Can the Bucks regain an elite defense? What worked and what didn't in 2023-24 (2024)

For five seasons under then-head coach Mike Budenholzer, the Milwaukee Bucks were an elite defensive team.

There was a slight dip in the 2021-22 season when center Brook Lopez missed most of the season with a back injury that required surgery but outside of that blip, the Bucks were the league’s best defense in 2018-19 and 2019-20, the ninth-best defense in 2020-21 and the league’s fourth-best in 2022-23, Budenholzer’s last in Milwaukee.

In 2023-24, the Bucks finished the regular season 19th in defensive rating. With Giannis Antetokounmpo on the sideline for all six games against the Indiana Pacers, their struggles were worse. Once Doc Rivers took over as head coach on Jan. 29, the Bucks improved to 15th in defensive rating in 36 games under Rivers compared to 22nd in 43 games under former head coach Adrian Griffin.

“We showed it in spurts,” Rivers said of the Bucks hoping to have an elite defense next season. “We have to do a couple of things that I know we can do, but we cannot be a bad defensive team and win anything, the numbers say that.

“You gotta be in the top 10 in both, right? Top five in one. There’s been some outliers, but overall, you gotta be a top-10 defense and a top-10 offense. We got the offensive part covered, now we gotta get to the defensive part.”

As the Bucks consider how to get themselves back into title contention next season, figuring out how to become an elite defensive team once again will be a top priority. The first thing they need to consider is the structure of their defense.

In the 2024-25 season, can an elite defense be built around the backline combo of Giannis Antetokounmpo and Brook Lopez? And if there is a high level of belief in that duo to protect the rim, what else do they need to elevate the defense again next season?

Let’s start with an examination of Lopez’s 2023-24 season. His status as an elite rim-protecting big man will be the biggest question. As Lopez gets older, his age, health and speed will all play a bigger role in his viability as a major piece of the Bucks defense.

Lopez is 36 years old. The 7-foot-1, 282-pound center will be starting his 17th NBA season and he will make $23 million in the final year of the two-year, $48 million contract that he signed in the summer of 2023. That will be the Bucks’ fourth biggest contract heading into the 2024-25 season. Getting real value out of that deal will be important.

Despite the Bucks’ defensive struggles as a team, Lopez was once again effective as a rim protector last season. His 2.4 blocks per game trailed only Victor Wembanyama and tied him with Utah Jazz center Walker Kessler for second in the NBA. A deep dive into the numbers shows an even more impressive defensive season than just the basic counting stat of blocks per game.

According to the individual rim protection stats calculated byThe Athletic’s Seth Partnow, Lopez actually put together the league’s second most valuable rim protection season, trailing only Thunder center Chet Holmgren. Last season, Lopez contested a league-leading 46.2 percent of the shots attempted at the rim and opponents shot 53.2 percent with him contesting shots at the rim, 10th among the 100 defenders that contested at least 200 shots this season.

On top of that, for the sixth consecutive season, lineups with Lopez grabbed a higher percentage of available defensive rebounds than lineups without him. While the Bucks weren’t as effective as they have been at grabbing defensive rebounds with Lopez in previous seasons, they still nabbed 75.3 percent of available defensive rebounds with Lopez on the floor, a number that puts them in the 84th percentile league-wide, per Cleaning the Glass.

To summarize, Lopez was one of the league’s best rim protectors and a positive force for the Bucks on the defensive glass. If he can do that again next season, he would absolutely be a viable anchor for an elite defense.

Antetokounmpo showed no sign of defensive decline this past season. According to Partnow’s rim protection numbers, Antetokounmpo was 14th in overall rim protection value, including 14th in opponent field goal percentage allowed in that same group.

While it might not have looked like the elite rim protection seasons Antetokounmpo and Lopez headlined at the start of Budenholzer’s time in Milwaukee, the Bucks were still solid at limiting shots at the rim. Opponents took 30.3 percent of their shots against the Bucks this season, which was the league’s sixth lowest proportion of shots at the rim. On shots at the rim, opponents made 65.8 percent of their attempts against the Bucks, the league’s 13th lowest percentage, per Cleaning the Glass.

Again, while it wasn’t perfect, the Bucks still showed the requisite resistance at the rim to be an elite defensive unit moving forward.

Their real problems on defense came in different areas around the floor and the Bucks’ biggest problem was their transition defense.

As The Athletic covered in January, the Bucks’ transition defense was abysmal under Griffin. Nightly, the Bucks were giving up far too many easy opportunities to opponents off turnovers, defensive rebounds and even made shots. Under Rivers, cleaning up the transition defense was a real priority and the Bucks improved in that regard. The playoffs, however, revealed the Bucks had not completely fixed their problems in transition as the Pacers regularly broke out for easy buckets throughout the first round.

Beyond their struggles in transition though, the Bucks took a step backward as a defense in half-court situations. Some of that certainly started with their poor transition habits, but beyond that, they just were not as good as they had been in previous seasons.

Under Budenholzer, the Bucks used a three-prong approach to elite defense.

It all started with Lopez anchoring the defense and providing some of the league’s best rim protection. Then, whether it was Eric Bledsoe, Jrue Holiday or even George Hill, the Bucks put significant pressure on ballhandlers with elite on-ball defenders. And finally, led by Antetokounmpo, the Bucks were one of the league’s best help defense teams through strong tactics and the use of smart team defenders like Khris Middleton.

