The REAL Reason Adrian Griffin Was Fired By The Bucks

The REAL Reason Adrian Griffin Was Fired By The Bucks

The Milwaukee Bucks caught everyone off guard by firing their rookie head coach Adrien Griffin despite ranking second in the East and if you read all the Articles and listen to all the Talking Heads you might think it was simply that they just couldn’t get more effort on defense and Griffin couldn’t figure out

How to get Giannis and Dame to fit together smoothly but those are casual takes and the reality is a lot more complex and nuanced which is why I took a deep dive into the footage to figure out exactly what went wrong it’s easy to see at first glance how their defensive

Rating rank has fallen quite a bit from their normal lofty standards and the first place to examine is how they defend the pick and role here’s an interesting stat they’ve been pretty bad at defending this for the past 4 years and currently they’re giving up more

Threes per game in the NBA than all but the Celtics and it’s mainly because of a coverage that many thought Adrien Griffin wanted to go away from for years under head coach Mike buen holer Brook Lopez would drop deep into the paint while defending the pick and roll and

Try and lure the ball handler into the mid-range it was reported that Adrien Griffin wanted to go away from drop coverage and have Brook Lopez come up higher to defend the pick and roll it seemed like everyone thought this was a big issue to start this season but I can

Tell you I saw plenty of drop coverage through the first four games to make me wonder what was everyone talking about in the first game of the season versus Philly check how low Lopez drops as they get exactly what they want on this pick and roll maybe you could say he’s a step

Higher than he used to be near the elbow and when conon is slow chasing around you can see how wide open Kelly UB is the truth is Lopez never stopped dropping in the pick and roll and the Bucks continue to give teams wide openen shots when there is no support for the

Ball Handler’s man teams have been exploiting this as the Bucks have defended the pick and roll more than any team in the NBA although it’s still way less than the percentage of time from last season but I suspect that will continue to change as more and more

Teams have guys that can hit a lot of Threes off the dribble when presented with very little resistance in front of them the problem the Bucks have with Lopez is that every so often he will step up to try and stop the guard from lighting them up but now you got a big

Guy who’s slow a foot trying to handle a speedy guard in the perimeter and this is what should make Bucks fans concerned come playoff time the real difference in defensive schemes is what Griffin did to address an issue I had with the Bucks defense the past 5 years

They would routinely help one pass away off the corner to wall off the rim while last year was an anomaly you can see how they’d be at the top of the league at giving up the most wideopen three-point attempts and it always made me feel like they were vulnerable come playoff time

Against good teams with multiple snipers since the 2020 playoffs the Bucks are 10 and 16 when the other team hit more threes than they did and if you’re giving up open threes both out top around the ball screen and then in the corner as well it makes it tough to win

Here’s how the Bucks would defend off the corners in years past notice how the defender standing on the Block and early helped to dissuade the drive to the basket altogether they would then take their chances with the easy kick and hope that the close out had an effect on

The shot this made it harder to score on them in the paint and for the most part their defensive rating was good although you can see two of those years were quite as Elite as their reputation now let’s look at this year I caught Brook Lopez seemingly getting

Upset with the way he was being coached on defense a few times you can hear the bench yelling to him to double even though there’s no one to help on his man who gets the layup as Lopez stares down the bench same game with conon not helping off the corner

Like in years past Lopez has to contest the driver and it leaves his man wide open for the dunk much to the Chagrin of Lopez and then in the weak side the Raptors pick on Dame with Lopez wanting to hang back to prevent the pass to the

Low block but you can hear Griffin yelling at Lopez to get up higher you may not need him tonight and this lets purle pass it right over to him for the score check Lopez’s reaction and his frustration began to boil over on this play notice how Beasley stayed

At home on the shooter in the corner this allowed the driver to get right to the basket for the layup instead of having an extra Defender to stop the ball you can almost see him saying see I told you this schem doesn’t work now the real culprit is giannis’s poor closeout

And my defensive philosophy has always been to not help one pass away off the corner unless it’s a bad shooter staying at home on the perimeter is a very solid defensive strategy but if not played properly then you’re liable to give up points in the paint and that is the

