Time Waits for Khris Middleton

Khris Middleton has done everything to keep the Milwaukee Bucks' season alive in their first round series against the Indiana Pacers.

The Milwaukee Bucks lived to fight another day following their gutsy 115-92 rout over the Indiana Pacers late Tuesday night.

In a series where the Bucks opened play without their two-time MVP in Giannis Antetokounmpo, and were without their high prized addition of Damian Lillard for Games 4 and 5, they have managed to dig deep into their competitive fires to extend a series where little has gone to plan.

It has been Khris Middleton, who has shouldered the unlikely burden of leading a shorthanded Bucks squad into battle, and it’s safe to say he has done everything he can to extend this series into Game 6 Thursday night in Indiana.

Nothing about the last three seasons since the Bucks won the 2021 NBA championship has gone to plan for Middleton. A litany of injuries have slowed him down, sometimes when the stakes have been the highest. Too many stops and starts that have kept him out of action for extended stretches in the last two regular seasons. Hell, even this series has seen Middleton get bogged down by bothersome ankles that he’s fought through to stay on the court, and still log more minutes than any player in this series.

Through it all, we’ve seen Middleton magic come up time and again throughout these five games, giving us echoes of how he’s come up big in past playoff runs.

We’ve seen him put up 40-point games like he did in Game 3, and even bury last-second heaves to force OT like he did in that same game against Indiana as he did to Boston in the series opener of that 2018 first round series. We’ve seen him take on gargantuan workloads without his long-time running mate in Antetokounmpo, and now in this case, without Lillard.

Game 5 fell into that latter category, and Middleton, for as experienced as he is, showed he was capable of new tricks. Finishing with 29 points on 9-of-20 shooting, Middleton made up for an uneven shooting night by regularly bodying up on smaller and tired Pacers defenders by the basket to haul down a team-high 12 rebounds. He put his strength and long arms to good use to position himself for 3 offensive boards, overpower his opponents at the rim, and regularly rebounded out of his area, which had been a huge thorn in the Bucks’ side all series long.

Through these five games, Middleton is averaging more points than he’s ever scored in a series (26.8), on .495/.370/.897 shooting splits, along with 9.4 rebounds, and 5 assists. Per StatMuse, he is 57 points away from passing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for second place on the Bucks’ all-time scoring list for the postseason. Middleton has built a prolific body of work in the playoffs, and he just continues to add to it as the Bucks have fought like hell to keep their season alive.

It’s not that this series has reacquainted us with just how good Middleton is. That’s really never been in doubt, in spite of years and years of online debate and conversations of whether Middleton’s place within the Bucks core. He proved that he was worthy enough to be the second-best player on a title team back in ‘21, and yet, the goalposts have kept shifting as the climb back to contending for another championship has proven much harder than we all could have thought.

Middleton himself has personified what happens to championship-winning teams.

It’s a lot harder to get back up the second time, and sometimes, your fate is made for you against your will. He’s been knocked down by injuries, ailments, and personal loss over these last three years. In turn, the Bucks have felt just how irreplaceable he is to their core, and in the many games they’ve been without him, they’ve felt that absence of his trademark shotmaking, playmaking, and most of all, composure that calms everyone on the floor.

The timing has never been right for the Bucks to have a fully healthy squad as the calendar has turned to April in each of the last three seasons. Those are the breaks sometimes, and it’s even harder to stomach when you try to find reason with it all. The life cycle of chasing titles as the Bucks have done throughout the prime of Antetokounmpo’s and Middleton’s careers will have a falling action, and it’s been unnerving to brace for when that day comes.

If anything, Middleton’s play has reinforced what happens when great players age into the latter stages of their careers. They might not be able to show what makes them special each and every game, and health and durability grow into a significant question mark. However, they can still rise to the occasion if and when the timing is right.

Everything Middleton has done in this series we’ve seen him do before, and he’s showing he can still do again. We have been shorted of seeing what has made Middleton one of the best players to ever play for the franchise during this post-championship era. Time has passed, but the competitor in him has never faded. There is still time for us to see Middleton magic.