Mardy Collins
Sebastian Telfair
Jameer Nelson
Delonte West
Marcus Banks
Dan Dickau
Jerryl Sasser
Speedy Claxton
Andre Miller

This year Eric Maynor and Patty Mills are the en vogue mid-major points. Mills has the advantage of his brilliant run in the Olympic Games last year, while Maynor has thrown together several nice tournament performances to help his case. Maynor on the surface has appeared to be more of a fit in the traditional point guard role, while Mills quickness allows him to score easier. But for a team in need of a point guard like the Bucks (possibly), are either of them worth the risk?

The above list is first round mid-major point guard picks since 1999 (Excluding 2007 and 2008 drafts, it’s just too early to tell). I included Telfair because he was facing mid-major competition in high school. Ten guys with varying results. Without question Andre Miller has had the most successful career of the aforementioned players with Jameer Nelson inching closer each year. There doesn’t seem to be a specific blueprint on what translates ones mid-major college success into prolonged NBA success. Miller has been one of the worst shooting point guards in the league since his entry, but has made up for that by looking exactly like Richard Pryor in addition to having great size and terrific vision.

College teammates Nelson and Delonte West have thrived playing with incredible talents. West has taken well to spotting up outside the arc waiting for Lebron to dish to him and defending with great zeal at the other end. Nelson has taken a few years to develop but his defense has been catching up to his natural shooting ability. He was voted an all-star for the first time this year largely thanks to the open shots he gets by playing with Dwight Howard. While neither is a pure point guard they both fell into the right situations. West can play like a two for large portions of the game because Lebron handles the ball so much. Nelson is enough of a point guard to lob the ball up for Howard or keep it moving around the perimeter for Rashard Lewis and Hedo Turkoglu, but if they really need a playmaker they can give it to Turkoglu and let Nelson move off the ball.

I would say the one thing that the more successful guys on this list had in common was above average athleticism or shooting ability. It sounds stupid to say, but a lot of times the key to sticking in the league and being successful is being really good at something. Yes, everyone in the NBA is really good at something, but if a player has a specific skill that they do better than most guys they have a great shot at sticking around. Miller has an incredible basketball IQ, Nelson is a very good shooter and from all accounts a great leader too. He gets the guys together every off-season in Philly to work-out and grow as players together. Speedy Claxton made a living off being speedy. Then he blew out his knee and none of his other skills were good enough.

Mardy Collins was a professional goon. That would explain his presence on the Clippers. Jerryl Sasser and Marcus Banks? They weren’t really good at anything. Actually disregard that. Banks had a nice half season with Minnesota and played that into a big contract to back-up Steve Nash, even though he wasn’t very good. So he was good at something: hiring the right agent. Sasser was just one of those mythical tall point guards that were all the rage for some time. He probably now hangs out with Reece Gaines and Julius Hodge wondering what went wrong.

So the question becomes then, are Maynor and Mills good at anything?

Maynor has shown incredible ball hawk and clutch shot prowess in his short stints on national television. His classic performance in the CAA tournament a few years ago was one that will not soon be forgotten by fans and GM’s alike. He did it again in the NCAA’s that year against Duke and nearly thrilled once more in this past year’s tournament against UCLA. So much for shriveling under pressure.

Meanwhile, Mills spent his summer last year blowing by Chris Paul, Deron Williams and Jason Kidd whenever he felt like it in the Olympics. Actually it was just in the exhibition game. The actual game that counted he was contained much better. Still impressive!

So both guys have some serious skill. I don’t think we’ll have any Jerryl Sasser or Sebastian Telfair problems here. Scouts and pundits alike seem to like Maynor more be it his polish, size or whatever the reason may be. He’s in contention at ten for the Bucks. Mills looks like he’ll find a place later in the first round, though he could move up if he shows something he wasn’t able to show at the end of the year after suffering an injury.

Regardless I’d look for both these guys to be productive for years to come. In a draft like this that might be something worth looking at with pick number ten.

