The Bucks are contenders. The Bucks are just another team in the East. That is their duality.
Part of the difficulty in reconciling this season is that fact. They were never going to reach the heights of the previous two years. The lofty 51-8 record of a year ago was outside the realm of possibility. Yet coming down off that type of winning high was always going to be hard. Losses or poor play could be readily dismissed as the product of a long regular season where even the best have their off nights. Then two post-seasons happened and we had to become okay with taking our lumps in the name of “experimentation” in the hope that hurting now would pay off in the end.