SAN FRANCISCO -- Despite an uneven effort for the first 45 minutes of their 104-93 loss to the Golden State Warriors on Tuesday, the Milwaukee Bucks managed to pull within three points with a little less than three minutes to go following an offensive foul Giannis Antetokounmpo had drawn against forward Jimmy Butler.
With the ball and a chance to tie the game, Bucks coach Doc Rivers took a timeout to give his team a chance to catch their breath and call a play.
"Single side pick-and-roll," Antetokounmpo said postgame on the Bucks' play featuring him and Damian Lillard coming out of the timeout. "We've run it a lot this year. You've probably watched 60 games of those. Single side. Tried to get the shooter out of there. Play me and Dame. That's what we do. That's how we finish our game."
With eight-time NBA All-Defensive forward Draymond Green defending him, Antetokounmpo directed traffic to set up an angle for his screen with Lillard on the right side of the floor. Working Green down the floor to create space, Antetokounmpo signaled for Taurean Prince to move out of the strong-side corner, but Prince didn't budge.
Standing near the right elbow, Antetokounmpo waved his arm three times to get Prince out of the corner with each gesture becoming larger and more demonstrative, but the veteran forward did not move.
With Prince still in the corner, Antetokounmpo set the screen for Lillard anyway with half of the possession's shot clock gone and the Bucks still not in the correct spots on the floor. But with players out of position, Lillard did not have the space needed to run the pick-and-roll with Antetokounmpo. Instead, he abandoned the play to make something happen on the weak side, finding Gary Trent Jr. for a catch-and-shoot 3.
Trent missed. The Warriors grabbed the rebound and scored. The Bucks didn't score in the game's final four minutes and the Warriors pulled out an 11-point victory without Stephen Curry, who sat out Tuesday's game to rest an ailing back.
"We didn't execute (the play), but that wasn't why we lost the game," Rivers said. "We didn't execute most of the game. We're in an offensive funk right now and we have to get out of it. We'll work our way out of it."
There is no denying the rut the Bucks now find themselves in on offense.
After scoring a season-low 41 points in the first half of Sunday's game against the Oklahoma City Thunder, the Bucks tied their second-lowest first-half total with 44 points against the Warriors. Their 93 points Tuesday was their lowest point total for a game this season.
"We just gotta be better," said Lillard, who had 16 points, three rebounds, four assists. "Just be more intentional about what we're doing on offense. We gotta do things with more force, more pace. We gotta help each other out. We gotta screen for each other. We gotta cut hard. We gotta be aggressive and attack. That will help us.
"I think right now our offense is not forceful enough. It's not intentional enough. Each part of our stuff, we gotta have pace. We gotta hit people. We gotta do those things consistently and right now, we're not doing it well enough to have an effective offense."
Lillard's assessment is correct. The Bucks do not play with any urgency on offense and their play out of the timeout with 2 minutes, 59 seconds remaining was a perfect example.
Rather than starting possessions in the right positions or quickly flowing from spot to spot, the Bucks start possessions by directing each other to get into the right spots and then begin their offensive actions.
Watch their second possession in Tuesday's game. For the first third of the shot clock, the Bucks are getting organized:
Lillard crossed half court with 18 seconds on the shot clock, forcing the Warriors to guard just three actions before Antetokounmpo attempted a pull-up 3. There was no pace. There was no urgency. Just a lot of standing around before Antetokounmpo, a player who had attempted only 44 3-pointers on the season, hoisted his missed shot. The Warriors barely moved on the possession.
For a second straight game, an opposing defense used one of their big men on Kyle Kuzma and let a wing defender handle Brook Lopez. And for a second straight game, that gave the Bucks problems. Watch Warriors big man Quinten Post abandon Kuzma on the left wing to show help on Lopez, who is posting up Butler:
In the second half, Kuzma made the Warriors pay for having Post cheat off of him to help on Antetokounmpo and Lillard.
Golden State regularly left Kuzma open behind the 3-point line, and he knocked down three 3s in the third quarter and finished with 22 points to lead the Bucks. But Kuzma also ended the night with 13 3-point attempts, the most he has shot in a game this season and the second most he has attempted in a game during his career.
"I think we just gotta recognize -- if they're going to put a small on Brook and put a big on him -- we gotta see that," Lillard said. "And realize like, 'All right, we're not going to put Brook in these actions because they're just going to switch, since it's like-size. We gotta put Kuz in the action and make that guy have to be at the level.'
"If Giannis is coming downhill at him or me coming downhill at him, maybe Kuz is rolling into that pocket and you're taking advantage of them matching up like that. But at the start of the game, we were too slow at it to where they were able to kind of talk it out and keep the matchups in the action that they wanted. But like I said, we just gotta be just quicker about those things and be better."
Even with Kuzma's shooting, the Bucks (38-30) still scored only 17 points in the fourth and looked lost on offense once again to close out the game. They still have the league's worst fourth-quarter offensive rating, per NBA.com, and Tuesday's game did little to push them in the right direction. The defeat also dropped the Bucks to the Eastern Conference's No. 5 seed, one-half game behind the Indiana Pacers and one-half game ahead of the Detroit Pistons.
After initially declining to get into specifics about the team's offensive problems in his postgame media session, Rivers rattled off a myriad of issues.
"It's everything," Rivers said. "We're missing shots too, but we don't have the right spacing. The ball's not moving. We're not attacking. We're not getting to the paint. I got a whole list. But we gotta do it, and I gotta get them to do it. That's my job. And it's on me. ...
"I think we get in these periods where we just stop trusting. We try to do it on our own and that's just not going to work."
Rivers has shared a similar refrain following tough losses throughout the season, but that hasn't changed much about the Bucks' offensive production.
Despite an MVP-level season from Antetokounmpo, a highly efficient Lillard and elite 3-point shooting, the Bucks have found themselves outside of the top 10 in offensive production all season long. The team's offensive issues remain 68 games into the season and time is running short before the postseason starts.
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