In the 2023-24 season, the Bucks lost their elite on-ball defenders and their defense suffered.

Broadly speaking, the further away from the rim a defender plays, the harder it can be to understand and statistically value their defensive contributions. However, according to Partnow, there are some tools available that can provide a guide into how impactful a perimeter defender has been even if exactly what they are doing to create that impact is hard to judge.

One of these tools is known as RAPM — short for Regularized Adjusted Plus/Minus — which involves some complicated math but essentially converts the plus/minus stats we see in every box score into an estimate of each player’s contributions taking into account who they are playing with and against. Though RAPM can be noisy in single season samples, across multiple seasons, it does a reasonably good job identifying the more and less effective defenders in the league.

Among players with at least 7,500 combined minutes since 2013-14, the top five in defensive RAPM are Rudy Gobert, Alex Caruso, Draymond Green, Joel Embiid and Kawhi Leonard, while the bottom five are Collin Sexton, Trae Young, Cedi Osman, Jamal Crawford and Enes Kanter Freedom.

With that in mind, the Bucks’ preferred starting backcourt of Damian Lillard and Malik Beasley ranked 1,089th and 1,187th respectively of the 1,499 players in the sample. While Grayson Allen, the Bucks’ starting shooting guard in the 2022-23 season, graded out as middle of the road defensively at 795th, Jrue Holiday is 57th in defensive RAPM, an elite mark. In combination, the Bucks’ starting backcourt this season represented a massive drop off in defensive talent from the 2022-23 season and that left the Bucks in a difficult position.

Numbers, especially numbers that try to capture something as complicated as NBA defense, might not always paint a complete picture of what went wrong with a team’s defensive effort, but the defensive statistics paired with the game film help point toward the biggest problem for the Bucks defense in the 2023-24 season: on-ball defense at the point of attack.

This is why Milwaukee general manager Jon Horst targeted veteran guard Patrick Beverley at the 2024 NBA trade deadline.

“We talked about, as we always do, trying to identify pillars going into this thing and ways that we will work to try to generate options and opportunities to improve,” Horst said after the deadline. “Without getting into all our pillars, in specific, the ones that (Beverley) addresses, we believe, are point-of-attack defense and defensive versatility.”

Beverley is an unrestricted free agent this offseason and he didn’t fix the Bucks’ perimeter defensive problems, which puts Milwaukee in an interesting position this offseason.

When trying to figure out how the Bucks build a strong defense with the players currently on the roster for the 2024-25 season, here are the basics:

• Lopez can still be an elite rim protector.
• Antetokounmpo is still an elite help defender and capable of taking on individual one-on-one assignments when needed.
• Middleton is not as strong as a one-on-one defender as he used to be, but still incredibly smart and capable of being an impactful team defender.
• Lillard is a below-average defender, but willing to give effort on the defensive end and he will be one of the Bucks’ leaders in minutes played next season.
• Their bench has multiple players — Pat Connaughton, Andre Jackson Jr., A.J. Green, Bobby Portis — that have shown an ability to make a positive impact defensively in certain situations, but are not viewed as impact defenders at all times.

As Lopez enters his age-36 season, there is a segment of Bucks fandom that would love to see the team try to move Lopez for defensive help on different parts of the floor, especially on the wing. That could be dangerous for the Bucks as they would then need to find elite rim protection again. Either that, or find so much help on the wing to become a defense built around elite point-of-attack and perimeter defense, which feels exceedingly difficult with Lillard on the floor for roughly 70 percent of every game.

The easiest path to above-average defense for Milwaukee next season appears to involve inserting a player into the starting lineup that can play elite, or at least above-average, defense next to the core four of Antetokounmpo, Lillard, Lopez and Middleton.

Essentially, it would be the inverse of what the Bucks tried to do by signing Beasley (and Allen before him) to play alongside former point guard Jrue Holiday. With an elite perimeter defender in Holiday, the Bucks could sacrifice a bit defensively in the final spot of the starting lineup because they had their three-prong defensive approach was still in place with Antetokounmpo, Holiday and Lopez. Now, with Lillard on the roster, the Bucks can look for a defense-first player in the fifth spot in the starting lineup because of the team’s surplus of offensive talent in the starting lineup.

Ultimately, the Bucks do not need to build a defense in the same way that Budenholzer created an elite defense for his five seasons in Milwaukee. They can build a totally different defense, but there are only so many things they can do defensively if Lopez is one of their two elite defensive players. There are many paths they could potentially take to arrive at a top-10 defense, but Rivers made it clear after the season, they will need to find their way into the top 10 defensively if they want to compete for a championship next season.

(Photo of Giannis Antetokounmpo and Brook Lopez: Andrew D. Bernstein / NBAE via Getty Images)

Eric Nehm is a senior writer for The Athletic covering the Milwaukee Bucks. Previously, he covered the Bucks at ESPN Milwaukee and wrote the book "100 Things Bucks Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die." Nehm was named NSMA's 2022 Wisconsin Sports Writer of the Year. Follow Eric on Twitter @eric_nehm