Yahoo Sports senior NBA reporter Jake Fischer and Yahoo Sports senior NBA writer Dan Devine break down Milwaukee’s stunning early exit following the first round of the playoffs and whether it could be the end of Budenholzer with the Bucks after five seasons. Hear the full conversation on the Ball Don't Lie podcast network - and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you listen.

Video Transcript

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JAKE FISCHER: What will this mean for the future of my Budenholzer? I think it's a very fair question to at least ask being that, I mean, I think the whole NBA world pretty much knows and has kind of written in stone that if Kevin Durant's toe was behind the line in 2021 and the Nets defeated Brooklyn-- or Milwaukee, excuse me, that his job was hanging in the balance and he was all-- in all the likely to have been terminated then.

It's too early right now. We're recording this on Thursday at 12:30. I mean, just happened last night. Feelings are raw. I think any stable organization and front office, which the Bucks certainly seem to be aside from the failures between 0 and 48 on the clock here, like from all my accounting no one looks at the Bucks is one of these situations that's got all this [? Peloton ?] intrigue and who's calling the shots and blah, blah, blah.

So like there's going to be a cooling down period, I believe before there's some [? guillotine ?] dropping, but there's-- I can guarantee you meetings are going to be held and I can guarantee you that there's absolutely going to be conversations about whether there are better options than Mike Budenholzer to coach this team moving forward. That could be Charles Lee, the assistant on the front of the bench who is very much a leading candidate for the Detroit Pistons job.

It could be an outside person. I don't know what the answer is going to be because they don't know what the answer is going to be yet. I think that's an important thing that I try to remind fans.

DAN DEVINE: There's no doubt that what Mike Budenholzer brought when he got to Milwaukee from Atlanta was a systemization of the way the Bucks played. A sense of how we can unlock Giannis Antetokounmpos specific greatness on both ends of the floor and maximize his abilities and put a system in place to do that, which coming off of the Jason Kidd era was, you know, manna from heaven for them. It was a sense that, like, there's a guy understands how to put something in place around our special unique player to vault us into a new level.

And that happened, they've been consistently up at the top of the league in win total. They won a championship. They've made deep playoff runs. But there comes a point-- or and has come a point in virtually every postseason that he's coached, even going back to Atlanta where once the opposition adjusts to the style and says, we understand how to attack and it started in this series with Miami right from the jump being able to beat the drop coverage with Brook Lopez and get it to mid-range jumpers and it continued throughout. They're not going to move Drew off of Jimmy.

Jimmy is going to be able to physically dominate that match-up. He can go up over the top of Drew in a way that a lot of guys can't. They're not going to switch off of it, we're going to keep hitting it. They're going to keep giving us the switch with Khris Middleton onto Jrue Holiday-- onto Jimmy Butler. He's going to punish that when they wind up bringing more help to the paint or when Brook Lopez winds up coming out to block shots. We can hammer the offensive glass. We can get to pull up 3's. All of the things that you know you can do against a Bucks defense the way they play all season long, the [? Heat ?] did all of it and Mike Budenholzer didn't change anything.