INDIANAPOLIS — As the game officials prepared to restart play with the Milwaukee Bucks trailing by three points and just 1.6 seconds remaining in overtime on Friday, Indiana Pacers forward Aaron Nesmith wedged himself underneath Bucks forward Khris Middleton on the right wing behind the 3-point line.
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Pat Connaughton was inbounding the ball on the other side of the floor, but Nesmith was determined to stay connected to Middleton.
As Middleton made his way across the floor around the 3-point arc, that alignment never changed as Nesmith attached himself to Middleton’s hip and kept himself in between Middleton and the inbounder. Nesmith was so close to Middleton that none of Middleton’s teammates could hit Nesmith with a screen. Eventually, though, Middleton got to the other side of the floor, hit Nesmith with a swim move like a defensive end in the NFL, and broke through to find just enough space to catch the ball heading to the left corner.
Middleton didn’t have enough room to breathe, but that had not mattered the entire night.
It didn’t matter when Middleton tied the game with a banked 3-pointer from the top of the key over the top of Pacers center Myles Turner with 6.7 seconds remaining in overtime. It didn’t matter when Middleton drilled the first basket of overtime over the top of Nesmith. And it didn’t matter when Middleton managed to get off a 30-footer to tie the game with 1.4 seconds left in the fourth quarter. It didn’t matter all night as Middleton tallied 42 points with Pacers defenders draped all over him for 41 minutes.
“He made two hellacious shots already,” Nesmith told reporters of what was going through his head as he defended Middleton on the final possession. “In my mind, I was (saying), ‘Do not foul.’ Just make it as tough as possible and hope he misses.”
And this time, when Middleton turned around and rose, hoping for a buzzer-beating 3 to tie Game 3 and force a second overtime period, his jumper bounced off the front of the rim. The Pacers had finally vanquished Middleton and his clutch-time heroics to take a 2-1 lead in their first-round series with a 121-118 overtime win.
Middleton started the day listed as questionable on the injury report with a right ankle sprain, which occurred in the first quarter of Game 2. The Bucks’ three-time All-Star forward played 30 more minutes on that ankle in the Game 2 loss on Tuesday and sat out practice on Thursday, but he still got the go-ahead from the Bucks’ medical staff to play in Game 3 after his pregame warmup on Friday. In 41 minutes, Middleton tallied a career playoff-high 42 points on 16-of-29 shooting, 10 rebounds and five assists.
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“Just who he is, man,” Bucks forward Bobby Portis (17 points, 18 rebounds) said. “Just a testament to being resilient and just being a team player, man. Obviously, we’re already down Giannis (Antetokounmpo), so I just think he understood the moment, the situation and rose to the occasion.
“Some guys can be questionable and be out there limping or acting like this and that, but he was full cash money today and it was good to see him hit those big shots. Obviously, the two big ones he made to tie the game twice. Wish we could have won, but the best thing about a series is that you get another game and you get another chance to go out there and fight again.”
Fight was the perfect word for Portis to choose because that is all the Bucks have been able to do in this playoff run.
Middleton was not 100 percent for Friday’s game, but he got on the floor because he knew the team needed him to have a chance in Game 3. After all, Antetokounmpo has been sidelined since April 9 with a left soleus (calf) strain.
“Felt good enough to go, so I feel like once I’m out there there’s no excuses,” Middleton said. “I just gotta play, forget about what I’m going through and just play.”
In Friday’s game, Pacers forward Pascal Siakam landed on Damian Lillard’s right foot and tweaked the starting point guard’s right knee in the first quarter, but Lillard came back at the start of the quarter because the Bucks medical team had cleared him.
On one of the final plays of regulation, Lillard re-aggravated an Achilles injury that had bothered him at the end of the regular season, but he told Rivers he could serve as a decoy during overtime if his head coach wanted to keep him on the floor because he thought he could help the team in some way.
“Honestly, Dame was really struggling,” Rivers said after the game. “In the overtime, he literally said, ‘I’ll be the decoy. I just can’t go as far as explosion.’ So I thought Dame just being out there was huge for us because they didn’t know that at the time.”
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Both Middleton and Lillard fought through injuries, but it wasn’t enough as the Bucks couldn’t put together enough quality basketball on Friday to come out with a win. Without Antetokounmpo, though, the Bucks’ margin for error has become razor-thin as the two-time NBA MVP could cover up many of the team’s weaknesses with his all-around greatness.
In the first quarter, Milwaukee once again played an undisciplined brand of basketball. Struggling to create good shots without Antetokounmpo, the Bucks showed off poor shot discipline and forced bad shots, which screwed up their floor balance and let the Pacers get out in transition to build a 17-point lead.
On the defensive end, the Bucks struggled to grab defensive rebounds and end possessions the entire night. By the end of Game 3, they had given up 19 offensive rebounds and the Pacers scored 32 second-chance points on those extra possessions. In overtime, the Pacers had possession of the ball for 1 minute, 41 seconds consecutively as they corralled five consecutive offensive rebounds.
“I don’t know if we can win or lose that (rebounding) battle, but we can’t get crushed in that battle,” Rivers said. “Giannis was our best rebounder and so we don’t have him, but we still have people that can rebound the ball. I thought a lot of them were long rebounds though and we didn’t come up with those. And that had nothing to do with Giannis, that is something all of us have to do. I have to watch the tape, but I think they were just quicker to the ball.”
And in the end, whether he could have saved the Bucks’ offensive effort or grabbed the defensive rebounds that were just out of the reach of his teammates, Antetokounmpo was not available for Game 3 and he may not be available for Game 4.
Lillard may be hobbled as well if his Achilles injury does not heal quickly enough, and Rivers joked after the game that Middleton will almost certainly be listed as questionable again on Sunday.
The Bucks don’t have any other options outside of continuing to fight, and that is going to be a tough task after playing a knock-down-drag-out dogfight of a game across 53 minutes on Friday. It won’t just be a physical test either; it will be mentally and emotionally difficult as well, but the Bucks are prepared for that.
Over the last six years, the Bucks have experienced plenty of tough losses.
- In 2019, they lost a double-overtime heartbreaker to the Toronto Raptors in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference finals.
- In 2021, they let the Brooklyn Nets come from behind to steal a 114-108 victory in Game 5 of their second-round series.
- They trailed 2-0 to the Phoenix Suns in the 2021 NBA Finals that season, only to storm back and win four straight games.
- In 2022, they dropped Game 6 of their second-round series against the Boston Celtics.
- Last season, they dropped Game 4 in Miami by letting the Heat rattle off a 30-13 run to close the game and steal a win to take a 3-1 series lead.
In some of these situations, the Bucks responded well and won their next game. In others, they responded well, only to fall apart in the end. And in others, they fell flat on their face in the next game. But no matter what, the next game was only determined by what the Bucks did on that night and that is the approach Middleton wants his team to take entering Game 4 at 6 p.m. (CT) Sunday in Indianapolis.
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“First, take care of our bodies tonight, tomorrow,” Middleton said of the mindset needed to bounce back. “Also, be ready, it’s one game. It’s a game-by-game series. You don’t lose the series in one game. We have a lot more chances.
“We play Sunday again. Get ready, go over our film, figure out what our adjustments are gonna be in our game plan, come out and be ready to play.”
(Photo: Michael Conroy / Associated Press)