The Milwaukee Bucks have been by far the best team in the NBA this season. Mike Budenholzer's squad leads the league with a 41-13 win-loss record, is the only team in the league to rank top-five in both offensive and defensive efficiency, and sports a net rating of +10.0 – 2.5 points per 100 possessions better than the Golden Stat Warriors' second-ranked mark. The Bucks, even if the basketball world would rather not admit it, are something close to a juggernaut.
But Rick Carlisle won't let his team use Milwaukee's unmatched dominance as an excuse. After watching his team surrender a staggering 80 points in the paint during a 122-107 loss to the Bucks, the Dallas Mavericks lamented an utter lack of interior defense.
“If that’s not an NBA record, I don’t know what is,” Carlisle said of Milwaukee's point total in the paint, per SportsDay's Brad Townsend. “They’re a great team. They’re extremely well-coached. Antetokounmpo’s a great player, but 80 points in the paint is ridiculous.”
The Bucks shot an incredible 34-of-41 from the restricted area on Friday night, good for 82.9 percent shooting. Antetokounmpo had 12 of those baskets all by himself compared to just one miss, en route to another ho-hum line of 29 points, 17 rebounds, and five assists on 13-of-19 shooting.
The most frustrating part for Carlisle is that he surely saw something like this coming. Not only was Dallas playing without DeAndre Jordan, traded to the New York Knicks last week, but Milwaukee came into the game scoring 46.6 percent of their points in the paint, the fourth-highest ratio in the league.
What makes the Bucks extra scary? They rank third in percentage of points scored from beyond the arc but went just 10-of-36 on threes against the Mavericks. If Dallas proved helpless to stop them when triples weren't falling, just imagine how Carlisle's team would fare when the Bucks are clicking on all cylinders.
Yikes.
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