,” Rivers said. “Then everybody else, you got to follow, right?”

Lillard agreed: “They got to be able to coach us and correct us too,” he told ESPN. “There’s no resistance to that from [either] of us. That does allow them to coach us harder as a team and hold us accountable.”

Milwaukee won its first two tournament games against Toronto and Indiana and rattled off six of seven victories overall before heading into the Nov. 26 game against Miami. But Antetokounmpo was scratched from the lineup hours before the game because of swelling in his left knee, leaving the Bucks short-handed.

Lillard stepped up in his absence. He scored 37 points and recorded 12 assists while getting the Bucks back to .500 and protecting their perfect record in group play.

“We all knew we weren’t playing the kind of basketball we wanted to play,” Lillard told ESPN. “It was just like, man, we got to be better, and we was all on the same page about this as a team. We got to do better. We got to address where we struggling at, everybody knew it and everybody just kind of respected and understood it. The coaches would get on us in film, get on us in practice and we just kept working.

“We worked our way through it.”

DURING THE THIRD quarter of the Bucks’ Dec. 3 matchup against the Detroit Pistons, a different player stepped in to lead a third-quarter huddle, The winner of the game would advance out of East Group B and host a quarterfinal matchup. And with Milwaukee locked in a tight game and a chance to seal a critical win, Lillard took control.

“I heard him multiple times saying, ‘This is where we assert ourselves. This is where we put teams away,” Antetokounmpo told reporters after Milwaukee’s 128-107 victory. “This is where we become the team that we’re trying to become … I loved it. I loved it when he said that.”

One quality Lillard and Antetokounmpo have in common is their preference to lead by example, but both have grown more comfortable as leaders of the team this season.

“Both of them wanted the other one to do it,” Rivers said. “Neither one of ’em are that. [But] they both are more vocal.”

Despite his natural inclination to the contrary, Lillard knew he too needed to fill what he called “the big, quiet space” in difficult situations. “Sometimes, people just need to hear some encouragement, some words to just let everybody know, man, this s— ain’t the end of the world,” Lillard told ESPN.

“We’ll be fine. We just got to keep pushing forward.”

After beating Detroit, the Bucks earned a home game against the Orlando Magic last Tuesday in the NBA Cup quarterfinals for the chance to make it to Vegas for a second straight season. Antetokounmpo was dominant all game, paving the way with 37 points and four blocked shots, but it was Lillard who sealed the win down the stretch, with nine points in the game’s final minute, including the go-ahead layup in a 114-109 win.

It’s the formula the Bucks envisioned when they put the two together before the start of last season.

“Giannis is playing MVP basketball,” Lillard told ESPN. “I’ve carved out what I feel like a team needs from me as far as being aggressive, making plays, getting in the paint.

“When everybody’s doing their job, you’re not dependent on only making shots. You’re not dependent on a perfect game because we’re consistent. Obviously, Giannis is going to have to do what he does. I’m going to have to do what I do. But when you get everybody coming in and doing their job, we’re going to have a great opportunity.”

The Bucks will have an opportunity to win the NBA Cup on Tuesday, a chance to come full circle and avenge a missed opportunity last season. Now, one year later, the Bucks are rolling, entering the championship game with Lillard and Antetokounmpo looking more comfortable as a duo than ever.

Antetokounmpo and Lillard are the highest-scoring tandem in the NBA, averaging a combined 58.4 points per game. Lillard has assisted Antetokounmpo 52 times this season, including on 19 dunks, both top-10 among passer-scorer combinations in the NBA, according to ESPN Research.

“At the end of the day it takes time,” Antetokounmpo said Saturday about his relationship with Lillard. “I feel like a lot of people had such high expectations from us from Day 1 to be the best duo to ever play this game, but it takes time.

“Now, it’s our second year playing together, we are more comfortable playing with one another. We know one another’s spots better.

“Our chemistry is the best it’s ever been.”