The Lillard-Giannis Bucks are still finding their way

MILWAUKEE — THERE’S 1:10 left in the fourth quarter, and the Milwaukee Bucks trail the New York Knicks by two points, in danger of falling below .500 for the first time in two years.

Coming out of a timeout, the Bucks inbound the ball to former MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo. Newly acquired star Damian Lillard watches the play unfold from the corner to Antetokounmpo’s left. The 6-foot-11 big man dribbles twice toward the same corner and Lillard begins to make his move. The play was drawn up in the huddle as a dribble handoff to the corner, but Lillard uses his instincts and calls a slight audible.

First, Lillard breaks toward the basket, knowing his defender, New York’s Quentin Grimes, would not want to allow him an easy layup. That move successfully gets Grimes chasing Lillard’s back hip as he curls back up the court, behind Antetokounmpo’s defender, Julius Randle, who has his full attention on the two-time MVP. Randle doesn’t have time to react to Lillard, who receives the handoff with a screen from Antetokounmpo that creates enough space for him to knock down a 3-pointer and put Milwaukee in the lead for good.

“Once I kind of read where his body was, I knew I would be able to jump up and get that clean look,” Lillard said after the game. “I thought that was a really good action for me and [Antetokounmpo] to be on the clear side and have options. Where, even if he didn’t hand it to me and his man jumped up when he saw me, [Antetokounmpo] still would have probably had a keep to the rim.”

The play showed off the kind of synergy the Bucks hoped to create when they sent shockwaves throughout the NBA a week before the start of training camp by acquiring Lillard from the Portland Trail Blazers to pair him with Antetokounmpo. After a slow start, the Bucks have quietly started to find a groove. Milwaukee won five straight games to improve to 10-5 with the 12th-best net rating in the NBA (plus-2.5), according to NBA.com. Milwaukee’s offense with Lillard and Antetokounmpo has been good, but not always good enough to make up for its defense, which is 22nd in the league after ranking fourth in 2022-23.

Lillard is shooting way below his career averages — 40% from the field and 30% on 3-pointers. Khris Middleton, a three-time All-Star who signed a new three-year deal in the offseason, is still on a minutes restriction. The dynamic two-man actions between Lillard and Antetokounmpo that many expected to dominate opposing defenses have not been as frequent as imagined when the duo was first paired.

Yet, despite an uneven start, moments such as the one at the end of the Knicks game have served as an encouraging sign.

“I wish I could take credit for that play,” Adrian Griffin, Milwaukee’s first-year head coach, said after the game with a laugh. “Dame, he made an executive decision and he kind of looped up the middle — you can’t really teach that. You’ve got two guys that have won at a high level. They’re winners. Giannis, think about the patience that he had to have also because that was not designed that way.

“That’s where I see glimpses of them getting to know each other. It will take time, but I like where we’re heading.”

LILLARD’s BEST GAME of the season came last week in a 128-112 win against the Toronto Raptors.

For a night, Lillard looked like his old self, finishing with 37 points on 9-of-18 shooting, hitting four of his 10 3-pointers and dishing out 13 assists. According to Elias Sports Bureau, Lillard became the first player in Bucks history to score 35 points and assist on 35 points in the same game.

When Antetokounmpo was sidelined by a calf injury, Lillard had his highest usage rate of the season. The game with his second highest came after Antetokounmpo had been ejected. But the side-by-side fit remains clunky at times.

“We’re still learning each other,” Lillard told ESPN last week. “If it would’ve been flipped and him coming to Portland to play with me, I would’ve already been comfortable because I’ve been here. He would have been trying to adapt and get comfortable and figure out how he fits in and maybe would have been a bit more passive in trying to learn the way. That’s me right now.”

In 280 minutes when Lillard and Antetokounmpo have shared the floor, the Bucks have been outscored by 2.1 points per 100 possessions. Milwaukee’s offensive efficiency during those minutes is 110.1, which would rank 25th in the NBA (overall the Bucks’ offensive efficiency is 118.1, good for fifth).

What’s most perplexing about Milwaukee’s offense is how infrequently Lillard and Antetokounmpo, two of the best pick-and-roll players in the league, have even attempted running those actions with each other. Antetokounmpo is setting about 9.0 on-ball screens per game for Lillard, which ranks outside the top 40 among all combinations. Oklahoma City Thunder‘s Chet Holmgren has set more on-ball screens for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jalen Williams and Josh Giddey each separately than Antetokounmpo has set for Lillard, according to ESPN Stats & Information.

“There’s many ways to get them involved with each other, it’s not always pick-and-roll,” Griffin said before a game last week. “We run actions where it’s a two-man game — it doesn’t necessarily have to be pick-and-roll. You’ve got to keep in mind most teams put their best two defenders on Dame and Giannis, so a lot of them have been switching and whatnot. We’ve been able to counter that with different actions to get them involved with each other.”

