Breaking down the adjustments and lessons from Milwaukee's In-Season Tournament

Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan were long-time friends. In the 1980s, the two met for coffee after Cohen went to see Dylan play in Paris. Dylan asked Cohen how long it took to write Hallelujah. He said two years, embarrassed by the fact it actually took him five. Then Cohen asked Dylan how long it took him to write I and I. Fifteen minutes, Dylan said. If Cohen exemplifies fastidious intentionality then Dylan is improvisational carelessness. 

Both approaches have their counterparts during the long grind of the NBA season. In the regular season, teams have too many games and flights (and too few practices) to worry excessively about the next opponent. There are scouting reports and gameplans of course, but the brunt of the focus is on oneself rather than the upcoming opponent. It’s not carelessness as much as the simple necessity of prioritization. The playoffs, though, see NBA teams spend so much time on every nuance of the upcoming opponent that the game itself can look very different. If you added together all the time scouts and coaches spent preparing for a series, it might well end up looking like the five years required for Hallelujah. 

The knockout portion of the in-season tournament (IST) constituted a brilliant midway point between the two approaches. It wasn't the playoffs, but teams gave the games much more attention than ordinary regular-season contests. And for the Milwaukee Bucks, their two IST knockout games gave a variety of lessons into what types of focuses will work if the team reaches the playoffs, how opponents will prepare for them, and what still needs improvement over the remainder of the season. 

Against the New York Knicks, the Bucks had a series of clear goals coming into the game. Establish the pick and roll on the offensive end, particularly with Damian Lillard running it. And funnel the Knicks into Brook Lopez in the paint. Those are exceptionally general goals -- ones the Bucks have in virtually every game. But the means by which Milwaukee achieved them became increasingly more granular as the game aged and both coaches continued responding to the others’ tweaks. 

On the offensive end, an early adjustment came towards the end of the first quarter. As soon as Antetokounmpo went to the bench, the Knicks began blitzing Lillard and forcing the ball out of his hands. Milwaukee’s offense stalled. When the Bucks reinserted Antetokounmpo after his usual, brief three-minute rest, he set picks for Lillard and rolled into the vacant center of the floor. The defense didn’t adapt, and now when Lillard faced two defenders, he found Antetokounmpo, who drew a third defender and swung the ball to the corner for open triples on two consecutive possessions. Then when New York stopped blitzing Lillard, the latter responded by hitting an immediate pull-up three. 

Antetokounmpo set four on-ball screens for Lillard in the first quarter, with Milwaukee scoring nine (!) points in those sets. 

Later, the Bucks started manipulating the tagger. Milwaukee as a team does not draw a particularly high rate of tags from opposing defenses, in that they rarely force corner defenders to sink in to pick up the rolling screener in a pick. But the 14 tags they drew from New York was the second-highest total of their season.

Milwaukee set double-high picks, with its power forward and center almost at half court to screen both sides of whomever was guarding Lillard. That gives Lillard a variety of options, but it also meant that the big defenders on New York were 30 feet from the net. When Lillard drove or passed to a rolling big, there was little help ready at the rim both because the bigs were far away and the available taggers were so small. 

Lillard drew six tags on picks during the game, one away from his season high, and Milwaukee scored 10 points on those possessions. 

Over the course of the game, Adrian Griffin threw different pick variations at New York like Ip Man facing a wooden dummy. Antetokounmpo used double-high picks to get downhill. He handled with Malik Beasley as one of the double-high screeners to get Beasley an open triple. Beasley ghosted screens to sprint across the court for movement jumpers. Milwaukee chose its screener specifically so that Lillard was able to pick on Julius Randle. Whenever it seemed like the Knicks were figuring out the Bucks’ intention, another ideation of the same play threw them flat on their backs.

By the time the dust settled, the Bucks had run 67 picks in the game, scoring 1.265 points per chance. Among the 468 games so far this season in which an offensive team has run at least 60 picks, that ranks as the 21th-most efficient mark of the year. As a result, Milwaukee’s half-court efficiency ranked in the 97th percentile among all teams’ games this year. 

Defensively, the Bucks sat Lopez several feet off of Mitchell Robinson in picks and handoffs. At the same time, they overplayed handoffs set by any other big. That forced a few turnovers early, but the main goal was to funnel actions towards Robinson -- specifically to have them defended by Lopez. Robinson set the seventh-highest rate of picks and the seventh-highest rate of handoffs of his season to date. And Lopez was phenomenal as the anvil into whom the remainder of the defense hammered the opposing offense. Of the 28 shots Lopez contested, the seventh-highest total of his season, New York shot just 42.9 percent. 

Because Lopez is the league’s best shotblocker, the Knicks tried frequently to score in those actions by not challenging him, either shooting from the midrange or lofting floaters before their drives even entered his domain. The wings and guards defending in the rearview committed more fouls than Milwaukee would have liked, but it was still a tactical win for the Bucks. The 11 floaters attempted by New York represents the tied-31st-highest total of any team in any game this season, according to Second Spectrum. New York attempted almost half their shots (45 percent) from somewhere in the midrange. There were fewer adjustments on either side, largely because New York loves floaters, attempting the second most of any team so far this season, while Milwaukee forces opponents to take more than any other defense. So in a sense, both teams were happy with how the game played out on that end. 

New York did use some counters, running more to get out of the half court, and even trying to move away from the Robinson-Lopez matchup later in the game to create backdoor cuts against overzealous defenders. New York actually scored well, but the shot profile of the two teams, with Milwaukee attempting so many 3s and New York so many long 2s, gave the Bucks a huge advantage.

