What do the numbers really say about year one in Milwaukee, and how can they improve in year two?
It’s certainly been a long offseason of people writing the Milwaukee Bucks off, primarily due to age, with many writers and anonymous “league sources” declaring their shot at another championship over before the season has even begun. Damian Lillard plays a key role in these discussions, being 34 years old himself. People often say Lillard had a down 2023/24 season, and yes, on some level, he did. Not to the level that people seem to imply—after all, he was an All-Star starter—but yes, his season was not necessarily everything people expected. There are many hypotheses for why that was, as we’ll get into, but many seem to place much, if not all, of the blame squarely on Dame’s shoulders.
For example, because it is fresh in my mind, The Ringer’s Michael Pina recently wrote an article entitled “Joel Embiid’s extension and the five people facing the most pressure this NBA season.” Pina ranked Lillard as having the second-most pressure of anyone in the NBA. Using the following statistical evidence to bolster his case, he wrote in part:
We all know what happened next. The Bucks capsized before they had a chance to figure out what they could be, and, despite making the All-Star team, Lillard was not the same guy he was on the Blazers. According to BBall Index, he averaged 7.9 fewer points per 75 possessions, which was the steepest drop from 2023 to 2024 that any player who logged at least 1,000 minutes had. His 2-point percentage fell from a career-high 57.4 to 49.0, and Milwaukee’s offense was barely mediocre—and objectionably sluggish—when he played without Antetokounmpo.
The Bucks are now desperate for the 34-year-old Lillard to bounce back from what could be an irreversible downshift…
I’ll take the point about Dame’s two-point percentage first. While it is true that he had a significant drop-off since the 2023 season, his percentage of 49.0 last season was right in line with his career average of 49.3. The previous year is a clear outlier in Lillard’s career, and failing to include that context seems somewhat disingenuous. To illustrate this point further, I constructed a groovy bar graph:
Basketball Reference
The other two points Pina made about the scoring drop-off and Dame being unable to sustain Milwaukee in non-Giannis minutes are fair but can attributed to any number of things that, sure, could feasibly be linked to age and fitness, but could just as easily be connected to factors outside of Lillard’s control. There is the whole “not working out in the offseason” thing, joining a far more talented team, the poor roster construction, having an objectively subpar coach for half the season, the mid-season firing of said coach and hiring of another, the big three playing a total of six full games together under the new coach. I could go on.
To discuss the age thing a little further, on a recent season preview episode of Deer Diaries, our Van Fayaz discussed the idea that Steph Curry—who has a very similar game to Dame and a worse injury history—is still widely viewed as a top-ten player in the league at 36 years old and that modern medicine has allowed elite-shooting guards to thrive into their late thirties. Steph did not receive anywhere near this level of negative coverage two years ago. Why aren’t people saying Lillard’s game could age like Curry’s has? Why is the discussion strictly about Dame declining and being on the brink of an “irreversible downshift?” I’ll let the readers draw their own conclusions on that one.
For what it’s worth, I think the main reason Lillard wasn’t at his absolute best had less to do with his fitness or age and much more to do with the overarching fact—which includes a bunch of the factors mentioned above—that he and the team were both very unprepared for each other, which can be readily improved this go around. Firstly, Dame came into a team where he was, for the first time in his career, undeniably the second-best player. Correspondingly, Giannis had to get used to having a 1B to his 1A on offence instead of clearly delineated second and third options. Think about it: Antetokounmpo has played almost his entire career as the sole offensive focal point. This isn’t to say Khris Middleton and Jrue Holiday aren’t primary options, but they aren’t offensive fulcrums, if that makes sense. In this way, Lillard is different. Indeed, you are moulding your offence to feature Dame almost as much as you do Giannis. Lillard isn’t icing on the cake; he is the cake, or at least half of it.
When Doc Rivers came in, they appeared to lean more into getting Dame the ball more often, and in more spots he felt comfortable. And yet, Lillard’s biggest roadblock throughout the year, in my opinion, was that he didn’t thrive as a pick-and-roll player, which is a massive reason any team trades for him. Despite playing on a bad team in his final year with the Portland Trail Blazers, Dame’s pick-and-roll numbers were much better than in Milwaukee. For the Blazers, he was the pick-and-roll ballhandler on 39.6 percent of offensive possessions and scored at a rate of 1.13 points per play (PPP) according to the NBA’s advanced play type stats. In Milwaukee, Lillard ran more pick-and-roll as the ballhandler, 43.1 percent, but scored at a much worse rate of 0.99 PPP. To put this in perspective, in the 2022–23 season, of players with a pick-and-roll frequency above 30 percent and at least 50 games played, Dame tied for second in PPP efficiency in the entire NBA. He dropped down to thirteenth last season in Milwaukee. Put simply, they ran pick-and-roll offence through Lillard with a high frequency but didn’t get the corresponding production he had yielded in prior seasons.
