BOSTON – No matter what the Milwaukee Bucks did against the Boston Celtics on Monday, they couldn’t change the reality of what had already happened before they stepped on the floor at TD Garden.

“We had two terrible games and there’s no excuse for that,” Bucks coach Doc Rivers said after Monday’s game. “But it happens. I thought we played relatively well (against the Celtics), but we couldn’t keep that up tonight. But I think our guys like where we’re going.”

The Bucks kept the score tight for the first two and a half quarters, but the Celtics pulled away and defeated Milwaukee 37-26 in the third. The result: a 119-108 Bucks loss, their third straight loss, dropping their record to 1-3.

With their victory, the Celtics proved what was already clear before the game. Now sitting at 4-0 on the season, they are the defending NBA class champions and the Bucks will have to work to challenge Boston in the postseason.

“They’ve been around for years and you can’t replace that. You can’t do that,” Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo said after recording 30 points, 10 rebounds, six assists but also seven turnovers in Monday’s loss. “You can put the best players together, but as long as you know how to play with each other, sacrifice for each other, play the right way, know where your teammates will be, know who will take over, who will have the hot hand – that’s what winning teams do.

“And our goal is to get there. Obviously we’re not there yet, but I don’t think we’re far away. I don’t care about the record. What matters to me is that we keep building, stay healthy and get where we want to get.”

For the first time since the Bucks’ season opener in Philadelphia, Milwaukee played with a high level of mental focus and physical intensity in the first half. That should happen every night, but it didn’t happen against the Chicago Bulls or the Brooklyn Nets, so it was a welcome return to the grassroots effort expected when the Bucks take the court. Maybe it was reasonable to expect against the NBA’s best team, but that wasn’t guaranteed after the last two games.

But while the Bucks provided the effort and intensity necessary to compete with the Celtics to start the game, their execution was not on the same level as that of the defending champions. That was evident in the final three minutes of the third quarter, where the Bucks made a series of small mistakes that the Celtics exploited to ultimately build a 15-point lead just over 90 seconds into the fourth.

The mistakes, while not huge, highlighted the significant gap in execution between the two teams at this point in the 2024-2025 season.

After a jumper by Bobby Portis and a technical free throw converted by Damian Lillard, the Bucks took an 80-79 lead with 2:42 left in the third quarter. It would ultimately be their last lead of the game, as things quickly went wrong for the Bucks.

As they often do, the Bucks placed Portis on the left block on their next offensive possession.

Although Portis has a size advantage against Jayson Tatum, he was called for a trip — one of his four goals in 19 minutes on Monday night — and the Bucks finished with an empty possession.

“I just thought Bobby got sped up tonight,” Rivers said. ‘I started working with someone and you know, he has those games every now and then. I love him because he is emotional, but there are nights when that can get the better of him.”

On the other hand, the Bucks made a mistake that has happened far too often this season and Derrick White made them pay for it.

The Bucks are just 12th in defensive rebounds this season as they have grabbed 72.9 percent of available defensive rebounds, according to Cleaning The Glass, but it feels much worse than that because of their team-specific context.

With a defense built around protecting the rim and forcing contested shots, the Bucks haven’t focused on forcing turnovers. They were always very low in that category when they were consistently in the top 10 under Mike Budenholzer, but they were a spectacular defensive rebounding team and that’s how they won the possession battle every night.

This year’s defense, led by defensive coordinator Greg Buckner, is, like Budenholzer’s defensive scheme, not expected to force turnovers. Still, that means the Bucks need to be an elite rebounding unit, and that hasn’t been the case this season. As the numbers show, they were good, but not elite, and that will continue to be a problem until it changes.

After White’s 3 on the reload, the Bucks came around to the other side and went to Portis in the post again. This time he worked against White and got one of his favorite shots, a turnaround baseline jumper, but missed. Then the Bucks showed another of their bad habits on defense.

The Bucks did what they needed to do in transition by finding matchups and defending the player in front of them, but their defense wasn’t quite sharp enough in semi-transition. This was a constant bugaboo for the Bucks, as they were not detail-oriented with their rotations as transition possessions turned into half-court possessions. Here Portis was not high enough in possession and was given too much space in the transition with Antetokounmpo, something the Bucks forward admitted after the match.

“I think the most important thing is coming up with a defensive rebound,” Portis said of how the defense can improve. “I think we cleaned up that part a little bit tonight, but the 3s, the extra 3s that they hit, just getting up to touch and closing to touch is something we can really focus on more, I think I.”

After the miscue on White, the Bucks gave up another offensive rebound. And this time it was Antetokounmpo who missed the boxout on second-year Celtics forward Jordan Walsh.

Antetokounmpo is averaging 11.8 rebounds per game, but he hasn’t been perfect on the glass this season and this was a big mistake.

All in all, the Bucks probably wouldn’t have been in such a bad spot heading into the final quarter without one final mistake.

After the game, Rivers told reporters that his team was prepared for the late-season tendencies of Payton Pritchard, who has hit some big shots to close out the quarters. Rivers said the team’s scouting report suggested Pritchard will always look to “break down well” in such situations. That’s exactly what the Bucks had him do on his sidestep 3 to end the third.

It was the sixth time this season that the Bucks allowed their opponent to score in the final ten seconds of the first three quarters of a game. Through four games, Bucks opponents have scored on their last possession 50 percent of the time. Those buckets can be absolute killers and the Bucks have been giving them up at an extraordinary rate so far this season.

Ultimately, the Bucks’ disastrous end to the third quarter forced them to look at the positives from Monday, despite the reality that they had won just one of their first four games of the season.

“I don’t like moral victories, but I thought we could be — at least three-quarters of the way,” Rivers said. “I thought we were running out of gas a little bit. We didn’t get much help from our bench tonight, so we extended minutes.”

The schedule doesn’t get any easier for the Bucks as they end their road trip against the Memphis Grizzlies on Thursday and then play a home-and-home set with the Cleveland Cavaliers. Still, Antetokounmpo remains positive about where this team can go this season, even if that positivity is fostered more out of necessity than genuine belief.

‘You have to. You have no choice. It has to be,” Antetokounmpo said. “It’s the fourth game of the season. Even though we were bad, even though we were very, very bad, it is the fourth game of the season so you have to be optimistic.

“This is the job we’re in, but at the end of the day we have a great team. I believe we will continue to play better, continue to learn from our mistakes, and ultimately win games.”

(Photo: Paul Rutherford/USA Today Network via Imagn Images)