“We played very, very bad basketball at the beginning of the year and we just had to win games,” Antetokounmpo said at media day on Friday. “We were just trying to turn the season around. We were bad. Now we’re competitive, we’ve played better, the guys are together and we’ve had a great stretch. We just have to get it done.”keep it up.”

Antetokounmpo acknowledged that the Bucks’ slow start meant they needed to play with more urgency early in the season and that the NBA Cup allowed them to play with higher intensity games to do so.

But even when the Bucks struggled early, one thing Damian Lillard said gave them confidence: his conversations with Antetokounmpo and his co-star’s attitude.

“His mind was never shut down, he was never discouraged, he was never overly worried,” Lillard said Friday. “There were always arguments. Our conversations were always like, ‘We’re going to turn things around, we’re going to figure it out, we’ve got to take the lead, we’ve got to keep going, we’ve got to dominate.’

“That was the conversation and of course that is my spirit. Just being in a situation like that and seeing that of course that’s his spirit too made me think that I wasn’t too worried. I knew something was going to change at some point.” kind of just based on that.

Coach Doc Rivers called the NBA Cup a litmus test for his Bucks, who he jokingly referred to as an “old team” compared to the other surviving teams – Atlanta, the Houston Rockets and the Oklahoma City Thunder.

“Every year your team is on a different journey,” Rivers said. “Bringing these two groups together and seeing how we respond is a good thing. It’s a great teacher. I will learn something from this. I just don’t know what it is. Every team will have something that will help them move forward.”

Lillard agreed that this trip is a chance for the Bucks to test themselves in a playoff-like environment.

“We’re on the right track,” Lillard said. “We have been able to win a lot of games recently and this is just another opportunity for us to continue that, but there is more at stake and we will draw even more momentum from an experience like this.”

Although the Bucks are back here, they’re trying to go one step further after losing to the Indiana Pacers in the semifinals last season.

Getting back to this point after a rocky start is an accomplishment for the Bucks, but for Antetokounmpo, the focus since the start of the season has been to continue playing strong basketball every day after starting so slowly.

“At the beginning of the season when we were 2-8, it was a feeling you don’t like,” Antetokounmpo said. “No one likes to lose; everyone plays to win. I think we definitely had a little more urgency as a team. We had to fix some things. We needed to play more team basketball, we needed to compete at a higher level.”

“Me and Damian got together and realized this was very important. Since we did that… we’ve played great basketball.”