There have been few Bucks draft picks I’ve been more excited about than Terrance Jerod Ford. The first time I saw him was during the 2001 McDonald’s All-American game. Ford was hitting step back threes, dropping dimes and running the show like a young John Stockton. The mechanics on his shot looked shaky, but he looked like he knew what he was doing. Over the next two years I watched him blossom at Texas. He would go on to win the Naismith Award as a sophomore and amaze me to no end with a tip dunk that I unfortunately cannot find on youtube. I’m legitimately surprised by that. This is probably the first time I’ve ever looked something up on youtube and been unsuccessful. Amazing.

Ford seemed to have had the athleticism and leadership skills necessary to be a great point guard for years to come and the Milwaukee Bucks answer there for at least the next ten years. Unfortunately he has a pencil for a spine and is lucky to even be playing anymore. Every time I hear an NBA player have his toughness called into question I always think back to Ford and hope no one ever dare to question his. But there are no guards that particularly remind me of the young, wide-eyed franchise point guard Ford I envisioned on draft day.

There is one that reminds me of the new T.J. Ford however.

Who is the new T.J. Ford? He’s that guy on the Pacers that thinks he’s a scorer. The one who is still quick, but still can’t shoot a lick. The one who has seen his assist numbers tumble like rocks down a mountain, while his turnovers have begun to pile like those same rocks on the ground. I don’t see a lot of Indiana Pacer games living in Wisconsin, but the ones I did see I usually saw T.J. shooting a whole lot more than he should have been. He lit the Bucks up a few times this year and they actually did win the games when he scored the most, but in the long run, how effective can a team be with a fragile 5′11 point guard taking 20 shots and handing it over more than he hands it out?

Whom does this new T.J. Ford remind me of?  Former Syracuse jacker Jonny Flynn.

Flynn has serious leadership qualities and jaw dropping athleticism. In addition to that he has a strong looking body and no known spinal conditions. All of these characteristics are pluses. A problem with Jonny Flynn has been his propensity to shoot all the time. And a propensity to take shots that are Jacksonian (I just thought of Jacksonian. I frequently call guys who take bad shots or too many shots, jackers. One of the all-time biggest jackers is Stephen Jackson. He has patented the “rhythm shot” pull-up three point fastbreak jumper. Jackson is a jacker. Therefore I’ll be referring to out of control jacker shots as Jacksonian. I love it). It may have been he just got caught up in the madness of the Syracuse playground system and had too much freedom for a college kid and that is what caused his poor shot selection. I could see that. If I was playing with Eric Devendorf, Andy Rautins and Paul Harris I’d be getting mine up too.

But if he was a truly great point prospect wouldn’t we have seen him reign his team in more? There was not a good reason Syracuse failed to win the Big East regular season crown and a one seed in the tournament. They had a great run in the conference tournament and did well in the NCAA’s, but they made it way too difficult on themselves. Isn’t that the job of the point guard to make sure they buckle down during the year? Look at what Chauncey Billups did for the Nuggets this year. He gave them discipline and order that a coach couldn’t. They finally found a point guard and all of their great athletes fell into line. They got on a roll during the season and now here they are tied with the might mighty Lakers. So, yeah it bothers me a little that we didn’t see Flynn get them going.

I say all that and I think all that and then I keep coming back to the way he played against Marquette near the end of the regular season. I mean I had nightmares for a month. Marquette didn’t have Dom James, but they did have Jerel McNeal, who was supposedly as good a defensive player as there was in the Big East. It didn’t even matter to Flynn though. He was hitting him with stutter steps, crossovers and everything else he had in his repertoire; it was like a prize fight between Mike Tyson and Mike Myers. McNeal was just not ready for him.

And it’s that memory that keeps me thinking he’ll be okay. Maybe he doesn’t have the preternatural vision, but maybe in today’s NBA that’ll be okay. What he can do is get by everyone and get to the rim and that is what the NBA is all about these days. Maybe I’m comparing him to Ford to keep my hopes down if the Bucks do draft him. Maybe I just don’t want to get to thinking we’ve found the answer again, only to see that answer putting up twenty shots a game while his teammates stand around in confusion. We will see if he is the pick this June. And if he is? Let’s just keep Eric Devendorf far away.

