The Bucks will still be without Giannis Antetokounmpo in his brief absence due to the birth of his first child, but with an even more stacked roster with the signing of free agent Marvin Williams who will likely provide more bench depth for their wing shooters, they’ll look to finish their already league-best first half of the season against a struggling Pacers team that’s lost it’s last five games.
Milwaukee is riding high into the break with the NBA’s best record, and have the utmost opportunity to better that exemplary mark with a game on the road against a competitive Pacers squad that is perfectly healthy, as superstar point guard Victor Oladipo made his debut last week. Per Milwaukee’s last result, which was just a stomping of the slipping Sacramento Kings via their 123-111 win inside the Fiserv Forum, while featuring a stellar a comeback from their supporting cast and an efficient combined effort from Khris Middleton and Eric Bledsoe’s totaled 56 points.
Their opponent tonight: their old buddy and teammate Malcolm Brogdon and their potential second-round opponent Indiana. Fittingly, the Bucks have obliterated this Pacers team twice this season, so we’ll see if Oladipo provides any extra pop to make this a fair fight. But, in the midst of this five-game skid, they’ve blown a massive, 25-point lead to the Raptors inside the Scotiabank arena, while losing to them two nights later in the Bankers Life Fieldhouse. And, they most recently dropped a tight 105-106 game against the Brooklyn Nets, thanks to a late pullup jumper courtesy of Spencer Dinwiddie.
Perhaps the most alarming stat of the night for Indiana: their starting backcourt of Oladipo and Brogdon went just 8-25 for the game combined en route to 18 points. Now, that’s a rather unfair assessment of the one-time All-Star Oladipo, who returned back to the hardwood for the first time in nearly a year, but for them to gain an upset over the league’s most dominant team, they’ll have to pull out all the stops to find advantages on the offensive end to get buckets against Milwaukee’s forest-like size and length.
Tip-off is going down for this one at 7:30 p.m. ET, on ESPN.
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