Bucks at Hornets
The Milwaukee Bucks continue to prove they are the best team in the NBA this season and are coming off one of their most impressive performances of the campaign. The Bucks will try to continue their push toward 70 wins when they visit the Charlotte Hornets in the opener of a two-game trip on Sunday.
Milwaukee was hosting a team fighting for postseason positioning in the Western Conference on Friday and pushed it aside with ease, breezing to a 133-86 victory over the Oklahoma City Thunder that marked the team's largest margin of victory this season. "The key to dominance, I think, is having a little bit of ignorance to it," Bucks guard Wesley Matthews told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "We play basketball. We're not getting caught up in the numbers, not getting caught up in trying to reach a certain number or anything. We know what our end goal is, we know what our endgame is, and we know in order to do that we have to take every day to the fullest and respect every single day." The Hornets enter the contest hot after earning a 99-96 victory on the road at the No. 2 team in the East - the Toronto Raptors. "We stayed in the moment," Charlotte coach James Borrego told reporters. "Probably one of our best wins of the season. We were complete end to end. Things didn't go our way down the stretch a few times, but we stuck with it and didn't hang our heads. We kept making plays and went on to the next one."
TIME: 1 p.m. ET. TV: FS Wisconsin, FS Southeast, NBA TV Canada
ABOUT THE BUCKS (51-8): Superstar forward Giannis Antetokounmpo took some shots from James Harden in a televised interview on Friday afternoon but brushed off any criticism by collecting 32 points on 13-of-20 shooting, 13 rebounds and six assists in 27 minutes - the ninth time this season he scored at least 30 points while logging under 30 minutes. "He's just constantly driven to improve," Milwaukee coach Mike Budenholzer told reporters of Antetokounmpo. "He's obviously very skilled, very talented, very gifted and he's not satisfied. We want that to be the identity of our organization. When your best player is built that way, you follow the lead of your best player. It's critical to us." Friday's performance marked Antetokounmpo's 15th consecutive double-double and he knocked down two of the team's 21 3-pointers.
ABOUT THE HORNETS (21-38): Charlotte is trying to make a push for a playoff spot and moved within 5 1/2 games of the eighth-place Brooklyn Nets with wins in its last two games. The Hornets got double figures in scoring from all five starters on Friday and point guard Terry Rozier matched the team high with 18 points while going 3-of-3 from the free-throw line, including the tiebreaking shot with 2.1 seconds left. Rozier averaged 22 points in the last two games after slumping to five points in a 119-80 loss at Indiana on Tuesday.
BUZZER BEATERS
1. Bucks SF Khris Middleton (neck) sat out Friday and is day-to-day.
2. Hornets C Bismack Biyombo collected 13 points and 11 rebounds on Friday for his eighth double-double of the season.
3. Milwaukee took the first two meetings this season by a total of 54 points, including a 116-103 triumph at Charlotte on Jan. 24.