A native of Holbrook, Arizona, Budenholzer attended Pomona College, where he was a four-year letterman in basketball and golf and was named the Outstanding Senior Athlete in 1993.

[3] In 1991, Budenholzer played for the Pentland in the Scottish National Basketball League[4] for four months while attending University of Edinburgh.

[5] He later spent the 1993–94 season in Denmark, playing professionally for Vejle Basketball Klub, where he averaged a team-high 27.5 points per game while also serving as head coach for two teams of the club's youth system.

[6] At the start of the 1994–95 season, Budenholzer was hired by the San Antonio Spurs of the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a video coordinator.

[6] Budenholzer left San Antonio at the end of the 2013 NBA playoffs to begin his new career as the head coach of the Atlanta Hawks.

The Bucks defeated the Chicago Bulls in the first round of the playoffs, but fell to the Boston Celtics in seven games in the conference semifinals.

However, Budenholzer was fired by the Bucks on May 4, 2023, after the team lost in five games in the first round of the playoffs to the Miami Heat, who would eventually become the first eight-seed to reach the NBA Finals since the 1998–99 New York Knicks.

[6] Prior to Game 4 versus the Miami Heat during the First Round of the 2023 NBA playoffs on April 24, 2023, one of Budenholzer's brothers died in a car accident.