Three key observations from Doc Rivers’ first game as head coach of the Bucks
DENVER – Doc Rivers pulled up a chair in a tight auxiliary room in Ball Arena to address the media before Monday night’s game between his Milwaukee Bucks and Denver Nuggets and quipped he didn’t know he still had to do the session.
In the opening moments of his 25th – albeit truncated – season as an NBA head coach, Rivers looked and sounded like someone who was riding a bicycle after taking a winter off from the exercise: comfortable.
He acknowledged he and new assistant Dave Joerger called some offensive sets the wrong name in Monday morning’s shootaround and admitted that it was impossible for him to learn all of the team’s plays and language in two days.
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But, Rivers knew he had to hit the ground running with just 36 games left in the regular season.
“Really, what I’m trying to do is slowly, really slowly put in some of my stuff and simplify some of their stuff – which is our stuff now,” he said. “One thing you don’t want to do, and we’re so fearful of doing it, is paralyzing their brain and now they’re thinking. So it’s just going to take awhile.”
One thing he addressed early – and for a while – was the two-man game between Damian Lillard and Giannis Antetokounmpo. He was asked about the duo in reference to the James Harden-Joel Embiid pairing last season in Philadelphia in which Embiid won an MVP and Harden led the league in assists.
“It’s different because of Giannis’ skill set and Joel’s skillset, but it’s been effective,” Rivers said of Lillard and Antetokounmpo. “But it should be like, dominant, in my opinion. We did a lot of two-man work (Monday morning). I think the whole team pretty much got what we did after 20 minutes of doing the same thing, or 10 minutes of. It’s important. The three-man game, too, with Khris (Middleton) in there too. I think that’s important as well.”
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He did outline a couple of things he addressed with his new team in the morning:
Shot quality on offense.
Transition defense, specifically.
“Execution” in general, which could encompass defensive principles and smoothing out offensive sets.
Then, less than two hours later, his Bucks tipped off against the defending champion Nuggets in a hard-fought game that resulted in a 113-107 Denver victory. Here are some immediate takeaways from Rivers’ first game on the bench:
The Bucks adjusted their rotations
Lillard began playing the entire first quarter in the 11th game of the season, at Toronto. Before that, Lillard had subbed out as part of a staggered lineup in which Antetokounmpo was on the floor without him.
The pair played nearly nine minutes of the first quarter together Saturday against New Orleans before Antetokounmpo subbed out, and on Monday they exited together with 5:09 to go in the first quarter for Cameron Payne and Bobby Portis.
The Bucks called timeout at 3:36 and Antetokounmpo checked back in.
Lillard checked back in with 1:23 to go.
It was just the start of new rotations for the stars, who played their usual first half minutes (17 for each) but through both quarters. They spent time together and staggered apart.
“That’s something we talked about,” Rivers said. “We talked about it my first day. I really want Dame and Giannis to be in when we get into the penalty. But I don’t want Dame to be tired when we get in the penalty. So our plan is to take them out and bring them both back in so they can end quarters.”
But, he also changed some of that on the fly as he felt against Denver in particular the both could not be off the floor together.
“I thought that’s when they made their little run,” Rivers said of his second-half thought process on his combinations. “I know we’d been doing that. I think you can get away with that against some teams, but you can’t do that against a good team, so we switched it in the second half.”
Middleton said that changing up rotations isn’t new for coaches but acknowledged there was thought behind it from his new coach.
“He must have saw something where ‘this is one of the first things I want to do and see,’” Middleton told the Journal Sentinel. “I think it worked out I think t was great. Unfortunately we just didn’t win the game.”
The Bucks got back on defense and rebounded
Now, this wasn’t a Rivers thing per se – Antetokounmpo said the team simplified its defensive approach in the three games when Joe Prunty served in the interim – but it continued in Denver and it was very focused against a machine-like offense. Players were not crashing for offensive rebounds they couldn’t really get and instead focused on racing back on defense and picking up a man in transition.
Then after a shot went up by the Nuggets, multiple bodies were fighting to finish a defensive position.
“I told our guys, anyone who told you you couldn’t play defense lied. You proved that tonight. You competed tonight,” Rivers said of his postgame message. “They got 15 points off of our turnovers. You take that away; our half-court defense was excellent. We fought tonight. I thought tonight was an offensive loss. I didn’t think we were crisp offensively. We had stretches where the ball was humming and hopping and we had stretches where it didn’t. And those stretches we have to clean up. But overall I was very happy.”
Center Brook Lopez agreed.
“There’s no excuse on that end because we’ve shown we can be a great defensive team,” he said.
Middleton agreed with Rivers that the team fought throughout defensively and said communication was on a high in a tough road environment as players helped one another other navigate screens and switch off the ball to eliminate mismatches.
“At the end of the day, the game plan is one thing but our effort has always gotta be there,” Antetokounmpo began. “I think we have very, very smart players that are on the team and sometimes when the game plan is not as accurate, our effort might not be there. And that’s not good. That’s bad. But whenever we come together as a team and we realize we have to stop a guy as a team or we have to stop the team from playing fast, from getting a lot of open threes, from driving. When we come together as a team, we can definitely do it. But we cannot just pick and choose.
“In order for you to win you have to do it all the time. And there’s going to be times that you lose games. But in order for you to win at a high level, there’s got to be a standard. At the end of the day, I think we set the standard as the team. Hopefully moving forward we can defend the same way. There’s going to be a lot of games that we’re going to win and we’re going to blow out teams and there’s going to be a lot of games that are going to be close that we have to let our habits we built throughout the year take over. And sometimes just our talent is going to take over, Dame’s going to take the ball and he’s going to make something happen. But as I said, we set the standard today. We can definitely defend. Moving forward I don’t see, there’s no excuse for us not to defend.”
Bucks used a defensive game plan to Mike Budenholzer’s vs. Nikola Jokić
Last year, for a half, the Bucks competed hard with the Nuggets on the second night of a back-to-back. Lopez was essentially playing two-time league MVP Nikola Jokić one-on-one (with some help at times), and then Antetokounmpo and Portis would take turns with timely double-teams.
The Bucks eventually lost their legs that night, but the foundation was laid for an interesting defensive scheme against one the best centers in the league.
Rivers and the Bucks built off what they saw from that game, and on Monday Jokić had to take 25 shots to score 25 points. He made just 10. His 40% shooting night tied his sixth-worst performance of the season.
“Yeah, Brook and Bobby, double, Giannis guarding him,” Rivers acknowledged. “That’s exactly what we need. He had to fight for his points tonight. Difficult points. But he’s still really good, you know? But when he takes 25 shots it means a couple things. No. 1, he couldn’t find guys the way he wanted to. And then No. 2, that means he had to force a lot of tough shots. That’s what our defense has to be.”
Rivers then said he was going to go small with just Antetokounmpo as the big to make Jokić have to guard the Bucks’ star in transition, but Antetokounmpo’s fourth foul scrapped that adjustment. But overall, the Bucks were happy with how they made Jokić work.
“He’s so good, there’s different levels to the difficulty,” Lopez said with a weary laugh. “But I thought our guys did a good job of reading and deciding when to help for me, when to have my back and just make it a bit more difficult for him.”
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Three key observations from Doc Rivers’ first game as Bucks head coach
