The Milwaukee Bucks are a basketball team of outsized attributes. The strides and leaps of the "Greek Freak," 6'11 "small" forward Giannis Antetokounmpo, seem more like a product of clay animation than cartilage and muscle. The balletic low-post grace of the massive, 265-pound "Moose," Greg Monroe, combines Beauty and the Beast in one shake-and-bake baby hook. The team has not one but two 6'6 point guards in lithe Michael Carter-Williams and bulldoggish Greivis Vasquez.
How the quiet Khris Middleton keeps the Milwaukee Bucks in harmony
The low-key swingman is the guy who makes the Milwaukee Bucks young lineup work.
Jeff Hanisch-USA TODAY Sports
If you’re looking for gaudy pedigrees, power forward Jabari Parker was the No. 2 overall pick in the 2014 NBA Draft out of Duke and a four-time prep champion playing in South Chicago. Over on the sidelines, Bucks head coach Jason Kidd is a guaranteed first-ballot Hall of Famer who epitomized the brains, grit and two-way excellence of the modern point guard at the turn of the 21st century.
Amid this stable of notables, second-round pick Khris Middleton operates incognito. Any flash in the skill set of the 6'8 swingman, who spent a week in the D-League in Detroit, stems from his relentless buffing of the fundamentals through repetitious drills and film study. Middleton has honed his game so that it simultaneously blends into the NBA scrum and is absolutely vital to his team’s outcome.
That’s because Middleton is the caulk, seaming the joints and shoring up any cracks that inevitably appear on the Bucks young roster. One whose future upside is still more enviable than its current experience and inherent synergy. His outside shooting opens up the floor for the team’s offense. His hard-earned knowledge of trapping angles and timing collapses the floor for opponents when the Bucks are engaged in their typically aggressive defensive sets. Middleton doesn’t wow onlookers in the moment. But his effectiveness is what makes the Bucks’ gambles, on schemes and on personnel, work day-to-day.
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Last season, Middleton was the most valuable player on a Bucks roster that leapfrogged from an NBA-worst record of 15-67 up to 41-41, then put a first-round playoff scare into the highly favored Bulls before succumbing in six games.
The difference was defense, specifically a strategic gambit producing an athletic pressure cooker that flipped Milwaukee’s defensive rating (based on points allowed per possession) from next-to-last, to next-to-first, in the NBA. In Kidd’s first season as coach, he and his assistant Sean Sweeney unveiled a swarming scheme that aggressively overloaded the strong side of the court: trapping the ball-handler, clogging the paint and nearby passing lanes and daring opponents to try cross-court skip passes over the team’s plethora of lengthy, gymnastic swingmen.
The result was an NBA-best 17.4 turnovers generated per game, which transitioned into nearly 20 percent of Milwaukee’s offense. Nobody thrived in this system better than Middleton, who finished eighth -- immediately behind Kawhi Leonard and Anthony Davis -- in ESPN’s analytical measure for "real defensive plus/minus."
At the other end of the court, Middleton led the Bucks in points scored, finishing 10th in the NBA in three-point shooting percentage, at 40.7, including a deadly accurate 51.3 percent on corner treys. This quintessential “3 and D” combo enabled the Bucks’ most unassuming player to post the ninth-best wins above replacement (WAR) value in the NBA last season -- 12.42 WAR per ESPN.com
Middleton couldn’t have blossomed at a better time. The sudden vogue of “pace and space” hoops, the increasing credibility of more sophisticated analytics and the salary inflation arising from the tsunami of new media revenue about the league, all elevated his negotiating position as he hit free agency at the end of the season.
From the summer’s onset, Middleton declared his loyalty to the Bucks, who in early July paid him a premium rate anyway -- $70 million over the next five years. After the relative pittance of $2.18 million total over the first three years of his career, Middleton will reap $15 million in this season alone, a sum that has added a new meaning to his “Khash” nickname.
If Middleton delivers what the franchise is asking of him, he’ll be worth every penny.
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The fans come to cheer Giannis, Jabari and Moose, but the first two are both still raw 20-year-olds. This is Monroe’s first season with the team after five years finishing out of the playoffs in Detroit, where he got a reputation as a mediocre defender.
Meanwhile, the Bucks unloaded two veterans to afford both Middleton and Monroe (signed for $50 million over three years), and the inevitable max contracts that await Giannis in 2017, and Parker a year later. While their experience and communications skills were crucial to the team's defensive cohesion, the Bucks traded 31-year old center Zaza Pachulia to Dallas and 30-year old forward Jared Dudley to Washington for future second-round draft picks.
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“I think we are younger than we were last year,” says Kidd. “Being younger and having higher expectations, sometimes that is not a good mix. So, we’ll have to go through our growing pains and see how we handle it.”
More than anyone else on the roster, it is Middleton’s job to minimize those pains and hold the fort while the young core matures and gels. In retrospect, it’s a vital role that Kidd envisioned for him months ago.
A well-publicized anecdote from last season recounted how Kidd told veteran voice Dudley to stop calling out so many defensive plays and assignments because he wanted others, specifically Middleton, to pick up the slack.
“Last year we wanted him to get louder because he was a quiet guy,” Kidd said. “He’s still quiet. But it is about the respect your teammates have for you, and they respect Khris (Middleton) and the work he has put in.”
Kidd actually benched Middleton for three games last November for not concentrating hard enough on his defense. But Kidd’s prodding and Middleton’s persistence helped turned the swingman’s defensive focus into a point of pride. To know it, you’d have to drag that brag-worthy tidbit out of Milwaukee’s humble linchpin.
