The Greek Freak's Antidote?

One of the big storylines of this NBA season has been the sheer dominance of Bucks small forward Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is the MVP favorite this year. Teams have tried all sorts of crazy tactics to try and stop Giannis, but it has largely been ineffective. However, amid their second round series against the Boston Celtics, Brad Stevens might have found a solution to limit the Greek Freak.

In game one of the Celtics vs. Bucks series, Giannis looked like a fish out of water. Mastermind head coach Brad Stevens had designed a game-plan for Giannis such that he would be constantly hounded by one big defender(mainly Al Horford), and two or three wings that could sprint at any time to give help.This strategy was successful, to say the least. Antetokounmpo was limited to 22 points(8 of which came at the line), shot 33% from the field, and was a -24(meaning that the Bucks were outscored by 24 points when he was on the court).

This plan was largely successful because of the insane play of Al Horford. The veteran big man came to play, and kept up with Giannis the entire time.

However, coach of the year favorite Mike Budenholzer countered the Celtics strategy in game two. The Celtics played well enough on Giannis, and 13 of his 29 points came at the charity stripe, and he shot just 47%. There was a significant technique change for everyone else. Whenever a Celtic came in to help on Giannis, Coach Bud instructed Antetokounmpo to kick it out to the open man, rather than go up for a layup. This allowed a large amount of three point shots. The game was closely contested in the first half, but once the shots started falling, Milwaukee ran away with it.

Clearly, the deciding question of this series will be whether the Celtics can shut down Giannis or not. If they play like they did in game one, with excellent close out D on open shots, and great ball movement on offense, there is possibility. If they play like they did in game 2, with Giannis getting into the paint making good passes, the series might be over pretty fast. For Milwaukee, they need to hit the open shots they get, and stop the Kyrie-Horford pick and roll, which was a killer. When they did that, it forced Kyrie to take horrendous shots. As the old saying goes, "offense wins games, but defense wins championships", and in this series, that is definitely the bottom line for both teams.