Before the NBA season, the Milwaukee Bucks were supposed to be all about youth and development.
They boasted one of the game’s most exciting young players, Giannis Antetokounmpo. They had the second pick from the 2014 draft, the highly-rated Jabari Parker. And they were the owners of potential-filled big men like Larry Sanders and John Henson.
The future could rightly be considered bright in Milwaukee, but not a whole lot was expected of the Bucks right now.
As it turns out, though, the future is taking a back seat to the here and now.
A cast of unheralded veterans has coalesced into a team in a surprisingly comfortable play-off position in the East, the conference’s sixth seed. Meanwhile the early loss of Parker to a season-ending injury and a current lengthy suspension for Sanders for violating the league’s drug policy hasn’t slowed down the Bucks, in the midst of a 6-1 run that includes wins over Miami, Portland and Toronto.
The Bucks have a kind of bizarro 2013/14 Phoenix Suns feel to them. Their surprisingly strong squad is, rather than riding a frenetic and effective offence to prominence like last year’s Suns, simply playing some of the best defence in basketball.
In fact, Milwaukee’s defence is the second best in the NBA by efficiency, with the Bucks allowing just 99.1 points per 100 possessions.
They can thank players like Khris Middleton, a third-year guard who was a second-round pick of the Pistons in 2012 and included as a kind of afterthought in the Brandon Jennings for Brandon Knight swap in July 2013. He’s arguably been their best player, with Milwaukee allowing a team-low 95.1 points per 100 possessions when he’s on the court and 103.2 points per 100 when he’s absent.
Or thank Knight himself, the eighth overall pick in the 2011 draft who was a defensive disaster with Detroit before they dealt him for Milwaukee’s own defensively challenged 2009 lottery pick point guard, Jennings.
Now Knight is chipping in with the best defence of his career while prodding along an offence susceptible to getting gummed up from time to time with 17.9 points per game at career best shooting figures (43.7 per cent field goal; an excellent 41.2 per cent from three).
There’s Jared Dudley, hitting 42.1 per cent from three and playing strong defence after catching on with the Bucks when the Clippers sacrificed a first round pick to Milwaukee to unload his contract.
There’s Jerryd Bayless and OJ Mayo, highly-rated score-first guards when they entered the league years ago and then disappointed, bounced around and landed in Milwaukee’s open arms – both enjoying some of the best defensive play of their careers.
And of course, there is Henson and Antetokounmpo, with the former using his insane length to develop nicely into a traditional deterrent inside and the latter using his even more insane length to develop into a stopper on the wings.
Sanders, before his suspension, and Zaza Pachulia, before a recent string of absences with injury, were also in part responsible for the Bucks being the eighth-best team in the league at forcing missed shots near the basket (50.5 opponents field goal percentage in that area).
Outside, their opponents three-point percentage (32.8) is third-best in the NBA and their opponents overall shooting percentage (43.4) is fourth-best in basketball.
"It's hard for opposing teams to execute because we're so long," Antetokounmpo told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel after the Bucks' win over the Raptors on February 2.
There’s something to that. Their big men (Henson, 6ft 11in; Pachulia, 6ft 11in; and Sanders, 6ft 11in) are all, indeed, big – and intimidating inside.
Antetokounmpo is a 6ft 11in, speedy and long nightmare the likes of which have rarely been seen in the NBA. Dudley and Middleton are both 6ft 7in and at times able to shift to guarding smaller two-guards with Antetokounmpo taking caring of opposing forwards. Mayo is 6ft 5in and even their point guards, Knight and Bayless, are a healthy 6ft 3in.
Much talk has drifted around basketball in recent years of trying to assemble a team that can play “positionless basketball”. It’s practically the nuclear fusion of the sport.
But that discussion has usually centered around offence – building a team of skilled, big players who can all dribble, pass and shoot.
The Bucks, though, are doing something kind of like that with their defence – employing a roster of big, long players who can shift between guarding 2-3 positions. Antetokounmpo and Henson are quick enough to guard smaller opponents; Dudley and Bayless and Mayo tough enough to guard bigger ones. And so on.
Coach Jason Kidd deserves some of the credit, as well, for bringing this squad together. He was an all-time great defensive point guard in his playing days and is generally known to preach its importance now as a coach.
"It's about teaching," he told USA Today last month. "Playing hard, playing defence, playing start to finish.
“Guys are doing that, and it’s fun to watch, fun to be around and fun to teach.”
The Bucks also aren’t old, with their core group of young talents ranging from 19 (Parker), including Knight and Middleton and Anteotokounmpo, to 24 (Henson). Only Pachulia (30) and Dudley (29) are any older than 27 among their regulars.
Antetokounmpo in particular has as much potential as anyone in the league and Middleton has blossomed into something almost like a fringe all-star this season. Parker will only add another dimension to that next season.
For right now, though, what the Bucks have is itself enough to constitute one of the most interesting teams in the league.
The old axiom is that defence wins championships – the Bucks aren’t that good enough to dream that big yet, but the foundation seems solidly in place.
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