But the Indiana Pacers, in Milwaukee’s second IST knockout matchup, were much more innovative in attacking Milwaukee’s defense. 

The Pacers saw Lopez’s impact in shifting New York’s shot profile in Milwaukee’s first IST game and schemed up ways to attack him differently. Instead of playing into Lopez’s hands by driving directly into him, they dragged him onto the perimeter to guard in space rather than in the paint. 

Milwaukee’s response was to move its defense to a zone for much of the second half. That meant Lopez could wait in the paint and no longer had to guard picks in the same way. Milwaukee’s 28 possessions of zone defense, all coming in the second half, tied the mark for the fourth-most in a half of any game this year. Lopez’s ability to defend the pick and maintain the integrity of the zone confused the Pacers at points.

When the dust settled, Lopez had contested 31 shots -- even more than against the Knicks and the third-highest total of his season. But Indiana shot a superior-to-the-Knicks (but still relatively inefficient) 48.4 percent on those looks. Lopez did an admirable job, but the Pacers found other ways to circumvent him -- namely by playing as much as possible in the open court, even running after Milwaukee baskets. 

Like New York, Indiana pushed in transition as much as possible to keep from attacking a set and ready Lopez. And in many ways, that proved the difference in the game; Milwaukee averaged a higher points per chance on its picks than did Indiana, but the Pacers used a full 20 percent of their possessions in transition, during which they scored far more efficiently than in the half court. Nothing better simulates the tactical requirements of playoffs than counters and feints, responses to responses, as if coaches were fencers. The IST offered experience there if Milwaukee reaches the dance. 

On the other end, Milwaukee mirrored Indiana in dragging screen-defending bigs into space. The Bucks forced Indiana’s center, Myles Turner, to defend Antetokounmpo in various ways in the pick and roll. When Turner switched onto him, Antetokounmpo found easy lanes into the paint.

The Pacers did their best to stop that from happening, so they asked their primary defenders on Antetokounmpo to fight through screens and prevent the switch. That maximized contact on picks, leading to plenty of straight-line drives for Antetokounmpo into the paint -- a death knell for any defense. He hunted Turner’s hips as the second line of defense and blew past them before further help could descend on him.

In the fourth quarter, the Bucks went away from some of those strengths. The offense didn’t press with regularity on the weaknesses it had previously probed, not to the extent that would be typical of a playoff game. Lillard ran only five picks and Antetokounmpo four -- not enough to maintain Milwaukee’s torrid pace of scoring. There were other detail-based issues, as there were against New York, such as lack of attention to defensive rebounding and too easily conceding mismatches in transition. 

So what should the Bucks take away from the two games? They were significant playoff warmups, with adjustments and counters around every turn. 

One positive is that the Bucks are likely going to be able to score enough no matter what defense opponents throw at them. The Knicks are the 11th-ranked defense in the league, and the Bucks created open shots with ease. Even against Indiana, when things were far less smooth and shots didn’t always drop, the Bucks managed 119 points. Offense is not going to be an issue. Milwaukee met every defensive trick in the IST with a clever approach of its own. Milwaukee is currently the fourth-ranked offense in the league, and that success is built to sustain if it reaches the crucible of playoff basketball.

On the defensive end, Griffin kept much of his tactical powder dry -- proving that the IST may have approximated the playoffs, but it’s clear which of the two coaches and players prioritize. The Bucks don’t switch a huge amount, even though the roster holdovers prepared that defense during much of the championship year. And they actually switched less frequently in both IST games than their regular-season average. Similarly, the Bucks only blitzed a small handful of picks, mostly against New York. Other, more complex coverages like switch-to-blitz -- which would have made sense as a means of defanging Indiana’s pick and rolls -- were not employed. While the Bucks made a fair number of adjustments on the offensive end, the extended use of their zone in the second half against Indiana was the major defensive innovation. 

It seems likely that Griffin unleashes more and more creative options against an offense as hot as Indiana’s if that happens in the playoffs. But it will be crucial for the Bucks to control the pace of games going forward. Both the Knicks and Pacers found advantages by increasing the speed of the game. According to Second Spectrum, the two teams combined for 12 possessions (six each) that lasted six seconds or fewer after a Bucks make, both tying for the sixth-most such possessions in individual games all year. Milwaukee needs to ensure it controls game flow, the means by which both teams enter their possessions. It can control opponents’ shot spectrums -- where shots are coming from. And it can win the pick-and-roll dance on both ends. Dominating tempo as well would leave little to chance.

There are plenty of means by which a team can control pace. Dribbling the ball up the court slower is effective, ensuring there will be as few possessions as possible in the game. Milwaukee already played slightly slower than usual in both IST games, but using an extra second or even two in its possessions could do more to control pace. Starting sets later could hurt Milwaukee’s offense slightly but help the defense. 

Paradoxically, the Bucks could also keep opponents out of transition by sending an extra player to the offensive glass, forcing the opposing team to focus on boxing out rather than leaking out. Milwaukee had 12 offensive rebounds in both knockout games, but fighting for more could have helped win both the possession and the tempo battles. 

There is work to do, of course. That’s true for every team. But that’s what the regular season is for -- preparing for games that matter more. Milwaukee used its IST games to test how it will fare if it reaches the playoffs, and to learn what needs tweaking before that could be the case. 

Milwaukee has an expansive set of tools with which it can stop opponents. It has a virtually unstoppable framework for success on offense, too. So one valuable takeaway from the IST is that Griffin will have answers available no matter what questions other teams ask. There are weaknesses, though -- and the Knicks tried and the Pacers succeeded in capitalizing on them. If there is one team-wide goal for the remainder of the season, it has to be to ensure the Bucks, not their opponents, control the pace of play.