NEW YORK — For the first time since Nov. 17, Giannis Antetokounmpo suited up for the Milwaukee Bucks after battling a left adductor strain that sidelined him for four games. The two-time NBA MVP finished with 30 points, 15 rebounds and eight assists on a minutes restriction that limited him to only 28 minutes, but the Bucks lost 118-109 to the New York Knicks.

While Antetokounmpo played well in his return, the Bucks (8-12) are on a seven-game losing streak, having lost two games with Antetokounmpo before his absence, four straight games without Antetokounmpo and now a close game in New York.

Friday’s loss also kept Milwaukee, last year’s NBA Cup champions, from advancing to the quarterfinals for the first time in the three-year history of the NBA’s in-season tournament.

“Does it matter what I’ve seen (when I was sidelined with the injury)? It doesn’t matter — it happened,” Antetokounmpo said, when asked to assess what he saw from the bench while he was out for the last four games. “We’ve lost the games. We’ve lost, what, six in a row? Seven in a row?”

To close the game, it was the little things that ultimately sank the Bucks’ chances of a comeback victory in Madison Square Garden. With just over five minutes remaining, a baseline spin and dunk from Antetokounmpo brought the Bucks within two points of the Knicks, but mistakes piled up down the stretch.

Out of a timeout, Doc Rivers drew up a play for Kyle Kuzma to take advantage of a size mismatch on Jalen Brunson, and he did successfully, drawing a foul to go to the line. But Kuzma missed both free throws. On the next offensive possession, Myles Turner (10 points) had a catch-and-shoot 3-pointer from Antetokounmpo that could have tied the game, but it bounced in and out.

Then Antetokounmpo was called for a foul on a 3-point attempt by Jalen Brunson.

Rivers challenged the call, but it was deemed unsuccessful, and Brunson went to the line for three free throws. On the night, Brunson put up 37 points (12-of-21 from the field, 9-of-10 on free throws) and five assists.

Kuzma, who had 20 points on 8-of-9 shooting, buried a 3 on the next possession to bring the Bucks within two again, but Milwaukee blew a defensive coverage on the next possession.

Rather than letting Antetokounmpo handle Josh Hart rolling down the lane, point guard Ryan Rollins crashed down into the paint and left Miles McBride open in the corner.

Antetokounmpo got to the paint for an easy look at the rim on the next offensive possession to shrink the Knicks’ lead down to three points, but then the Bucks made another mistake on the defensive end. While Rollins let Antetokounmpo handle the 2-on-1 situation against Hart, the Bucks couldn’t keep Karl-Anthony Towns from bulldozing his way into position for an offensive rebound and two more free throws.

From there, the Bucks just couldn’t score and eventually dropped the game by nine points.

While Milwaukee failed to close out the game because of little things during clutch time, coach Doc Rivers believes those little things have been piling up this season and are causing a major problem for his team.

“The bottom line is they had 13 more shots than us, they had eight more free throws,” Rivers said. “We’re outshooting teams (in accuracy). Shooting 52 percent, but it’s the turnovers, it’s the offensive rebounds, it’s the fouls.

“It’s a numbers game, and we have to win that game. Especially with Giannis, if we win that game, we’re going to win the game.”

This numbers game has been a consistent problem for the Bucks all season. In 2002, basketball analyst Dean Oliver introduced his four factors of basketball: effective field goal percentage, turnover percentage, offensive rebound percentage and free throw rate. Those four factors essentially create the numbers that Rivers spoke about following Friday’s loss.

When including the ratings of your opponents in the four factors, there are eight categories, and this season, according to Cleaning the Glass, the Bucks are elite in only one of those eight categories: effective field goal percentage.

Four Factors Rankings

eFG%TOV%REB%FT Rate

Offense

3rd

12th

30th

30th

Defense

19th

19th

16th

27th

Going forward, the Bucks will need to find a way to improve upon those numbers to consistently win games, but for now, they might need to find the necessary desperation to win one game and end their current seven-game losing streak. This marks Milwaukee’s longest losing streak since the Bucks lost eight in a row in January 2014, when Antetokounmpo was an NBA rookie.

For Antetokounmpo, that starts with doing the little things at a much higher level.

“You gotta come in, do your job, do what you’re paid to do, defend, rebound the ball, do the little things,” he said in a nearly three-minute explanation. “And sometimes when you worry about doing the little things, all the other things add up.

“If you’re so concerned with scoring the ball and getting yourself going offensively, and that doesn’t work for you, now you feel like you cannot do nothing. You cannot worry about one shot or two shots that you miss, which took four seconds out of the game to dictate 47 minutes, 56 seconds of the game.”

Doing the little things is part of what Antetokounmpo described as a winning mindset, as he continued his impassioned post-game message.

“We’ve gotta get into the mindset that we’ve gotta compete,” he said. “We gotta get to the mindset that this is not a one-man show, that we have to do together. We’ve gotta move the ball. We’ve gotta find open threes; we’ve gotta run, we gotta create spacing.

“Overall, we gotta get our competitive spirit back to where it’s supposed to be. Nobody should have a personal agenda, nobody should worry about what they want from themselves, worry only about winning mentality. Winning mindset. The more we can win games, the more everything can take care of itself.”

The Bucks will have a chance to implement that winning mindset almost immediately as they head back to Milwaukee to take on the Brooklyn Nets on the second night of a back-to-back.