CLEVELAND – When Milwaukee Bucks head coach Doc Rivers announced that Giannis Antetokounmpo would miss Monday’s game against the Cleveland Cavaliers with a right adductor strain, the outcome felt inevitable.

But the Bucks fought hard, and a double-digit comeback in the third quarter even saw them take the lead in the fourth quarter, where their reserves increased the lead in the first six minutes. With just under six minutes remaining, both coaches leaned into their starting units, and the Cavaliers made one final run to regain the lead and earn a 116–114 victory. The Cavaliers’ victory extended their undefeated start to the season to eight games, while the Bucks suffered their sixth straight loss.

After their opening night win against the Philadelphia 76ers, the Bucks are now 1-6 to start the season. History has not been kind to teams that start a season with that record. Since 1970, 150 NBA teams have started 1-6 or worse. Only twelve of those teams made the playoffs, five of them with a losing record.

“We’re going to make the playoffs,” Rivers said when informed of this statistic after the game. “I’m not worried about that.”

That’s the attitude the team needs to help the Bucks climb out of the hole they dug for themselves to start this season. Rivers emphasized that despite the disastrous start, the team is still in a good place.

“The team is very positive. I think they are optimistic,” Rivers said. “No one wants to lose. We have some tough games ahead of us, but one win at a time. We win three or four in a row and the numbers say if you’re 5-6 after that, you have an 80 percent chance of making the playoffs, you know? That’s why the numbers are so strange sometimes, especially at the beginning of the year. And we don’t pay much attention to it.”

Rivers’ assessment is correct because the situation can change for teams in a situation like this. Two years ago, the Los Angeles Lakers made the Western Conference Finals from a spot in the Play-In Tournament after starting the season 2-10. You can even point to a historical precedent for the Bucks franchise. The 2000-01 team that reached the Eastern Conference finals started 3-9 and finished 52-30.

It’s possible, but this is certainly not the place where a team wants to start the season.

While Rivers and the Bucks may not want to think about the history of teams in their situation, other metrics should be very important to them. Through seven games, they rank 21st in offensive efficiency (110.7 points per 100 possessions) and 26th in defensive efficiency (119.4 points per 100 possessions). The 1-6 record is not something born of bad luck or coincidence, but rather the product of struggles on both ends of the floor.

Defensively, the Bucks have consistently struggled to make their opponents uncomfortable at any level. While teams may not want to go to the rim when Brook Lopez is patrolling the paint, opponents are still managing to shoot 69 percent at the rim (24th in the NBA) against the Bucks this season by pulling Lopez away from the hoop . Outsmarting Milwaukee in transition and attacking the rim when Lopez is off the floor.

According to Cleaning the Glass, opponents are shooting above league average against the Bucks in every part of the floor (rim, midrange, 3) this season. Luck is part of every shooting statistic, but the high shooting percentages also indicate how easy the offense felt for opponents.

On offense, the Bucks just aren’t getting enough production from players outside of their few superstars. Antetokounmpo is averaging 31 points per game on 63.3 percent shooting (better than last season) and 6.3 assists per game through six games, while Lillard is averaging 27.6 points per game with an effective field goal percentage of 56.0 (both improvements from last season) and 6.7 assists per game in seven games this season.

But instead of stepping up in Khris Middleton’s absence to start the season, the rest of the supporting cast is struggling:

• After an 0-for-3 performance deep in Cleveland, Gary Trent Jr., a career 38.3 percent 3-point shooter, is now shooting 23.1 percent from 3.

• Lopez is shooting just 28.2 percent from deep, and his early-season shooting numbers would be his least efficient for a Buck season.

• Bobby Portis is averaging just 12.4 points per game, his lowest since his first season with the Bucks. He is shooting 22.2 percent from 3, a career low, and 47.6 percent overall, his lowest as a member of the Bucks, while averaging a career-low 1.9 turnovers per game.

“A 1-6 start, that’s ugly,” Lillard said. “But if you look at the big picture, it’s such a long season, with 75 games to go. And I was part of the teams that won 16 in a row, 14 in a row. Sometimes you just end up in a ditch. Sometimes it can happen in the middle of the season. It could happen towards the end of the season. And I think it just looks different because it happens in the beginning and we had one win and six losses.”

While Lillard is right to suggest that a 1-6 streak might not draw the same amount of attention in another part of the season, the dawdling start has eliminated much of the margin for error that exists in a regular NBA season.

Last season, the Indiana Pacers were the sixth seed in the Eastern Conference with a 47-35 record. To finish the season with a 47-35 record this season, the Bucks would need to compile a record of 46-29 in their last 75 games, or in other words, 61.3 percent of their last 75 games have to win. For reference, the Bucks have compiled a .598 winning percentage with their 49-33 record last season. They could obviously make a deep playoff run from one of the Play-In spots, like the Lakers and Heat did in 2023, but this 1-6 start has them on a dangerous path for the remainder of the season brought.

“But I think because of who we have on our team – Giannis, Khris, myself, Bobby, Brook – having an experienced, talented team, we can get a lot of things done,” Lillard said. “And I think about how we showed against top teams like Cleveland the last two games and against Boston. We know what we are capable of.

“It’s just a matter of putting it all together and we have a lot of games for it. So I think for that reason we have every reason to keep fighting, because we will find our way back and we will look back at this at some point. But you can never be the team that has to fold. You have to keep answering the call and keep moving forward, and that’s what we’re going to do.

There is no reset button on an NBA season, so all the Bucks can do is move on and deal with the damage they did to themselves in the first two weeks. However, that path won’t be easy, and they need to drastically change what they’ve been doing so far.

(Photo of Isaac Okoro and Bobby Portis: Jason Miller/Getty Images)