MILWAUKEE “HAS ENTERED THE CHAT”

(Milwaukee Bucks Facebook)

Make it 7 in a row for the Milwaukee Bucks. When the Bucks started this recent win streak, they were sitting towards the bottom of the play-in seeding. Today, they sit in 4th place and only 1.5 games behind the 1st place Brooklyn Nets in the Eastern Conference. The key has been the return of Jrue Holiday and Khris Middleton. When the Bucks have the trio of Middleton, Holiday, and Antetokounmpo on the floor, they are 9-0 this season. A recipe for disaster for the rest of the league. Giannis has looked like an MVP through the first 21 games, but even leading the team in every major statistical category wasn’t going to be enough with 4 of the other starters missing numerous games. With a quarter of the season now complete, the Bucks getting healthy couldn’t have come at a better time. The teams like the Bulls that got off to a lightning quick start are coming back down to earth a bit, and Milwaukee has just now, as the kids say, “entered the chat”. The top 6 teams in the Eastern conference all sit within 2 games of each other, and the Bucks play 2 of those teams this week in 6th place Charlotte and 2nd place Miami. Milwaukee could find themselves in 1st place within the next couple of weeks if all goes well. The last piece of the puzzle that has yet to come back is Center Brook Lopez who has missed 20 games with a lower back injury. The pressure for him to return might have been eased a bit with the addition of DeMarcus Cousins. The champs have remained out of the big headlines so far this season while Golden State and Phoenix have been the talk of the league. However, you can expect the newly healthy and reloaded Bucks to remind everyone why the road to the Larry O’Brien still goes through Milwaukee.