have hoped when they hired him<\/a> to replace first-time head coach Adrian Griffin midway through the 2023-24 season.<\/p>\nAs of Friday afternoon, the Bucks (26-35) are in 11th place in the Eastern Conference and five games behind the Atlanta Hawks and Charlotte Hornets, who occupy the final two spots in the East\u2019s Play-In tournament.<\/p>\n
Two-time NBA MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo has missed 29 of the Bucks\u2019 61 games, but even with him in the lineup, the Bucks haven\u2019t been able to find a successful formula and appear destined to come up short of expectations for a third straight season.<\/p>\n
The Bucks are 23rd in offensive rating and 25th in defensive rating this season, per NBA.com. With Antetokounmpo out for half of the season, the Bucks\u2019 offensive struggles make some sense. The Bucks entered the year planning to build their offensive identity around Antetokounmpo\u2019s ability to draw help defenders, but the defensive struggles are more difficult to explain.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust keep looking,\u201d Rivers said on Friday when asked how to fix the defense\u2019s struggles this late in the season. \u201cDefensively, we just haven\u2019t been where I obviously thought that we would be. A lot of that is Giannis has been out of the lineup, but the defensive numbers don\u2019t change when Giannis is in or out.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re 25th either way, which is not a good sign. We don\u2019t force turnovers. We give up a ton of 3s and we give up 3s when the ball doesn\u2019t get into the paint. That\u2019s a concern, and that should never happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
If the Bucks continue on this pace, it would be Rivers\u2019 first full season as a head coach with a losing record since the 2006-07 season with the Celtics and the first time the Bucks have missed the playoffs since the 2015-16 season. With Rivers as head coach over the last two-and-a-half seasons, the Bucks have posted a 91-88 record in the regular season. They were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs by the Indiana Pacers in each of Rivers\u2019 first two seasons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MILWAUKEE \u2014 Milwaukee Bucks coach Doc Rivers claims there is nothing to a report from ESPN\u2019s Stephen A.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":644295,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3775],"tags":[7,103,102,121,3871,6],"class_list":["post-644294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-milwaukee-bucks","tag-basketball","tag-bucks","tag-milwaukee","tag-milwaukee-bucks","tag-milwaukeebucks","tag-nba"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116185171609401900","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=644294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/644295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=644294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=644294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=644294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}