Why The Milwaukee Bucks Are The Best Team Left In The Playoffs

Connor Hanson
Sports Editor

About two months ago, I wrote a piece about why the Milwaukee Bucks are going to win the Finals this year. And now, two months later, all signs point to the Bucks hoisting the Larry O’Brien trophy at the end of May.

You might be asking yourself if I am simply forgetting about the Golden State Warriors or the Houston Rockets or one of the three other hopefuls left in the Eastern Conference Playoffs. But to put it simply, I am not. The Milwaukee Bucks are the most dangerous team left in the playoffs.

The Bucks won their first series against the Detroit Pistons by an average margin of 23.75 points-per-game, sweeping and easily handling the Pistons, even with All-Star Blake Griffin back for the last two games of the series. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that the Pistons were a joke of a matchup, but to have no games come down to the wire, even when Giannis Antetokounmpo had an off night, shows just how serious the Bucks are this year.

Plus, they are just now getting Nikola Mirotic and Tony Snell back, and are hopefully returning Malcolm Brogdon to the court for game three of their series against the Boston Celtics. Once Brogdon returns to their lineup and syncs back up with the rest of the team, forget about anybody winning a seven game series against this squad.

However, the Celtics are a formidable opponent, and with the Bucks trying to restore their regular lineup, the Celtics have the best chance of ruining the Bucks Finals run. But even then, the Bucks have yet to drop back-to-back games this season and own the best regular season record and home record this year. So, with that in tow, and home court advantage throughout the entirety of the playoffs, the chance of a team knocking them out is incredibly small.

One can also look at the Bucks top six scoring players and see that all of them average over ten points-per-game – something the Philadelphia 76ers can only come close to rivaling at the moment. That goes to show, that Giannis isn’t the only thing that teams need to focus on. Add the fact that a lot of the scoring outside of Giannis comes from the perimeter and midrange, an opposing team has to pick whether they want to take away the three or lockdown the paint, since they can’t do both, leaving one area for the Bucks to wreak havoc on.

Sure, the Bucks will have a game where they go cold from the field, allowing the other team to take away the offensive spacing and make it difficult for the Bucks to produce in a half-court offense, but the chances of that happening four times, in a seven-game series, is slim-to-none.

Finally, put together all those players, all that spacing and all that depth with a top-tier, front-runner for Coach of the Year in Mike Budenholzer, and you have a blueprint for how to win a trophy at the end-of-the-season. So, when the Bucks get Brogdon back and make it out of this series against the Celtics in six, maybe seven games, you should fully expect to see them lift that Larry O’Brien trophy come the end of May.

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