The Milwaukee Bucks will play for the NBA Cup championship on Tuesday ... but is that really saying much? The four other teams in their group -- the Heat, Pacers, Pistons and Raptors -- have a combined record of 41-60 this season. None of them are top-four teams in the Eastern Conference right now. The Orlando Magic are, but the Bucks got to play against them in the quarterfinals without their two best players, Paolo Banchero and Franz Wagner. The path to Vegas just wasn't all that perilous.
This has quietly been essential to their turnaround. The Bucks are 4-8 against teams above .500 this season, but 10-3 against teams below it. Take a look at their schedule -- their 2-8 start came mostly against good teams. Their rebound back above .500 has come mostly against bad ones. The Hawks, who they beat in the NBA Cup semis on Saturday, are probably somewhere in between. It's hard to call a team "bad" when they are 5-1 against the Cavaliers, Celtics and Knicks. It's hard to call a team "good" when they're 0-2 against the Wizards.
You can beat teams in that mediocre range by mostly relying on your two best players. That's what happened on Saturday, as Giannis Antetokounmpo and Damian Lillard scored more than half of Milwaukee's points to beat Atlanta. That's what's been happening for most of the season, as those two are primed for All-Star selections while the rest of the roster has been inconsistent at best. But to beat the best, you need more than one or two reliable scorers. And when the Bucks play for the NBA Cup on Tuesday, it is going to be against one of the NBA's best. The Thunder and Rockets literally rank No. 1 and No. 2 in defense right now, and both have top-five net ratings.
Better 3-point variance can help, of course. The Bucks shot just 31% from deep against the Hawks, and they missed nine free throws. But the single player they need most right now is very much still working himself into shape. Khris Middleton hasn't looked remotely like Khris Middleton yet this season, and the Hawks game was pretty concerning ahead of Tuesday's NBA Cup championship.
The raw numbers don't quite do him (in)justice, but they're uninspiring nonetheless: five points, 2-of-7 shooting, three big turnovers in the final minutes. Middleton twice failed to convert on what should have been breakaway transition buckets because he just didn't have enough explosion to do so. While he's never been an especially notable athlete, on Saturday Middleton looked like a 33-year-old coming off of two ankle surgeries.
"Tonight was a little rusty," Middleton admitted on TNT after the win.
It hasn't just been tonight.
He's played in just four games, all on a minutes limit, since making his season debut on Dec. 6, but he's now shooting 7 of 27 from the floor and 3 of 12 from 3-point range. He obviously has other virtues -- his 19 assists in his first three games back, for example, were quite valuable for a team lacking creation after its top two players -- but the Bucks need a genuine third shot-maker to hang with defenses like Houston's or Oklahoma City's. Right now, that's what's missing.
That means quite a bit in the context of the NBA Cup, but ultimately it's just a single game for a trophy with minimal meaning. Milwaukee's season will be judged by how close they come to winning the bigger one that's awarded in June. Middleton has plenty of time to ramp up for a push towards that one, and last spring, even with both Antetokounmpo and Lillard injured, he was quite good in his lone playoff series against the Indiana Pacers. But there are no guarantees with 33-year-olds coming off of two ankle surgeries, and that's part of what makes Milwaukee's NBA Cup finale so interesting.
It won't be anything like the five games they played to get there. This will be against a true contender, a fair barometer of how close they are now to where they'll need to be when it counts in May and June. If the Bucks don't have a healthy and reasonably effective Middleton at that point, their outlook is hopeless. This is a single-game setting. Anything can happen in 48 minutes. But if the Bucks want to get a true measure of where they stand against elite competition, they need to get something closer to what they hope will be Middleton's true form down the line. They're not beating any team like the Rockets or Thunder in June with this version of him. Tuesday will be a valuable test of how much of his old self he can still access in big games.
