{"id":702368,"date":"2026-04-07T01:43:25","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T01:43:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/702368\/"},"modified":"2026-04-07T01:43:25","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T01:43:25","slug":"straight-up-scorers-two-time-champ-argues-01-bucks-were-more-talented-than-the-90s-bulls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/702368\/","title":{"rendered":"“Straight up scorers” – Two-time champ argues ’01 Bucks were “more talented” than the ’90s Bulls"},"content":{"rendered":"

While the NBA history books rightfully crown the ’90s\u00a0Chicago Bulls<\/a>\u00a0as the gold standard of basketball excellence, Jason Caffey believes the 2001\u00a0Milwaukee Bucks<\/a>\u00a0were better in terms of being an offensive team.<\/p>\n

Caffey won two NBA titles with the Bulls in the late ’90s. He experienced team success once again when he played for the Bucks in ’01. For Caffey, that Milwaukee team wasn’t just talented but an offensive powerhouse that arguably eclipsed the systematic approach of Chicago’s “Triangle Offense”.<\/p>\n

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Moreover, Caffey even speculated that the ’01 Bucks could’ve given the Los Angeles Lakers a run for their money in the Finals that year. Unfortunately, they lost to the Philadelphia 76ers in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals.<\/p>\n

“It bothered the hell out of me because I felt like that team had more talent than the Chicago Bulls team,”\u00a0Caffey\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0on Scoop B Radio.\u00a0“I mean, you had Tim Thomas on that team. You had Ray Allen, you got Big Dog, you got Sam Cassell, straight up scores.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

“If you look at the regular season that year, we swept the Lakers,”\u00a0he added.\u00a0“The four games we played them, they could not compete with us. You know, no disrespect to the Lakers, we just had too many jump shooters. That would have been a terrible matchup for them in the Finals.”<\/p>\n

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Caffey couldn’t convince Allen to defend Iverson better<\/p>\n

At the same time, Caffey pointed out that the difference between a dynasty and a “what if” team is carved out on the end of the floor: defense. While the ’90s Bulls were a suffocating defensive nightmare, the ’01 Bucks simply couldn’t reach that level on the defensive end.<\/p>\n

To this day, Caffey still regrets not being able to convince his Bucks teammates, especially Ray Allen, to intensify his defense on Allen Iverson. Jason believed that it would have made a difference if Ray had stepped up his game on defense and toned down his scoring a bit.<\/p>\n

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“However, our guys in Milwaukee, just the defensive standpoint wasn’t there,”\u00a0Caffey assessed.\u00a0“You know, Ray was one of the better athletes in the league. And I was trying to tell him that, Ray, you don’t need to score all the points all the time. Maybe if you could slow A.I. down just a little bit. Sam can’t do it.He’s not the same of athlete you are. You’re going to really just sacrifice your numbers to shut A.I. down. And if we shut him down, we beat those guys, I think. And [I] just never could get them to buy into that.”<\/p>\n

Related: “Gimme a break, you’re just a golfer” – Charles Barkley on why Tiger Woods wasn\u2019t fun to be around<\/a><\/p>\n

Allen believed the Bucks were robbed<\/p>\n

As Caffey reflected on the ’01 Bucks, the lesson was clear to him: offensive dominance could never outrun the fundamental truth that most championship teams succeed because of their high-level defense.<\/p>\n

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However, that wasn’t how that season was ingrained in Allen’s memory. For Ray-Ray, there were a lot of things that happened in that controversial conference finals series that were beyond the Bucks’ control.<\/p>\n

In a candid reflection, Allen suggested that the\u00a0Bucks were robbed of a shot at a championship<\/a>\u00a0that year simply because Milwaukee was a small-market team and everyone was rooting for the bigger superstar, Iverson, to go up against the vaunted Lakers.<\/p>\n

Allen believes that suspending a veteran presence and defensive player like Scott Williams in Game 7 over a hard foul on Iverson was too much. It was one of the reasons why Allen was convinced that their conference finals duel with the Sixers was probably rigged.<\/p>\n

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“I don’t know if they were manipulating it; it just seemed like it was not going to go in our favor,”\u00a0Allen told\u00a0Sporting News<\/a>\u00a0in 2018.\u00a0“… People around the world and in the NBA wanted to see A.I.-Kobe.”<\/p>\n

Whatever the truth is, what would always remain a fact is that both Caffey’s and Allen’s takes were debatable. For many fans, it’s hard to argue that the ’01 Bucks were a more talented squad than the ’90s Bulls, and it’s even harder to assume that the ’01 Eastern Conference Finals were rigged.<\/p>\n

Related: Ray Allen highlights the main reason why he has Michael Jordan as the GOAT: “Every player that played against him didn’t want to see him”<\/a><\/p>\n

This story was originally published by Basketball Network<\/a> on Apr 6, 2026, where it first appeared in the Latest News<\/a> section. Add Basketball Network as a Preferred Source by clicking here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While the NBA history books rightfully crown the ’90s\u00a0Chicago Bulls\u00a0as the gold standard of basketball excellence, Jason Caffey…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":702369,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3775],"tags":[7,103,329,2955,7851,43640,150,102,121,3871,6,88137,207,1131,361],"class_list":{"0":"post-702368","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-milwaukee-bucks","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-bucks","10":"tag-chicago-bulls","11":"tag-eastern-conference-finals","12":"tag-iverson","13":"tag-jason-caffey","14":"tag-los-angeles-lakers","15":"tag-milwaukee","16":"tag-milwaukee-bucks","17":"tag-milwaukeebucks","18":"tag-nba","19":"tag-offensive-team","20":"tag-philadelphia-76ers","21":"tag-ray-allen","22":"tag-the-bucks"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116360893132833459","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702368","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=702368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702368\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/702369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=702368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=702368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=702368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}