Phoenix Suns coach Mike Budenholzer didn’t have time to wax nostalgic Tuesday as he faced his former team in Milwaukee for the first time since getting fired as the Bucks‘ coach two years ago.
But as much as he tried focusing on keeping his injury-riddled team alive in the playoff chase, Budenholzer couldn’t deny this game was a little different from a typical regular-season contest.
“Yeah, I mean, I’m human,” Budenholzer said after the Suns’ 133-123 loss.
Budenholzer led the 2020-21 Bucks to the franchise’s first NBA title in half a century, but he was fired two years later after Milwaukee posted the league’s best regular-season record but got upset 4-1 by the Miami Heat in the first round of the playoffs.
Milwaukee posted the most combined regular-season and playoff wins of any team during Budenholzer’s tenure and had the league’s best regular-season record in three of his five seasons. He posted a 271-120 regular-season record and a 39-26 playoff mark with the Bucks.
“I’ve always said it was a great five years here in Milwaukee,” Budenholzer said. “I’m forever appreciative to the organization, to the players, to the fans here. The people here were great to me. It’s tough to lose tonight. I want to keep the focus on my guys, my team. But I’ve said it a million times: It was five great years here.”
The Bucks didn’t air a video salute to Budenholzer but did post a “Welcome Back, Coach Bud” message on the video board during the first timeout. Budenholzer was busy talking to his team at the time and said after the game he didn’t notice it.
“I thought they were going to play like a video for him,” said Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo, who won two MVP awards during Budenholzer’s Milwaukee tenure. “They didn’t, which was surprising to me. I felt like they should.”
The only remaining Bucks who played on Budenholzer’s last Milwaukee team are Antetokounmpo, Brook Lopez, Bobby Portis and Pat Connaughton. Portis wasn’t in the building Tuesday because he’s still serving his 25-game suspension for testing positive for the painkiller tramadol.
Antetokounmpo noticed one unusual aspect about playing against his former coach.
“It’s definitely weird seeing him complain about plays that I do, charges and blah-blah-blah, push-off and all that,” Antetokounmpo quipped. “And it’s the stuff that he loved when I did it when we were on the same team and won a championship together.”
Since Budenholzer spent last season away from coaching, this marked the first time he had returned to Milwaukee as part of a visiting team. He coached against his old team for the first time since his firing on March 24, when Devin Booker‘s jumper with 2.4 seconds left gave the Suns a 108-106 victory over the Bucks in Phoenix.
The Suns haven’t won a game since while dealing with injuries to Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal, which prevented either of them from playing Tuesday. Phoenix is 11th in the Western Conference standings — one spot away from qualifying for the play-in tournament.
That’s what made Tuesday’s game so important.
The Suns instead lost their fourth straight and fell two games behind ninth-place Dallas and 1 1/2 games behind 10th-place Sacramento. Phoenix forced 20 turnovers but allowed Milwaukee to shoot 68.9% from the floor, the highest single-game shooting percentage by any NBA team since March 1998, according to Sportradar.
“My gut is they had one of those nights,” Budenholzer said. “I thought defensively our effort, our (will to) compete was at a very high level. … The basket was big for them tonight.”
Source: espn.com