So why was this? I’ll take an educated guess, and it relates less to Dame’s basketball ability and more to how the Bucks dealt with how he was covered. Maybe this stat sits somewhere on the internet for me to confirm this, but I’d be willing to bet Lillard was doubled on a high percentage of these pick-and-rolls. And when a player is doubled, they’re forced to hit the open man—which is, in most cases, the screener—and their job is done. It’s up to the open man to make the next play, whether to shoot or pass. Unfortunately, Milwaukee’s screeners—Giannis being the most important one, as was discussed in depth as part of the Accountability Series—often struggled to punish this aggressive coverage, which in turn hurt Dame’s ability to score. If they were able to punish doubles more often, defensive coverages would’ve needed to soften or change altogether, which would’ve allowed Lillard to get more open shooting opportunities.
A good example of this is teams completely selling out to deny Nikola Jokić short-roll catches because they know he’s such a good decision-maker in advantage situations, including giving guards like Jamal Murray ample space to shoot. Zach Lowe has talked about this repeatedly on his (now-defunct?) podcast, The Lowe Post. Dame, on the other hand, was covered in the exact opposite way with the Bucks. Teams would sell out to prevent him from shooting while being more than content with the Bucks screeners trying to beat them in the short roll. Also, it’s worth mentioning that the picks set by Milwaukee’s screeners were sometimes softer than you’d like, which allowed Lillard’s defenders to stay attached, further limiting his scoring opportunities. As I mentioned earlier, these are just some examples as to why I think it’s unfair to look at Dame’s scoring drop-off and blame just him.
With that said, what options are at Milwaukee’s disposal to fix this? How much upward trajectory is there for the Bucks’ main screeners to punish these doubles? Well, Brook Lopez averages 1.13 assists per game in his career with Milwaukee, while Bobby Portis averages 1.27. Suffice it to say, neither are really playmakers that will force defences to switch their coverage, but both can be better with more reps. Just for reference, Jusuf Nurkić averaged 3.04 assists across seven seasons in Portland as Dame’s main screening partner. Luckily, the Bucks happen to have one of the most skilled players, at that size, in league history in Giannis, who can thrive in this role if he commits to it. But as we know, the screening frequency must rise significantly from what it was last season to make this a reality. Ergo, I expect playing out of Lillard doubles to be a primary directive from the coaching staff throughout training camp.
Having said all of this, we lose sight of the fact that Dame still had a great year! The dude averaged 24 points and seven assists on 42/35/92 shooting splits. Would you like those percentages to be four to six points higher? Sure. But that’s still a lot of production. And despite being injured for a large portion of the playoffs, he still managed ridiculous averages of 31 and five on 42/41/97 splits while being at the very top of Indiana’s scouting report (along with Khris Middleton). Additionally, the NBA’s advanced player stats show he posted the second-highest net rating and assist-to-turnover ratio of his career. And the encouraging thing is you feel like Lillard hasn’t even scratched the surface of his potential with this team. Internal offseason improvement (getting into shape for camp, role clarity) and external improvement (organisational stability, better-fitting roster) should go a long way.
Regardless, Dame has shown throughout his storied career that he isn’t afraid of pressure or noise. He sought a trade and sacrificed a large part of his role to pursue one goal: a championship. There has been much discussion about if the eight-time All-Star still has it. His playoff performance confirmed that he certainly does. But the external noise remains, motivating Lillard, as we have seen this offseason (although I could do without the 700 push-up, 1000 lunge workouts, David Goggins). Accordingly, we conclude with an excerpt from Dame’s hit single “Lillard University,” in which he raps, “promise even if it’s rocky, we won’t ever flee the boat; gentle as a teddy bear, but not the bear you need to poke.”
Here’s to resilience through the highs and lows of an NBA season, and a bear that’s cleary been poked.
As if it needs to be asked, where do the readers see Damian Lillard fitting into the playoff rotation?
Poll closes at 8 AM (Central) tomorrow!
Next up: some Greek fella!