The Milwaukee Bucks entered the NBA playoffs as the championship favorite, the surest bet to make the Eastern Conference finals and the aura of being the best team in the league with the most unguardable player.
And now it’s all on the verge of collapsing.
The Bucks are not done yet. There is still a path — a narrow but legitimate one — for Milwaukee to claw back from a 3-1 deficit against Miami and avoid becoming just the fifth No. 1 seed in NBA history to lose to a No. 8.
Should the Bucks meet a premature end to these playoffs, we all know what’s going to happen. They’ll blame the fluke back injury that took Giannis Antetokounmpo out of the series’ first three games. They’ll blame a bad matchup against a Miami team that underachieved in the regular season but has legitimate playoff performers like Jimmy Butler. They’ll certainly blame coach Mike Budenholzer, who might have been fired in 2021 had they not cashed in with an NBA championship.
HEAT: Jimmy Butler’s career high 56 points powers Miami to 3-1 lead over Bucks
HAWKS: Dejounte Murray suspended for postgame altercation with referee
But the issues seem deeper than that. If anything, what this series has shown is that we might have already seen the best of the Milwaukee Bucks — with no clear path to get Antetokounmpo back to the NBA Finals.
That admittedly seems like a crazy thing to say about a team that just went a league-best 58-24 in the regular season and had the misfortune of losing Antetokounmpo early in Game 1. If that doesn’t happen, it’s a different series.
But Milwaukee’s roster is old, expensive and pretty fragile as we’ve come to find out.
Even without Antetokounmpo for a couple games, it would have been hard to believe when the series began that the Bucks would be in this much trouble against the Heat, who had the worst offensive numbers of any team in the playoffs and looked alarmingly outmatched in an 11-point play-in tournament loss to the Atlanta Hawks.
Instead, the Heat have just been better and more resilient than the Bucks, who got Antetokounmpo back in the lineup and led by 10 points with 5 1/2 minutes left but forgot how to play basketball for the next several possessions. Meanwhile, Butler carried Miami to a comeback win with a 56-point masterpiece that was truly one of the great playoff performances we’ll ever see.
That’s why you can’t write Milwaukee off just yet. If that’s what it took for the Heat to pull off Game 4 at home, it will take a huge effort to close this series out. And if Milwaukee can just win the next two — one at home, one on the road where they almost won on Monday — they would be a significant favorite in a Game 7 situation.
But the short-term concerns for Milwaukee could breed some longer-term tension, even if they get by this series.
This is a team built around Antetokounmpo, Jrue Holiday and Khris Middleton, who delivered that title in 2021 and should always be celebrated for what they did during that playoff run — which, by the way, could have been in peril when Antetokounmpo hyperextended his knee in the Eastern Conference finals. Back then, his teammates were good enough to finish off the Atlanta Hawks.
But Holiday will be 33 next season on a $35 million contract, with a $37 million player option for the following year. He has shot the ball poorly against the Heat and made several uncharacteristically harmful decisions in the closing minutes of Game 4.
Middleton has a player option for $40 million this summer that seems likely to be declined, making him an unrestricted free agent. After a series of injuries the last couple years, it’s hard to know exactly what kind of player you’re going to get as he also enters his mid-30s. Brook Lopez is going to be a 35-year-old unrestricted free agent.
That’s a lot of uncertainty and a lot of cap space for an aging roster with no real youth injection on the horizon. With their 2025 and 2027 first-round picks still owed to the New Orleans Pelicans from the trade that netted them Holiday, there’s no obvious way for the Bucks to pivot.
It was all worth it, of course, because Antetokounmpo stayed in Milwaukee and won a title with Middleton and Holiday as his supporting cast. But Antetokounmpo is just 28, and there’s a whole next chapter of his career that needs to be written.
In three years, he also will be a free agent. Are the Bucks really going to ride that out with the same if this group follows its championship by losing to the Celtics in the second-round in 2022 and suffering the indignity of a first-round upset to the Heat?
Maybe they won’t have any other choice. But the Bucks’ murky future highlights the desperate need to make the most out of what they have now. Given the regular season they had, home court advantage throughout the playoffs and a seemingly favorable path to the Eastern Conference finals, it was crucial for Milwaukee to make the absolute most out of this playoff run.
That reality underscores what a disaster it would be to lose this series to the Heat. If the Bucks can’t get out of the bind they’ve created for themselves right now, it’s not hyperbole to say that even with a force of nature like Antetokounmpo, their title-winning days might really be over.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Bucks on verge of collapse after loss to Heat
