Grayson Allen

That year's Kentucky roster featured future All-NBA talent in Devin Booker and Karl-Anthony Towns plus a whopping seven other players who made the league. Oh, ...

It does make it a whole lot harder: the 2016 Cavs managed to win as the lower seed with a home loss in the NBA Finals. Of course, they had generational star, but so does this Bucks team. As we should recognize after multiple playoff successes and failures by the Bucks (the second round series against Boston in 2019, the East Finals against Toronto that same year, the first round series against Orlando in the 2020 bubble, the second round series against Brooklyn in 2021, and most importantly, the 2021 NBA Finals) tenor of a seven-game NBA series cannot nor should not be judged on the outcomes of games one and two. However, that reality does not preclude Allen from becoming a flamethrower, nor does it preclude the Bucks’ ability to win the series despite dropping a home game. As if a loss to Chicago, whom the Bucks had beaten in 12 of their prior 13 matchups, was an utter disaster. This was a bang-bang play and Allen was punished more than appropriately (in my opinion excessively) with an ejection and a suspension: it’s not hard to assume that had this not been committed by Allen and instead by a player with no such reputation, it would have been merely a flagrant-1. Game 2 was rough from the start and while the end result was respectable thanks to a decent second half, the loss of Middleton to a sprained MCL for multiple weeks loomed as big as the L itself. This brought many haters among the Bucks fanbase out of the woodwork and comments sections on this site were swarmed with bitter Bulls fans ready to call us out as accessories to murder for continuing to support a player from our favorite team, to say nothing of the vitriol on Twitter. Angry takes like suspending Allen for the length of Caruso’s injury (laughably unprecedented), expelling Allen from the league, or throwing him in jail flew from talk-radio big mouths and tweet warriors. With his rookie contract a year from expiration and needing to preserve cap flexibility for their other, more important young players, the Grizzlies moved him in the offseason to the Bucks for the piddly price of Sam Merrill and two second-round picks. To be clear, it is awful that Caruso was injured and Allen deserved a flagrant foul, but to say that this was Allen’s intention is ludicrous. More and more dropped their grudges from the national title game, a grudge reinforced by the shoves and trips in the ensuing years. His sharpshooting carried over from college and he was a reliable offensive option for a young team scraping into the postseason, even joining the starting lineup for 38 of his 50 games. The culmination of this was in 2015: the Badgers achieved their first-ever number one seed, took out Arizona again (after besting the 1-seeded Wildcats in the Elite Eight the year before for their first Final Four since 2000), setting up a rematch with a Kentucky squad who squeaked past the Badgers by a single point one year prior to make the national title game.