LAS VEGAS — The Milwaukee Bucks are the only team returning here for the NBA Cup for the second straight year, a stark turnaround following their 2-8 start to this season.
Milwaukee has gone 11-3 since and enters Saturday’s East semifinals matchup against the Atlanta Hawks undefeated (5-0) in Cup play so far, giving it a chance to settle what star Giannis Antetokounmpo called a “bad taste” in the Bucks’ mouths after losing in the semifinals last season.
“We were playing very, very bad basketball at the beginning of the year, and we just needed to win games,” Antetokounmpo said at media day Friday. “We were just trying to turn the season around for us. We were bad. Now we’ve been competing, we’ve been playing better, guys are together, and we’ve had a great stretch. We’ve just got to keep it going.”
Antetokounmpo acknowledged that the Bucks’ slow start resulted in them needing to play with more urgency early in the season and that the NBA Cup gave them games with higher intensity to do so.
But even when the Bucks were struggling early, one thing Damian Lillard said gave them confidence: his conversations with Antetokounmpo and his co-star’s attitude.
“His mind was never shut off, he was never discouraged, he was never overly concerned,” Lillard said Friday. “There was always fight. Our conversations had always been like, ‘We going to turn it around, we going to figure it out, we got to lead, we got to keep going, we got to dominate.’
“That was the conversation and that’s my spirit naturally. Just to be in a situation like that and to see that that’s his spirit naturally as well, that’s what made me just believe I wasn’t overly concerned. I knew that eventually it would turn around just based off of that.”
Coach Doc Rivers called the NBA Cup a litmus test for his Bucks, whom he jokingly called the “old team” in the field compared to the others still alive — Atlanta, the Houston Rockets and the Oklahoma City Thunder.
“Every year your team’s on a different journey,” Rivers said. “Mixing those two groups together and seeing how we react is a good thing. It’s a great teacher. I’ll learn something through this. I just don’t know what it is. Every team will get something out of this that will help them moving forward.”
Lillard agreed that this trip is a chance for the Bucks to test themselves in playoff-like environments.
“We’ve gotten ourselves going in the right direction,” Lillard said. “We’ve been able to win a lot of games lately, and this is just another opportunity for us to continue that, but with more on the line and with us to get even more momentum from an experience like this.”
Although the Bucks are back here, they’re trying to go a step further after falling to the Indiana Pacers in the semifinals last season.
Getting back to this point after a rocky start is an accomplishment for the Bucks, but for Antetokounmpo, continuing to play strong basketball each day after starting so slowly has been the focal point since the start of the season.
“In the beginning of the season when we were 2-8, it’s a feeling like you don’t like,” Antetokounmpo said. “Nobody likes losing; everybody plays to win. I think we definitely had as a team, a little more urgency. We had to fix some things. We had to play more team basketball, we had to compete in a higher level.
“Me and Damian came together and realized that’s very important. From the time we did that … we’ve been playing great basketball.”
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