NO DEFENSE, NO CHAMPIONSHIPS.

There's accountability in Wisconsin.  Last summer, the Milwaukee Bucks replaced head coach Mike Budenholzer, who got his team to a championship for the first time in fifty years, with Toronto assistant Adrian Griffin.  "The Bucks, however, are in a different place than the Packers when it comes to underachieving in the playoffs.  There is still a lot of second-guessing about whether that team wasted a quarter century of quarterback talent with two Super Bowl wins in three appearances, and we'll see whether a coaching change at the Bucks produces another title or two, or provokes a different sort of second-guessing."

A day before the Packers addressed one source of underachievement in the playoffs, the Bucks, with the third-best record in the league and a gaudy offense, replaced Mr Griffin.

The wins continued to pile up for the Milwaukee Bucks over the last two and a half months – 30 of them – beginning opening night against Philadelphia on Oct. 26 through Detroit on Jan. 22. Only two other teams in the NBA have that many.

Yet throughout the first months of Adrian Griffin’s successful, albeit brief, head coaching tenure there was a prevailing unease over the locker room, and the games.

He acknowledged it, once, calling it a “dark cloud” after a tough home win over Chicago on Nov. 13, just 10 games into the season when the Bucks were 6-4. By that point, the team’s veterans had already met with Griffin to amend his defensive schemes after early blowout losses to Atlanta and Toronto.

While there were games, or moments, to point to as improvement since that time, the overall tenor of the season was not a strong baritone but rather a trembling treble that became impossible to ignore. Bucks ownership and the front office heard and observed it all, and ultimately decided a new conductor was needed to get the team to its ultimate goal of a championship.

One of those voices belonged to Giannis Antetokounmpo, who was part of the offseason interview process that culminated with Griffin’s hiring. He has been visibly – and vocally – frustrated at various points from the very beginning of the season through this past weekend. After losing to Atlanta by 17 points on Oct. 29, he was animated in discussing plays with teammates and a coach.

The players might have been improvising, coaches or not. The fans knew there was something wrong.

After a loss to Indiana on Dec. 7 Antetokounmpo and others on the team spoke of disorganization on offense – but he maintained it was on the players to sort it out. But following a loss in Houston on Jan. 6, he said there was no pride defensively on the court and added the team needed direction and clarity on what to do from the coaching staff.

"We have to be better,” Antetokounmpo said in Houston. “We have to play better. We have to defend better. We have to trust one another better. We have to be coached better. Every single thing, everybody has to be better. Everybody.”

The team followed that up by being booed off the Fiserv Forum court at halftime in a blowout loss to Utah two days later. They have won five of six since, but the loss was by 40 in Cleveland on Jan. 17 and on the sideline of the Bucks’ victory in Detroit on Monday, Antetokounmpo was seen drawing plays.

Milwaukee sports pundit Brandon Sneide notes it was a tough decision that the team had to take.

Over the summer, the Bucks made the decision to go with a rookie head coach to replace Mike Budenholzer, and man, did that ever backfire on them.

It only took 43 games for general manager, Jon Horst to realize the countless defensive mishaps, a clunky offense, and odd rotations were just not in the future for his team, and honestly, good for him, and good for us fans.

By all accounts, in my opinion, this was the RIGHT decision. I don’t necessarily enjoy calling for folks to be let go from their professions, but when you are talking about sports, there is only so much room for error, and in this case, that small creaking sound you hear is the Bucks championship window beginning to close.

This team doesn’t have time to experiment, they don’t have time to see who is going to be a good head coach or not, and figure things out as they go.

They have to win, and they have to win NOW.

If you watched any of the Bucks games, you could likely sense that it was a team trying to fit a square peg in a round hole all season. It simply just didn’t work, and credit to the organization for seeing that, swallowing their pride, and fixing it before it became too late.

The team have a tough road stretch coming up, with less than half the games to play before the playoffs.  How that works out promises to be more edifying, at least for Bucks fans, than the upcoming presidential election. Under the interim coach, the team went into Cleveland and acquitted themselves well.