Author’s note: this article is the first in a three-part series diagnosing theMilwaukee Bucks offense as the 2024-2025 season winds down. Parts two (players, coaches, clutch) and three (film) will run in the coming days.
So you find yourself staying up to nearly midnight on a Tuesday to watch the 2024–25 Milwaukee Bucks desperately try to score a single point with the game on the line. “Been here before,” you think, before wondering whether the sense of a sclerotic offense you’ve picked up on these past few weeks is fact or fiction. And it isn’t just a passing concern either: history will tell you that a viable title contender needs to be top-10 in both offense and defense to have a real puncher’s chance in the playoffs. If you can’t score more points than the other team, you lose. That’s sports.
The team’s 104-93 defeat at the hand of the Golden State Warriors earlier this week is this article series’ catalyst, although that game was just one more piece of evidence of a trend that is increasingly hard to overlook: Milwaukee’s offense is not particularly good. On the surface, this is a very strange thing to say. A roster that includes Damian Lillard (aged, but still) and Giannis Antetokounmpo should, in theory, have very little trouble getting the ball through the hoop at will. If you look at certain team-wide stats, that contention of substandard scoring sounds even odder (all stats from here on courtesy of NBA.com, Cleaning The Glass, and Basketball-Reference):
The team has the second-best 3P% in the league (38.3%)
Giannis Antetokounmpo (30.2 PGG) and Damian Lillard (24.9 PPG) are the best two-man scoring duo in the league
Taurean Prince has the second-best 3P% (44.6%) among qualifying players, AJ Green is 14th (41.7%), and Gary Trent Jr. is 17th (41.5%)
Brook Lopez is at or slightly above his Bucks-career averages in scoring (12.6 PPG on .496/.371/.848 splits)
That’s a strong two-star starting point with a number of guards, wings/forward, and a couple centers to surround them with shooting. Again, on paper, everything looks really good. So why has the team’s offense been stuck at bang-average the entire year? Over the run of the season thus far, they’re sitting at a 114.6 ORtg (14th). Since the All-Star break they’re... 16th overall with a 114.4 ORtg. A remarkable amount of consistency in being average. The numbers imply that in spite of these personnel changes, Milwaukee has the same old Bucks since October:
Khris Middleton (hobbled and with questionable availability, but still efficient with his 12.6 PRG and .627 TS% with 4.4 APG to throw in) was swapped for Kyle Kuzma (more available, much less efficient at .516 TS%, a 0.86 AST:TO ratio, but scoring 13.7 a game)
Bobby Portis has been removed from the lineup entirely due to suspension—another loss of a double-digit scorer
Kevin Porter Jr. was brought in over a player who was logging zero playing time and is averaging nearly 10 points a game in just 16 minutes played while shooting 44.1% from three
What do all the above numbers imply? One read could lead you to conclude that the team has never had the kind of consistent personnel availability needed to build a replicable scheme. There is likely a kernel of truth there. Another angle would see those stats and wonder if there isn’t something lacking at the core. That you can shuffle the deck chairs all you want, but some key ingredients are missing which will always handicap the final product.
With the team defense on the rise—they’re the fifth-best unit since the All-Star Break with a 110.6 DRtg—it behooves both them and us to understand where it is going wrong on the other end of the floor. To get to the bottom of things, I’ll be starting with as wide a lens as possible before narrowing our view to concrete recent examples of sub-par play. If the series is done properly, we’ll leave it with a synthesis of eye test and number crunching that which will help inform what levers and buttons the Bucks could pull and push.
In part one, we’ll zoom out and take a look at Milwaukee’s shot selection, how it compares to expectations, and what changes may serve them best in the short-term at a strategic level.
The Play Types
What could be a wider starting viewpoint than looking at the team’s play-type numbers? Behold (sorted by most to least frequent, per NBA.com)!
Bucks Play Types (as of March 19th)
|Play Type|Frequency (ranking)|Points Per Possession (ranking)|
What jumps off the page to you here? My first instinct is to look at the three play types I’d think of as core to how this team could function: transition, P&R, and spot-ups.
