Buden had spent a full seventeen years as an assistant coach with the Spurs, experiencing the glory of an entire Spurs dynasty.
Then, in 2013, he left for Atlanta and successfully turned the Hawks into the Spurs of the Eastern Conference.
He briefly yet deeply imprinted his ideals of balance and team Basketball onto that Hawks Team.
He brought the Spurs' passing-and-cutting system and dynamic offense to the team. In the 2014-15 season, he even led those unheralded Hawks, whose biggest stars were Horford and Millsap, to sixty wins and the Eastern Conference First Seed.
Though being swept by the Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference Finals during the Playoffs had cost him some face, that clearly did not erase his accomplishments.
Now that he had joined the Bucks, Buden was once again thinking outside the box and pushing major reforms.
First, he turned Giannis into a ball-handling forward and transformed Brook Lopez, who had joined that summer on a veteran's minimum deal, into a two-way center capable of both spacing the floor and Rim Protection.
On defense, he built the team into a formidable drop-coverage defensive unit around its twin towers.
On offense, he made perfect use of Giannis's strengths, pairing him with shooters to create more chaos and kick-out opportunities.
That officially transformed the Bucks into a Regular season powerhouse. As for the Playoffs, they would still need time to prove themselves.
After all, although they were already the Eastern Conference First Seed, this was really only their first year getting started. There were bound to be plenty of problems within the team.
And those problems would probably be difficult to expose during the Regular season.
Only the more intense, more brutal, and more targeted Playoffs could reveal whether this team was the real deal.
The Thunder, meanwhile, were