06/09/2020
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — Before the Milwaukee Bucks labored through a stretch of basketball that could wind up altering their future, Giannis Antetokounmpo did something that he tends to do well: He elevated for a dunk, a brief burst of explosiveness that gave the Bucks a fourth-quarter lead against the Miami Heat in Game 3 of their Eastern Conference semifinal series.
But upon landing, Antetokounmpo grimaced. He had rolled his right ankle in the first quarter, and perhaps it was bothering him even if he would later refuse to admit it. But in that moment, his expression — his face contorted in pain as he turned to get back on defense — was, in its own way, a sign of so much more misery to come.
The Bucks went the rest of the game without making a field goal, and their 115-100 loss to the Heat on Friday night put them in the deepest hole imaginable. Miami will have a chance to sweep the top-seeded Milwaukee in the best-of-seven of series on Sunday afternoon, while thorny questions are already percolating about the Bucks — and the uncertainty that looms.
For the second consecutive year, the Bucks entered the playoffs with the league’s best regular-season record. Last year, their championship hopes were extinguished by the Toronto Raptors in the conference finals. (The Raptors went on to win it all.) This year, the Bucks’ stay inside the N.B.A.’s so-called bubble at Walt Disney World is on the cusp of being prematurely popped.
“They made every play,” the Bucks coach, Mike Budenholzer, said of the Heat, “and we didn’t make enough, obviously.”
An early exit would be less forgivable this time around. Antetokounmpo, 25, a dynamic force whom the Bucks drafted and groomed, is the favorite to collect his second consecutive N.B.A. Most Valuable Player Award sometime in the coming days. But his contract situation — he can become an unrestricted free agent in 2021 if he refuses to sign an extension this off-season — has been brewing like a storm cloud, rumbling closer with each blown postseason opportunity.
And while this series is not over, most of the stories about this game will read as epitaphs (including this one) for good reason: No team in N.B.A. history has come back from a three-games-to-none deficit in a best-of-seven series. The Bucks would need to become the first, to sustain their title dreams.
“Might as well make history,” the Bucks’ George Hill said. “First time in the history of the N.B.A. that we’re playing in a bubble. First time that a team can come back from down 3-0. We’ve got to trust each other and continue to believe.”
But do they believe? The Bucks missed their final 10 shots as the Heat closed out Friday’s game with a 17-1 run. All told, Miami outscored Milwaukee by 40-13 in the fourth quarter, which was the most lopsided fourth quarter of a playoff game since the advent of the shot clock, according to ESPN. For his part, Antetokounmpo rattled through a long list of problems, starting with the twin observations that the Bucks could neither rebound nor score. And while the Heat played with discipline, he said, the Bucks lost their composure.
The idea that the Heat had “played harder” than the Bucks was a theme for Antetokounmpo: He mentioned it 16 times over the course of a six-minute news conference. Jimmy Butler, in particular, left his imprint all over the game for Miami, finishing with 30 points, 7 rebounds and 6 assists.
Antetokounmpo collected 21 points, 16 rebounds and 9 assists but shot 7 of 21 from the field. He also played just 35 minutes in a game that the Bucks desperately needed to win, and started the fourth quarter on the bench. He said he could have played more. His ankle, he said, was “great.” Budenholzer indicated that he had no regrets about limiting Antetokounmpo’s playing time.
“If you’re going as hard as these guys are in a playoff game — 35, 36 — I think that’s pushing the ceiling,” Budenholzer said, referring to the minutes he wanted his best players to supply.
When the season was suspended in March because of the coronavirus pandemic, the Bucks were 53-12 and looking primed for a title run. But they have not been able to reassemble the pieces in the bubble. In eight seeding games, they went 3-5, then lost the first game of their first-round playoff series with the Orlando Magic before winning the next four.
At the same time, the Bucks have been at the center of various tensions and challenges for players here. It was Hill, one of the team’s veteran leaders, who led his team to boycott one of their playoff games against the Magic after the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, in Kenosha, Wis. It led to a wave of disruptions and protests across multiple sports leagues.
On Friday, Hill was asked whether the team was struggling to focus on basketball with so much else going on.
“There’s no excuses,” he said. “We’re here in the bubble, and we’re playing. We can’t make excuses why we’re not playing good, quality basketball right now. You’ve still got to go out on that court and lace your shoes up just like every other team here.”
In the face of the longest odds, Antetokounmpo seemed to be doing what he could to remain upbeat.
“I believe in my teammates,” he said. “I trust my teammates. I love my teammates, and I want my teammates to be confident. I’m confident.”
The Bucks have another opportunity to prove it. They may not have many more.
Last February, Layshia Clarendon was preparing to move from Oakland, Calif., to Brooklyn to play basketball for the W.N.B.A.’s New York Liberty.
“The fact that we were going to live in Brooklyn, and play in Brooklyn, I was like, ‘This is so dope,’” said the star guard, who identifies as nonbinary and who planned to live in Clinton Hill. “I was really excited to get out there and get involved with the food scene and the culture.”
But days before the scheduled move, the pandemic changed everything, including the league’s entire season, which shifted to a restricted campuslike “bubble” (or what W.N.B.A. players call the “Wubble”) in Bradenton, Fla.
Since July, Clarendon, 29, has been living alone in a hotel room, training, competing and doing activism work through it all as a leading member of the Social Justice Council, an initiative between the league and the players’ union that addresses voting, equality and other social issues.
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Last month, when much of the U.S. professional sports world halted competition in response to events in Kenosha, Wis., Clarendon told reporters that W.N.B.A. players, who had dedicated their season to Breonna Taylor and other Black women lost to police violence, always support one another. “We know when to fight on the court and we know when it’s time to unify, and we could use a lot of unity in our country right now.”
When the season ends, Clarendon, who is under contract to play with the Liberty for another season, will return to Oakland to reunite with Jessica Clarendon, 34, the chief operating officer of Rapinoe Ventures. The two are married and expecting their first baby in December.