Ask Middleton about his contract and you get a shrug and a simple declaration that it won’t change his lifestyle. Ask him how he prepared over the summer -- working out in his high school gym in Charleston, S.C. -- and he’ll elaborate on finding the right balance between coming hard and trapping the dribble, or hanging back just slightly to pluck the steal on defense.
“This style is a great fit for me,” Middleton said. “You don’t rely on guys to guard one-on-one here. It is all team defense. If you get beat you just have to make sure it is a certain way, into the help. And we have a team that can cover a lot of ground.”
Middleton’s low-key demeanor and team-first mentality were crucial to facilitating Milwaukee’s grand plan. A day after the terms of his deal were announced, the Bucks revealed that they had bested the New York Knicks, Los Angeles Lakers and Portland Trailblazers in the battle to sign coveted free agent center Greg Monroe. Middleton, who was Monroe’s teammate in Detroit as a rookie, helped convince him that it was the right fit.
“The type of thing he and I discussed when I was making my decision was how we could look forward to working together as a team and try to build something special,” Monroe said. “Thus far, everything I believed in and made my decision on has been pretty much right.”
Jeff Hanisch-USA TODAY Sports
Bucks fans might call him Khash but teammates good-naturedly teased him, knowing he’d retain his understated ways regardless of the summer windfall. The product of an unbroken home, Middleton regularly visits with both of his parents’ extended family in South Carolina and Louisiana. He also penned a heartfelt remembrance on the Players' Tribune website for family acquaintances, who were among those murdered in the racist church shooting in his native Charleston. Middleton was driving on a nearby street when it happened, and his grandmother had mentored some of the victims in school.
The essay was an anthem to the resilience of his hometown. In it, Middleton wrote about the need to stay together in hard times. It was also a reminder that Middleton won’t necessarily be quiet if he believes his words will matter. But he isn’t often inclined to flex that authority.
Asked if Middleton needs to become more of a vocal leader, Bucks general manager John Hammond didn’t flinch:
“He does. His natural tendency is to be somewhat of an introverted personality,” he said. “But sometimes you have to take people out of their comfort zones and that is what a good coach can do. I know Jason is doing that already and I know Khris is doing that for himself.”
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The glue of this young Bucks team is already going through its first test. As Kidd feared, the defense was a long way from ready when the Bucks opened with a trio of embarrassing losses. In Milwaukee’s first home season opener in more than 30 years, the Knicks blitzed them for 122 points. Two nights later, again at home against the Wizards, they surrendered a barrage of three-pointers in a 36-point fourth quarter that ended up a 118-113 Bucks loss. When Toronto hung 106 points on Milwaukee’s first road loss of the season, the Bucks were dead-last in defensive efficiency for the fledgling season.
Since that time, Milwaukee has battled back to .500, including a double overtime victory at home on Saturday that ended the Cleveland Cavs’ eight-game winning streak. Milwaukee is still yielding 104.7 points per 100 possessions, a defensive efficiency rating that is 23rd in the NBA and a far cry from 99.3 points surrendered last season. The team’s ability to force turnovers has dropped from first to ninth, depriving them of transition baskets and accounting for a drop in pace from 12th a year ago, to dead last this season.
Over the team’s rocky start, Middleton’s most glaring flaw had been an inability to knock down two-pointers. He’s making only 25 percent on 56 contested twos, and 48 percent on 25 open twos through the first 10 games, for an ugly 32.1 percent overall. Middleton was rushing his shots, penetrating less often and also trying more pullups off the dribble, when he is less than accurate on catch-and-shoot situations.
But with the floor-stretching three-pointers that are his strength, Middleton has actually improved to 44.2 percent. His shooting was one of the ways that Kidd thought Middleton could lift the team even when he wasn’t speaking up.
“When he was in Detroit [during his rookie season], I saw that he could shoot the ball,” Kidd said. “He still has a lot to learn about the game, but he has the ability to get better the way he did last year and the year before that with Milwaukee. He developed the ability to play 82 games at a high level. And I thought, to fill the role of your leader, a guy you can rely on to get a big basket or make a defensive play, I thought he was very comfortable in that situation.”
And as the glue or linchpin that keeps his teammates in sync, the 6’8 swingman is once again making his efforts matter on the scoreboard. While leading the team in minutes, Middleton has the Bucks at +22.8 points per 100 possessions better when he’s on the court (they score 8.2 more points and give up 14.6 fewer points). That makes for the second-best differential on the team, behind Monroe.
Saturday night’s signature win over Cleveland was typical Middleton. His box score performance was unremarkable. But in the two overtimes alone he executed a back cut to score on a feed from Monroe, buried a crucial three to bring Milwaukee even in the second overtime and deflected an inbounds pass that led to a steal by a teammate. He also forced a game-cinching turnover with a defensive switch that anticipated a pass, and knocked it out of bounds off another Cavs player.
The Bucks were +6 in the 42 minutes he played and -3 in the 15 minutes he sat. Hammond fashioned the offseason makeover in conjunction with Kidd. And Middleton’s all-over-the-floor contributions set the standard for a Bucks organization still developing their outsized stars.
“I don’t think anything we have done last season or over the summer is about the immediacy of who we are today,” Kidd said. “It is about who Khris and Giannis and Jabari and the other guys are going to be two or three years from now.”
But of all those outstanding cornerstones and the high-wattage free agent acquisition, Middleton is the one ahead of the curve. On a roster of loud talents, the responsibility for enabling the Bucks to weather the transition phase and maintain last season’s momentum falls on the shoulders of Middleton’s quiet leadership.
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