The Milwaukee Bucks fired rookie head coach Adrian Griffin on Tuesday just 43 games into his tenure. You won't often see a coach get canned with a 30-13 record, but it goes to show the level of stakes the Bucks have riding on this season.
They don't have time to fool themselves with a regular-season record. When they traded for Damian Lillard, it became championship or bust. This is not a championship team right now. So they got proactive, making a move based on their heightened standards of performance rather than the general standards that a No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference would typically satisfy.
Give the Bucks credit for that. They could've taken what they obviously believe was a bad hire in the first place and made it worse by refusing to admit their mistake. But here's the problem: If they fire one guy to just make another mistake on the next hire, nothing will have been accomplished.
Insert Doc Rivers, who was hired Wednesday to replace Griffin. Hmmm. Have you seen how much different, for the better, the Philadelphia 76ers look this season under Nick Nurse? The fascination with big-name retread coaches will never go away, and to be fair, maybe all the Bucks need is someone who's used to managing superstars -- but Rivers would never be confused for a creative offensive mind, and I would argue that's what Milwaukee needs most.
While everyone is going to point to Milwaukee's defensive decline -- from fourth a season ago to 22nd this season, in which the Bucks are surrendering almost six more points per 100 possessions -- as the reason Griffin is out of a job, to me, that is mostly the product of a conscious roster decision rather than a Griffin failure.
Sure, Griffin changed up Mike Budenholzer's Brook Lopez drop strategy in the early going. Yes, the Bucks are playing a more aggressive style out high and leaving themselves too vulnerable on the backside, which is particularly problematic when you don't have any resistance to speak of at the point of attack. Offensive rebounds and paint points are killing them. Giannis Antetokounmpo has pointed to the lack of a defensive plan. When you get into the weeds of defensive schematics, this is certainly a messy picture.
But zoom out and a clearer reality develops: when you flip out Jrue Holiday for Lillard, and start a Lillard-Malik Beasley backcourt, you are going to struggle defensively. Milwaukee's front office should not have expected anything different. If they did, they set Griffin up to fail.
Now, I'm not saying Griffin didn't "lose the locker room" or anything like that. I'm not privy to that sort of information. Our Jack Maloney provided at terrific timeline of Griffin's rapid falling out, particularly with Antetokounmpo -- who, it was reported by Marc Stein on Tuesday, wasn't so much an advocate for the hiring of Griffin in the first place as he was for not hiring Nick Nurse, which is, well, interesting.
Nurse is currently working wonders for the Sixers, who were painfully stale under Rivers, who now takes over for Griffin, who, it sounds like, was largely a default hiring in the first place. The NBA, man. It's never straightforward.
Having said all that, it bears repeating the one part of this whole thing that is, from a pure basketball standpoint, actually pretty simple: The Bucks made a deal with the basketball devil when they traded Holiday for Lillard. That was a bet, any way you slice it, that a Lillard-juiced offense would be more than enough to make up for what was an inevitable defensive decline -- which, in theory, would leave them on the plus side of such a philosophical shift.
It's true, Milwaukee is scoring basically the same six points more per 100 that they are losing defensively from a year ago, making it look like a wash on paper, but a wash is not what they were after. And besides, numbers can only tell you so much.
Anyone who has watched this team will tell you the Bucks are not getting anything close to the best version of Lillard. That was Griffin's main job. Maximize Lillard and Giannis, and the rest might not even matter. But Giannis isn't as natural as everyone hoped he would be as a short-roller, and Lillard has openly admitted he has struggled to play with his typical rhythm without the ball in his hands as much he's used to.
It's a tight fit, and Griffin never quite found it. Lillard is shooting 42% from the field and 35% from 3. He's averaging 25 points per game. Those are acceptable numbers, but nowhere close to the production that most people were expecting. Lillard was supposed to be feasting on defenses that could no longer focus entirely on him. His 51.5 eFG% ranks 26th among point guards, in the vicinity of Russell Westbrook, per Cleaning the Glass.
For this to work, Lillard's offense has to be worth more than Holiday's defense, especially because Holiday's offense, while not elite, is far better than Lillard's defense, which I laid out as a disaster less than a month into the season. Anyone who didn't see a lot of these defensive struggles coming wasn't watching the Blazers for the last decade. Everything starts at the point of attack. The Bucks are scrambling from the start of every possession.
Throw in the fact that Holiday has now taken the Celtics, the Bucks' chief Eastern rival, to an even higher level, and it only puts even more pressure on Milwaukee to raise their offensive level behind Lillard. That's the position they willingly, happily, put themselves in from a roster standpoint. It's not about numbers. It's about what we're truly seeing on the court.
This team needs to start humming, not barely getting by against the likes of the Pistons and the Warriors playing without Stephen Curry and Draymond Green. Not scoring 95 points in a 40-point loss to the Cavs with Lillard and Khris Middleton combining to shoot 8 for 30. Not losing to the Rockets by managing to score a measly 108 points despite Giannis going for 48.
Lillard was 5 for 16 in that Houston game, including 1 of 8 from 3.
He's shooting 27% from 3 for the month of January.
This just isn't going to cut it against the backdrop of what should've, again, been a predictable defensive decline. Perhaps the defense shouldn't have fallen off this much, but I'd be careful thinking Rivers is going to fix that side of the ball.
I'd be equally skeptical that Rivers has the designer chops to unlock Lillard without just going back to the paint-drying pick-and-roll system he ran with James Harden, which we know eventually stalls out and we know Antetokounmpo is ill-suited for as a short roller.
I could see Rivers running 50 pick-and-pops a game with Lillard and Lopez while leaving Giannis to float around aimlessly "making plays" in the cracks like some sort of supercharged theoretical Ben Simmons.
Perhaps we go back to Giannis at the top of the key charging downhill into a wall while Lillard "spaces the floor." These are the kinds of unimaginative offensive "strategies" I'm fearing for Bucks fans. I don't like this hire. I think the front office is betting that the Bucks are so stocked with top-end talent that all they need is a big-name coach to manage the egos and not get in the way of the actual basketball. I think that's a bad bet.
What I think this team needs, pretty clearly, is a creative offensive mind to unlock the absolute best version of Lillard -- not the one that is propping up his marginally acceptable numbers with a vintage performance here and there while delivering, for the most part, too many subpar outings.
Indeed, Rivers doesn't just have to get Lillard and the offense right; he has to get it damn near perfect. Because the Bucks' defense -- the failings of which, again, I would put more on the front office than the coach -- doesn't allow for any error.
It's a tough gig. Griffin wasn't the guy to make it happen. I have my doubts that Rivers is, either, but only time will tell.
