The Milwaukee Bucks were the NBA’s best team in the regular season this past year, posting a 58-24 record. Unfortunately, they were brought low by the Miami Heat in the first round of the 2023 NBA Playoffs. This embarrassment led to the firing of head coach Mike Budenholzer and the hiring of Adrian Griffin as his replacement.
Eventually, of course, the Heat made it all the way to the NBA Finals, losing to the Denver Nuggets. In the Finals, Miami looked completely out-matched and the one thing that fueled their playoff run, three-point shooting, failed them.
Their inability to post wins in the Finals without red-hot three point shooting as led many to wonder: “How did they even get that far?”
ESPN’s Zach Lowe Questions if the Miami Heat Would Have Beaten the Milwaukee Bucks If Giannis Antetokounmpo Had Not Gotten Hurt
One of the most frustrating traits of Mike Budenholzer’s teams were that they seemingly always put themselves in a hole in the Playoffs. Aside from a few outliers, they almost always dropped the first game or two of a series.
When the Bucks dropped Game One to the Heat this year, that is what everyone thought, too. “Oh, they always drop Game One. They’ll be alright.”
And then Giannis Antetokounmpo got hurt in Game Two, ironically the only game Milwaukee won in the series. And that was it. While he came back later, his back was clearly still in pain. Giannis was not playing with his body 100% healthy.
Which led ESPN’s Zach Lowe to wonder:
“The Heat’s run, the thinking went, was some combination of a fluke and a reversion to normal for a team that had gone cold from 3-point range all season. Would they have survived even one round had Giannis Antetokounmpo not injured his back in the first game of Miami’s first-round series against the Milwaukee Bucks?”
In his column, Lowe reports that many executives in the NBA do not think the Heat’s run to the Finals this year is anything that can be replicated. It was, in a word, a fluke. They got hot at the right time, their best individual opponent got hurt, and when the Finals came around they reverted back to normal.
Obviously, there is something to that. No doubt, the series would have gone much differently had Giannis not hurt his back. Perhaps the Bucks would have ended the miraculous run before it even began.
Lowe’s article mostly focuses on the Heat and how improbable their run was. But what if Giannis had not gotten hurt? Khris Middleton was finally looking like the player he was before he got hurt. Could the team have made another run?
And if they made it out of the first round, would Mike Budenholzer have kept his job? Would a second round loss or loss in the Eastern Conference Finals also ended his tenure in Milwaukee?
These are interesting things to think about with no clear answer. The reality is that Giannis got hurt, the Heat got hot, and Milwaukee went home early.
Hopefully the NBA changes those dangerous blocking/charge rules that were responsible for Giannis’ injury and Griffin gets his team back to the Promised Land in 2023.
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