Bucks’ slow start too much to overcome in loss to Celtics: ‘We just gotta be better’

BOSTON — Sitting in the visiting locker room at TD Garden, following his team’s 119-116 loss to the Boston Celtics on Wednesday, Milwaukee Bucks center Brook Lopez found himself at a bit of a loss while discussing the Celtics opening a 10-0 lead to open Wednesday’s game, an unfortunate trend in Bucks’ games this season.

“I guess it’s just, I don’t know, a lack of focus,” Lopez said before flashing a brief, wry smile. “If I had a better answer, hopefully, that wouldn’t keep happening. It’s obviously something we’ll figure out, but hopefully starting with myself, we have a bit of urgency figuring that issue out.”

While Lopez was speaking to the Bucks’ early trend of slow first-quarter starts, the same idea may apply to several other problems that appeared for the Bucks in the first 45 minutes of Wednesday’s loss to the Celtics in Boston.

The Bucks have been able to put together a 10-5 record to start the season and could have left Boston with the Eastern Conference’s best record with a win on Wednesday, but their early season problems were on full display in Boston before they managed to claw their way back into within a single score of the Celtics in the final minutes.

The 3-pointer Jaylen Brown hit to put the Bucks in the 10-0 hole to open the game serves as a good way to look into the early-season issues on display in Boston on Wednesday.

To start the possession, Malik Beasley and Damian Lillard executed a switch on the screen between Derrick White and Jrue Holiday , something the team will do to help keep themselves in front of their opponents to make up for not having strong point-of-attack defenders in their backcourt. With Lillard on Holiday on the left wing, the Celtics pull their other four players out behind the 3-point line to stretch the Bucks’ defenders as far out as possible.

When Holiday starts his post-up against Lillard, the Bucks send help, knowing that they don’t want to see Lillard try to defend Holiday one-on-one. By the time Holiday moves from the 3-point line to the left block, all four Bucks defenders have turned their backs to their own assignments and either gotten themselves in the lane or a step away from the lane to help slow Holiday down.

With so much attention drawn in around him, Holiday makes the simple decision to jump in the air and kick out a pass to Brown on the opposite wing for a 3. Even with Kristaps Porziņģis slowing the pass down because he thought it might be intended for him on a cut to the rim, Brown still had plenty of time to catch and shoot and knock down the 3.

“We just gotta be better,” Antetokounmpo (21 points, 13 rebounds, five assists) said. “They want to shoot a lot of 3s. They get comfortable by shooting 3s. They play well when they shoot 3s and then they’re able to break down your defense and drive the ball, get in the paint and then kick it out for another 3.

“We got to do a better job to just defend the 3-point line, keeping guys in front of us. Hopefully next time, when we play them, we can do that. Or next time we play another team that wants to shoot a lot of 3s, we can do (that).”

On top of giving up the first 10 points of the game, the Bucks didn’t score in the first three minutes of the game. Throughout the season, the first quarter has been their worst quarter. That is especially true on the offensive end, where the Bucks are managing to score just 103.1 points per 100 possessions, the league’s 25th-best offensive rating in the quarter.

Off Rtg

Like Lopez, Antetokounmpo didn’t have a good answer for the team’s continued sluggish starts to games.

“I wish I knew,” Antetokounmpo said. “If I knew the secret formula of how we’ll start the first quarter always engaged and make shots, I’ll do it every single time because I have an obsessive personality, but I don’t. Sometimes you start well, sometimes you don’t. It’s part of the game. Today, we didn’t start well.”

The Bucks scored just 17 points in the first quarter on Wednesday, but let’s take it back to the defense.

The Celtics started Wednesday’s game by hitting 12 of their first 20 3-point attempts (60 percent). And while it was the 3-point line that was hurting the Bucks, it was their poor point-of-attack defense that opened up those opportunities for the Celtics. Look at this Al Horford 3 from the first quarter.

While Porziņģis only appears to graze Lillard with the screen at the top of the floor, it is just enough to give Derrick White a step on Lillard and compromise the Bucks’ defense. With Lillard trailing White, Antetokounmpo sells out to try to chase down a block at the rim. Lopez didn’t trust Lillard and Antetokounmpo to contain the problem, so he helped out of the corner and left Al Horford wide-open for a 3.

