The Milwaukee Bucks finished off their series with the Orlando Magic with a 118-104 win on Saturday in their rescheduled Game 5 after the Bucks refused to play on Wednesday in protest of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which prompted a league-wide halt of play to press for further action from the league and owners.
Some of those actions were on display in the arena on Saturday, as there was signage encouraging people to vote this November, and both coaches spoke on voting in their in-game interviews. As for the game itself, the Bucks took control early, as Giannis Antetokounpo exploded for 22 first half points on 9-of-11 shooting, but the Magic would close the gap to as few as three in the second half. A run led by Marvin Williams and Khris Middleton in the fourth as Giannis sat with five fouls would push the Milwaukee lead back to double digits, as they held on for a comfortable victory and advance to the next round to face the Heat.
Here are three takeaways from the final game of the series and what comes next for both teams.
Can the Bucks find another gear?
It’s the same question that’s been posed of this Bucks team for two years, but can the supporting cast around Giannis provide enough, particularly offensively, to push them to the Finals. The Miami Heat are next up for the Bucks and pose quite the threat, as they are a team built to capitalize on Milwaukee’s greatest defensive weakness, which is their willingness to give up three-pointers. The Heat are the best three-point shooting team in the league and have proven this year that can give the Bucks problems, beating them twice. We know their plan will be to light it up from distance, and as such it’ll be incumbent on the Bucks to find a way to match their offensive output.
With Bam Adebayo, they have one of the few players in the league that can pose problems for Antetokounmpo, and will surely be focused on building a wall against him to force the ball to move to the others. That means Middleton, who struggled for much of the Orlando series but had a nice performance in Game 5 with 21 points, 11 rebounds, and seven assists, will need to play at an All-Star level and Eric Bledsoe — who has looked OK but not spectacular offensively to start the playoffs — will have to shake loose of his postseason woes. The Heat present a lot of questions the Magic can’t — particularly shooting the basketball — and while it wasn’t ever really in doubt, the Bucks will need to play much better in the next round to advance.
Where do the Magic go from here?
Orlando chose to lock up their core for the foreseeable future last summer and the result was pretty much the same as a year ago: a first round appearance, a scrappy Game 1 win, and then four straight losses to a superior team. The roster imbalance in Orlando is painful to watch, as they simply don’t have the shooting to consistently stay in games with the best teams in the league. That’s not to say there aren’t good players on this team, as Nikola Vucevic has become a legitimate All-Star in recent years and had some huge games against the Bucks and an excellent defense in this series. Markelle Fultz looks like he’s turned the corner and has emerged as a more than solid point guard in this league after his struggles in Philadephia, and Jonathan Isaac, pending his recovery from a torn ACL suffered in the Bubble, is an emerging defensive star in this league.
Their guard situation is rough, with Evan Fournier surely picking up his $17 million player option and Terrence Ross set to make $13.5 million (Fultz’s final year of his rookie deal pays him $12.8 million) and they need to either re-sign D.J. Augustin or find a replacement for him on the open market where they won’t have much money to offer. The lack of cap space this offseason, coupled with uncertainty about the future of the cap, makes things very difficult on the Magic to upgrade this roster. It was the concern when they locked up guys from a 7-seed finish a year ago, and if trades are made difficult by the cap situation leaguewide, next season figures to look an awful lot like this one.
Will Mike Budenholzer make necessary adjustments?
This might be a silly question as I think we know the answer is no, but Bucks fans still might be holding out hope that Bud will be willing to adapt to an opponent next round. As stated above, Miami is a nightmare matchup for the Bucks defensive philosophy of collapsing on the rim and allowing for kick outs to shooters. At minimum, the Bucks have to try force more of those shots to come from the likes of Jae Crowder, Andre Iguodala, and Jimmy Butler rather than Duncan Robinson, Tyler Herro, and even Kelly Olynyk. Whether they’ll make adjustments to holding defenders on those players more to keep them from catching fire, Robinson in particular, remains to be seen as they have a very strong commitment to what they do, but that does leave them vulnerable to hot shooting nights — and Miami is a team that can replicate that for a number of games.
Maybe more important is whether Bud will be willing to tighten his rotation in the next round and give Antetokounmpo and Middleton the extended, high 30s and even low 40s minutes that they are rarely asked to play. Bud loves his first quarter line change sub and rarely asks his stars to even sniff a 40-minute outing, but in the playoffs you simply have to give extended minutes to your top guys (and in the process cut back on some of your bench minutes, possibly eliminating guys from the rotation entirely). Part of extending Giannis’ minutes is keeping him out of foul trouble, and while he’s the Defensive Player of the Year, it wouldn’t surprise me if the Heat try to go at him some early in games to see if they can push the star into picking up some early fouls.
All of this is to say, next round will be fascinating and the Bucks, currently, don’t hold the form they once did in the regular season when they were mowing teams down. If they find that, all this may be moot and they might end the series quickly, but Miami’s playing well and they’ll be looking to take an early game off the Bucks to bring some of those postseason doubts back into their minds.