Other more severe issue they are fourth in opponent’s points in the paint and nowhere is that more apparent than in the pick and roll as well while Lopez is blocking almost three shots a game it’s not enough to overcome the Myriad of attacks that go right at him he’s still

Formidable and can dissuade people from taking shots but allow owing ing easy penetration into the lane and giving up this many paint shots isn’t sustainable and you won’t see their defensive rating get better unless they can get more pressure on the shooters aside from Lopez in the drop whenever Bobby poris

Is in there he will hedge high in a throwback to an earlier era of pick and roll defense and this method of Defending clearly isn’t working out for the bucks it pulls poris out of position and the ball moves too quickly via the pass for him to catch up with poris on

The floor and Lopez on the bench the Bucks defensive rating would rank them last in the NBA and the way they’re hedging pick and rolls is a big reason why I can see how frustrating it could be for a team used to a certain amount of success to try something that’s new

And if it doesn’t work right away it becomes demoralizing as an almost endless stream of layups marching to the hoop don’t get me wrong what griin wanted to do isn’t a bad idea but this is a results based league and after five or six games of this the players

Probably turned on him for what it’s worth they did turn to a zone defense a lot more than last year and they ranked sixth best so this was working and perhaps Griffin should have went to it even more to stop the onslaught of points in the paint and wideopen

Three-pointers any criticism of the offense could certainly feel unwarranted considering they had the second highest offensive rating in the League this year which was six points higher than the previous all-time high we’d ever seen in the NBA I went through close to a th000 clips and I did observe some spacing

Issues that could have been frustrating to Damen Lillard there were times when Giannis was on the weak side Wing where he won’t command any gravity and his man can just stand near the nail removing the possibility of a Lillard drive all together I got the sense that the

Lillard Lopez pick and roll was a source of excessive turnovers as they struggle to get in sync with each other but some of these miscues are a bit random and might just be a little fluky another thing I noticed was that the spacing along the Baseline would get clogged

When they tried to set a pin down for a cutter while a pick and roll was going on now Top This is a popular play something the Warriors get a lot of mileage out of but for the bucks it allowed the defense to clog up the middle while having one Defender easily

Guard two guys this wasn’t something I saw the Bucks do a lot of last year and if you’re looking for new things that the players don’t feel confident in I guess you could point to that but I will stress their offense was Elite and so was their record so you’d be hardpressed

To point to anything on this end that led to Griffin’s dismissal that said his top assistant Terry St s quit before the season even started and this had to have been a red flag having been Lillard’s coach for 9 years in Portland this could not have been a good situation between

The head coach and his point guard there were examples of confusion on the court like this play where Lopez inexplicably Cuts in front of Middleton who lets him have it and after going back and forth more exasperation towards Griffin from Lopez they do an excellent job to scram

Dame out of the mismatch down low but you can see he has no idea where he’s supposed to to go as they give up another open three watch Lopez turn to Beasley incredulously as he switched instead of trailed the ball handler giving up a wide openen shot here’s

Lopez angrily telling campaign to get in the weak side which means he’s foolishly holding the ball out to get it stolen you can see Griffin calling for Giannis to run a two-man game with Dame but instead he’s isoing on a crowded left side Lopez is smashing into people and

Yannis is taking the worst shot he can take with 12 seconds in the shot clock here’s a wideopen Dame coming up for a handoff Giannis opts to keep it and gets his cookies snatched and then Giannis wanted Dame to come back for the handoff but when Dame turns that down it turns

Into another terrible ISO and a brick from 18 ft while Brook Lopez is pointing it out and the fact that the team felt the need to bring in Doc Rivers to consult so early in the season also indicates that there was some sort of knowledge deficit be it player coach

Communication or ex’s and OES either way there might be some scrutiny from from other coaches over Doc’s willingness to get involved in the situation seeing as though he ended up taking Griffin’s job within a month but here we are with the second half to get things sorted out on

Defense from a coach whose defensive record in Philly was a bit up and down and who has a reputation of failing in big moments of the playoffs if they go back to the buen holer style of Defense which tended to give up open threes but limit points in the paint it’s possible

Their ranking climbs back above average but I fear there are too many holes with this rock to see them getting past the other top teams in the east

Coach Nick went deep into the footage to explain exactly why Adrian Griffin was fired by the Milwaukee Bucks.
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