“They make it difficult on teams,” Lopez said. “They move the ball well, they trust one another. It’s tough when you end up behind the ball and it’s flying around, so we just got to do a better job of trusting our team defense. I think a lot of that is just knowing situations, reading what we need to be doing, maybe a little less help sometimes in certain situations. I know I helped from the corner one time when I shouldn’t have, like that’s obviously a no-no.”

And while Lopez lamented his own mistake in helping out of the strong-side corner, his desire to leave Horford open in the corner shows the greatest problem for the Bucks’ defense, which the Celtics were able to exploit repeatedly throughout the game. Whether it is opposing guards or wings, after trading Jrue Holiday, the Bucks just don’t yet have the defenders they need to contain their opponents’ best perimeter scorers. That has led to the Bucks being a bad defensive team, 22nd in defensive rating following Wednesday’s loss (per NBA.com), this season.

While the first two clips above showed the Celtics being able to take advantage of Lillard to create advantageous situations for their offense, the Celtics were able to do the same with their two star wings as well.

Middleton has never been seen as a defensive stopper. Even in his best defensive seasons, while he did things like covering the other team’s best wing (especially in Mike Budenholzer’s first season in Milwaukee), Middleton has always been seen as an intelligent team defender who can put together solid possessions on the ball. Without a more elite on-ball wing, the Bucks put Middleton on Tatum to start Wednesday’s game and Tatum had the advantage.

To the Bucks’ credit, they let their wings defend in isolation rather than send help in the same way they did with their guards, so it didn’t lead to open 3s quite as often as their guards’ struggles, but a similar thing occurred when the Bucks’ younger wing MarJon Beauchamp got a chance on Tatum.

Notably, while the Bucks let Antetokounmpo spend time on Jimmy Butler in the team’s early season matchup against the Miami Heat , the 2020 Defensive Player of the Year spent only a limited amount of time on Tatum on Wednesday with the Bucks opting to place him on Holiday far more often instead.

But no matter where the Bucks choose to place Antetokounmpo, the Celtics present matchup problems for the Bucks. This year’s version of the Celtics is fully committed to playing five-out offensive basketball with Porziņģis, their nominal center, stretching defenses out with his 3-point shooting and that means the Bucks need to win more often at the point of attack on defense. At this point, the Celtics made it clear that the Bucks’ personnel cannot consistently pull that off, which is a major reason the Bucks are 22nd in defensive rating, per NBA.com, through 15 games this season.

When the Bucks needed a stop at the end of the game, the Bucks were forced to get creative and it worked, even if they were aided by Tatum’s willingness to jab-step to run out extra time on the shot clock.

“You gotta press up. You gotta close out with urgency. They have a lot of really good shooters on their entire roster,” Bucks coach Adrian Griffin said. “So it’s not just one guy. They put a lot of pressure on your defense because they have several guys that can put heat on the rim. But you gotta do a lot of good things well. You gotta guard the ball, you gotta help and rotate and close out to 3-point shooters and then you gotta limit them to one shot.

“But I thought the second half, we really started to fly around, intensity increased, physicality increased and we were able to get back in the game.”

The Bucks were able to come back late and close the gap in their first showdown with the other favorite in the Eastern Conference, but that final score should not be seen as a sign that the Bucks are exactly where they need to be to compete with the East’s best. Even if it is just a regular season loss in November, the Bucks should use it as evidence of the things that they need to work on moving forward and how they have to improve the rest of the season.

“It was good for us to see,” Lopez said. “Obviously, they started off super hot. Us, not. But again, there was lots of good stuff to take away from it. We will be a different team at the end of the season in April. They will as well, I’m sure.

“And if we’re going to complete our goal of winning a championship, we’re obviously going to have to meet up with them at some point. They’re a very talented team, they have the same aspirations. So, you know, as long as we take care of business, keep improving game in, game out, I’m sure we’ll run into them and we’ll see what it’s like then.”

These two teams do not meet again until Jan. 11, 2024, when the Celtics make their way to Milwaukee, but the Bucks have plenty of work to do on themselves before trying to get ready to battle the Celtics again.

(Photo of Giannis Antetokounmpo and Jayson Tatum : Maddie Meyer / )