It is interesting that transition makes up a smaller part of their shot diet relative to the rest of the league; a strange situation with Giannis Antetokounmpo available. That they’re mediocre at it to boot isn’t pleasant. Those values don’t budge much regardless of the level of the opponent. Per CTG:
Against top-10 point differential opponents: 13.6% frequency, +1.8 pts/possession (26th)
Against middle-10 point differential opponents: 14.0% frequency, +1.2 pts/possession (28th)
Against bottom-10 point differential opponents: 15.3% frequency, +2.5 pts/possession (19th)
The implication here is that Milwaukee is ineffective in transition regardless of the opponent but that the good ones also slow the Bucks down by hook or by crook. Even if every team has “don’t let them get out on the break” written in all caps and bolded on the scouting report, though, the bottom-third use rate indicates that the Bucks themselves aren’t working particularly hard to hunt opportunities in open play. Why? Good question. Maybe the coaching staff wants to conserve players’ bodies by focusing on a methodical approach. Another reason could be prioritizing half-court reps over pure single-play optimization with a longer view on the grind of playoff basketball. Explanation aside, this is a pretty obvious area where Milwaukee’s offense is a firm step behind.
Pick and rolls look better by comparison. If you combine possessions where the roll man and ball handler end up taking a shot, Milwaukee runs a P&R every fourth or fifth possession. This is about the same as last year. The reward remains good efficiency relative to others, with the rollers paying things off particularly well. Compared to a season ago, they’ve chosen to finish actions with the roller more often and have been rewarded by an even better PPP mark (6.6% vs. 7.4% and 1.12 vs. 1.18). In both seasons with Damian Lillard aboard, the Bucks have been a very good P&R group. At the numbers level, things look good here.
Finally, spot ups. This one is as weird as transition, really. For a team that is so prolific from beyond the arc, how have they gotten themselves into the position where they hoist only the 17th-most attempts from distance (37.0)? How is such an accurate group doling out spot-up jumpers at a bottom-third rate? What is the missing link between what the numbers say they should be doing (i.e. pushing the envelope into the ~40 attempts/game territory) and where they’re at now?
For completion’s sake, here are their 3P%s by quarter and by how open shooters are on the season:
Bucks 3P% (by quarter)
|Quarter|3P%|
Bucks 3P% (by defensive coverage)
|Closest Defender|Frequency|3P%|
If there is a point of concern it is that 35.8% make rate on open shots. The numbers show that Milwaukee is generating a good chunk of open to wide open threes for its shooters. With a game in the balance, would a handful more open makes be the difference that changes the entire thrust of this article series? It certainly would have a big impact—sports contain always contain series of next order consequences that build on each other. A handful more open makes with the game in its more open phases keeps Milwaukee’s room for action wider, longer. Miss those and suddenly you find your star players taking matters into their own hands, trading efficient spot ups for tougher (but still effective!) isos, for example. Reasonable readers/commenters would be well within their rights to say this point right here is the end all, be all to Milwaukee’s struggles.
A couple other observations: I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a quick note to isos. They do it plenty, and they’re pretty good at it. Makes sense. Imagine what the offensive numbers would look like if Dame was given continuation foul calls to boost that 12.3% free throw frequency? Yeesh.
And let’s tackle post-ups while we’re at it. There are essentially three guys who get post touches between Brook Lopez, Giannis, and Bobby Portis. Of the five teams who post up the most in the league, Milwaukee is the only one doing it at a sub-.500 scoring mark. It’d be one thing if this play type was also a setup to something more efficient (see: Nikola Jokic parking at the elbow and dissecting defenses to death), but the spot up and cut numbers tell us that, no, these are not post-ups to keep ‘em honest. This is static, stand-and-watch offense.
Of all the areas the team can control and realistically tweak, I’d argue the most obvious one is generating more spot-up looks. In a math battle—which is what some NBA games devolve into—winning the three-point attempt contest is a good starting point. To get there, though, the coaches and players may need to get more creative in their sets to spring shooters. And if they want to get out and run a little bit more like GM Jon Horst says they’d like to do in the playoffs? Well, I wouldn’t be mad at that either.
In order to reach certain ends, however, it behooves you to have particular means to get there. Do the Milwaukee Bucks have the right people—whether they be players or coaches—to realize a more optimized offensive outlook? Or are all the numbers laid out about the natural, inevitable, and “best” outcome given the ingredients available?
Part two of this series will zoom in and look at Milwaukee’s offensive capabilities through the lens of its players, rotations, coaching, and clutch performance so far this season. We can wax poetic about what the Bucks should do, but whether they can do it as currently constructed is another question entirely.