Even with his shooting numbers sitting well below career norms, Lillard insisted he was not worried about his slow start to the season. In a normal offseason, Lillard said he would have gotten back on the court to play pickup in September, but he didn’t want to risk injury while he waited for Portland to trade him. Milwaukee’s first day of training camp was his first day back on the court, which is why he feels he’s still working into a rhythm to start the season.

“It’s such a long season, we don’t want to be perfect right now,” Lillard said. “Obviously, we want to be good. We want to be better than we have been, but we don’t want to be perfect.

“I’m happy we’ve been having some success and have been able to win games as we go through the process.”

BROOK LOPEZ LAY on the floor near his locker, one leg up on his chair, headphones over his ears and eyes focused on game tape with more than an hour remaining before tipoff.

Milwaukee’s meeting with New York would mark a shift in its defensive strategy, which Lopez has been at the center of since he joined the Bucks in 2018. Playing a drop scheme, Lopez finished second in 2022-23 Defensive Player of the Year voting and signed a new two-year in the offseason — the same offseason that marked the arrival of Griffin as the Bucks’ head coach.

Griffin, who had been an assistant coach with the Toronto Raptors, brought with him a much more aggressive defensive scheme that has Lopez playing up more and blitzing ball handlers. In one regard, it worked: The Bucks are fourth in deflections per game this season after finishing in 27th last season.

But the more aggressive approach left Milwaukee vulnerable at the rim. The Bucks ranked last in field goal percentage allowed at the rim through the first five games of the season, per Second Spectrum, after finishing in second place last season. The scheme also forced Lopez into difficult spots defensively, which was an added problem after the acquisition of Lillard cost them Jrue Holiday, one of the best perimeter defenders in the NBA. Holiday reminded the Bucks of what they were missing when his new team, the Boston Celtics, hosted Milwaukee on Wednesday and he held Antetokounmpo to 2-of-7 shooting as his primary defender despite giving up 7 inches of height.

“You don’t feel them in the same way anymore,” a rival Eastern Conference executive said. “The head of the snake is gone.”

So, in practice the day before the matchup with the Knicks, Antetokounmpo, Lopez and Middleton went to Griffin about adjusting their strategy on pick-and-rolls, allowing Lopez to drop back and stay closer to the rim instead of playing so aggressively.

“Sometimes as coaches, we’re too smart for our own selves,” Griffin said after the game that night.

Lopez went on to have eight blocks in the game against New York, as if making a statement that he was exactly where he belonged. He is averaging four blocks per game in the past 10 games, and Milwaukee has jumped from contesting 78% of opponents’ layups and dunks to 91%.

Still, the defense hasn’t bounced back completely. Milwaukee is 24th in the league defense against on-ball screens when using drop coverage, compared with second last year.

“It’s about buying into what’s asked of us,” Lillard told ESPN. “The guys here, everybody has been used to the same thing for years. And then you have a new staff come in and it’s a different thing, offensively and defensively.

“I think we’re all still trying to get a grip on it.”

ANTETOKOUNMPO KNOWS THE Bucks still have a long way to go, even if he is encouraged by their early improvements.

The offense is clicking, blitzing opponents in transition while Antetokounmpo leads the NBA with three 40-point games. They have found ways to stay effective despite Middleton remaining on strict minutes, averaging just 20.4 minutes in 12 games. However, Middleton has been efficient when he plays — he’s shooting a career-high 56.5% on 2-point attempts — and, most importantly for Milwaukee, he remains healthy, sitting out only on the front end of back-to-backs.

And since Lopez returned to his usual defensive position against the Knicks, the Bucks defense ranks 16th in the NBA, closer to league average than the disaster the unit was to begin the season.

“I still think we’re still trying to figure out…,” Antetokounmpo said before pausing, searching for the right words. “Not who we are, but who we are trying to be.

“One thing I know for sure is that we’ve got to get better. We are not even close to, what I believe, what we can really do as a team. … We’re going to try to figure out as a team what works, what doesn’t work and it’s going to be a process.”

That process included falling behind 10-0 out of the gate Wednesday night in Boston, eventually trailing by 21 in a game the Bucks never led. Despite the early deficit, they cut the lead to 3 in the final minute, thanks in part to an eight-point flurry by Lillard, who scored 27 points but needed 24 shots to do so.

“When you miss a lot of shots, usually it’s what the opposing team is doing,” Lillard said after the game. “When you look at how we played, we just didn’t execute well. We didn’t have good pace to our offense, we didn’t make extra passes, we didn’t screen for each other; a lot of things we have to do.”

After Wednesday’s loss, the Bucks, who won more games than any other team in the NBA over the past four seasons, find themselves tied for second in the East. They’ve begun to stabilize, which gives them renewed confidence in what their team will look like as the season goes on.

“To start the season we had some adversity, we had some ugly outings,” Lillard said. “I think any time you want to accomplish anything in this league you’ve got to be willing to go through the hard times and go through the hard parts of being an NBA player.

“We’ve been able to win some games through that and now that it’s starting to click it looks better and it’s starting to roll how people expected it.”