Milwaukee Bucks: The prohibitive favorites to win the 2019-20 NBA title

Entering the 2019-20 season, the Milwaukee Bucks should be considered the prohibitive favorites to win the NBA Championship

It all ended so abruptly. Just three summers ago, after the infamous meeting at the Hamptons and My Next Chapter, everyone was resigned to the inevitability of the Golden State Warriors. No matter how many self-created problems they had to work through, whether it be personality clashes, beginning the season out of shape, or just general apathy, a healthy Golden State was never going to lose a playoff series.

They were the Beatles and there was no Yoko Ono in sight. The 2017 Cleveland Cavaliers had a historically dominant run through a sorry Eastern Conference and it took them hitting a record 24 3-pointers just to beat the Warriors one time.

The following year Houston built their roster entirely with one goal in mind: usurping the Greatest Basketball Team Ever Assembled. They spent the entire season perfecting a switching defense to try to bog down the beautiful game. GM Daryl Morey publicly discussed this fixation, saying “It’s the only thing we think about.”

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In the end, the Warriors just had too much. The Rockets made a valiant effort, leading 3-2 in the Western Conference Finals as we all know. They even held double-digit leads at halftime in both Game 6 and Game 7. The inevitability still never left us. Golden State third quarters were always going to happen, and there was nothing Houston or any group of mortals could do about it.

It was like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. (Yes Chris Paul was injured, but Warriors fans will contend that a healthy Andre Iguodala makes it a five-game series.) The only thing left for them was chasing the ghosts of dynasties past like the Jordan Bulls and Bill Russell’s Celtics.

It turns out this year was when it would all come crashing down. But even with all the in-fighting and roster issues that plagued the Warriors in 2019, the bottom line is that they three-peat if Kevin Durant was fully available for the Finals. Shortened contract lengths from the 2011 lockout and the rise of player empowerment have turned the league into supercharged NBA2K simulation.

As strange as it is to say, Kevin Durant is now a Brooklyn Net. Klay Thompson is out for most of 2020. Andre Iguodala ain’t walking through that door. For the first time in at least a decade, the winners of both conferences are very much in doubt. Hey! Finally some parity! (Side note: When people bring up the competitive balance issue in the NBA, tell them to take a look at the AFC winners in the NFL since 2001.)

This upcoming season is shaping up to be amazing, so let’s take a look at the championship contenders, starting with the team that I would rank at the top of the totem pole.

And the Milwaukee Bucks should be everyone’s preseason title favorite. They are the only team in this tier that has already played championship-level basketball. And it has been undersold just how incredible they were. Last season they had a top 20 point differential in the 3-point era (+8.9), had 45 double-digit wins (all previous 7 teams to do that won the title) and went 8-4 vs Toronto/Philly/Boston/Golden State. And they did this all while limiting the minutes of Giannis Antetokounmpo and the other starters.

A few plays here and there go differently and the Bucks go up 3-0 against the eventual champion Toronto Raptors in the Conference Finals. But enough about last year, how does this squad shape for this upcoming year?

In a league where the two-star model has become all the rage, Milwaukee’s entire ecosystem revolves around Giannis. His continued development on the court takes precedence over everything else that happened during their offseason. The remarkable thing about Giannis is that he still has a lot of low-hanging fruit to improve his game. Fans and analysts will always bring up the jump shot, but I personally do not see him ever becoming a plus shooter from 3-point land.

A more pressing issue is his foul shooting. During the series against the Raptors, he would miss the first free throw severely short nearly every time and it affected his aggressiveness later on in the series. Some sort of mid-post or intermediate scoring game would also serve the Greek Freak very well in the future. It would render the “building a wall” strategy useless, and big men like Al Horford would be drawing dead trying to guard him.

Giannis bludgeoning his way to rim 25 times a game has its limits, especially against elite defenses at the highest levels of playoff basketball. Sure enough, it looks like he is emphasizing this part of his game during the offseason. Reminder: he is still only 24 years old.

Nearly all of Antetokounmpo’s supporting cast is returning to Milwaukee. Losing Malcolm Brogdon is a tough pill to swallow, but bringing back George Hill and signing Wes Matthews should dampen his absence. Khris Middleton is back and being paid handsomely for his services. Much-maligned Eric Bledsoe is still a vital cog for their system, a terror on both sides of the floor in the regular season (emphasis on the regular season part). The bench mob will continue to run rampant against most opposing second-units. They also re-stocked the war chest with Brogdon trade and should be able to use these new assets to make in-season upgrades.

A dark cloud is looming over this franchise in the form of Giannis’ pending 2021 free agency. It may seem early to think about this now, especially after a 60 win season, but at this time last year Anthony Davis and the Pelicans were just coming off an electrifying trip to the second round. We all know how that ended.

Not saying Giannis is going to show up wearing a “That’s All Folks” shirt at the end of the year, but the Bucks should already be making their case for retaining him. They also lost Nikola Mirotic and Tony Snell in addition to Brogdon, so perhaps he’s not too thrilled considering these comments during his exit interview. Nonetheless, the sun is shining brighter on Milwaukee right now than it has since the Kareem/Oscar days in the early 1970s.

The Milwaukee Bucks are a juggernaut until further notice and have the least number of question marks among the powers of the league. We can talk about how Middleton might not be a good enough second banana, how Mike Budenholzer is still relatively unproven in making playoff adjustments, or how conceding the most 3-point attempts in the league might be a dangerous game to play. But these issues pale in comparison to some of the structural concerns of the other teams with championship aspirations. They are the prohibitive title favorites.