The Bucks players were all puzzled.
This was the kind of defensive intensity one only encountered in the Playoffs. Why was it being brought out in an ordinary Regular Season game?
Because they were unaccustomed to it, the Bucks scored only twelve points in the first quarter.
Although the Lakers' offensive efficiency was not high either, they still scored sixteen points.
Over the following second quarter and third quarter, the Bucks gradually recovered somewhat.
They scored twenty points and twenty-two points in those two quarters, respectively.
But compared to their usual scoring output, it was still somewhat low.
By the end of the third quarter, the Lakers were already leading the Bucks by ten points.
At this point, the Bucks' head coach was not panicking.
He stressed to the players that no team could maintain that level of defensive intensity for all forty-eight minutes. If they did, they would collapse.
So he told the players not to panic. The moment the Lakers relaxed even slightly would be the Bucks' chance to counterattack.
However, once the fourth quarter began, he found that the Lakers were still maintaining tremendous defensive intensity.
Although the Bucks players gave it everything they had in this quarter as well,
under the Lakers' immense defensive pressure, the Bucks' offensive efficiency was still nowhere near its usual level.
In the end, the Bucks scored twenty-four points in the fourth quarter.
The Lakers scored only eighteen points in the fourth quarter.
But that was already enough.
Thanks to the ten-point lead they had built earlier,
the Lakers ultimately defeated the Bucks by four points.
The Lakers secured their second straight win.
And both games had been hard-fought battles.
In the first, they defeated the fourth-ranked team in the West. In the second, they defeated the third-ranked Bucks in the