Figuring out which players in the draft will develop into rotation guys or stars is difficult. It gets even more difficult when players and their agents (mainly the agents) decide they are going to tell teams where they don’t want to play. This problem is one that hits home in Milwaukee.

Milwaukee is not a big market. This is news to no one. It’s the 33 (or so) largest market in the country, but that puts them into the bottom third of the NBA spectrum. So it is understandable why agents have reservations about sending their clients here. And from the players perspective, I could see why one would do whatever he could to avoid coming to Milwaukee. It is going to be freezing cold for virtually the entire season and pile about 100 inches of snow on that fact. The women of Milwaukee have been growing up eating brats and drinking beer since they turned 18 which has turned the large majority of them into…men. At least man sized. And the locals don’t especially care for a bad NBA team. So not a lot of pluses.

That would explain the Yi Jianlian fiasco in 2006. The Bucks pretty much had to take Yi. They had to prove they would not be manipulated by agents or anyone else trying to pressure them into something. The market aspect combined with the lack of a large Chinese population was obviously a big deal then. Did it factor into Yi being traded? Probably. But it was a lot easier to trade Yi once the organization realized that he wasn’t very good and was probably 25 years old without a lot of upside. (I’d like to make clear though that the Bucks were much better off making that trade than not. Without that deal the Bucks would have won 22 games last year and the culture in the locker room would still be terrible. There would once again be no hope for next season either. Charlie Villanueva would never have gotten better and it would likely have trickled down throughout the team. So yeah, it was a good basketball decision.) Would they have kept Yi if he were a good player? Tough to say. The Bucks could be faced with a similar situation this year.

In my second look at how past drafts could impact this year’s draft for the Bucks I can’t help but compare the Yi Jianlian fiasco to Brandon Jennings.

Most mock drafts I’ve looked at have Brandon Jennings falling anywhere from fourth to the Kings to seventh to Golden State. He’ll likely be gone by the time the Bucks pick. But what if Jennings fell a little in workouts? What if character issues or injury concerns push him back and he’s available at number ten? Would the Bucks take him? The folks at RealGM have Jennings dropping to the Bucks at ten, so who really knows what is going to happen.

But how would Team Jennings feel about dropping to Milwaukee? When I say Team Jennings I’m speaking primarily about Jennings agent and the folks at Under Armour. To say they have a lot invested in the career of Jennings would be an understatement. They have built their entire basketball related future on his career. The last thing Under Armour wants to have happen is for him to end up in Milwaukee. Sacramento? Probably not. Minnesota? Pass. They are looking for Golden State, D.C., or New York as the best case scenarios for teams in the top ten. New York would obviously be great from not only a media standpoint, but then he’d get to work with Mike D’Antoni, a European type coach who can transform point guards into point gods. The thing about Jennings is that he probably could just go back to Europe for another year or two, or at least hold it out there as a threat.

The problem for the small market teams is that Jennings might be really good. I mean REALLY good. The only time I’ve seen him play was at the McDonald’s All-American game a couple years back and he looked like the next big thing at point guard. I realize that I was watching a glorified pick up game, but what struck me is that all he was concerned about was setting the assist record. Any time a point guard wants to be known as a passer it means one of two things, either he is a jacker trying to fool scouts and fans alike, or he really loves the feeling of setting other guys up. I’m leaning towards the latter, only because of how natural he looked in setting up his teammates.

As for the whole Italy thing, I’m into that too. To be a point guard you need to be ballsy. Moving to Europe when you can’t get into college…that is ballsy. His European stats don’t mean all that much to me. Talk about a period of adjustment, wow. He had so much going on that performing in games was probably pretty difficult. But he probably learned more in practicing every day over there like a professional than he ever could have wasting away with that clown of a coach they had at Arizona this year. He couldn’t even get his guys to foul at the right time.

So while I’d love to have Brandon Jennings further develop himself as a star point guard and pitchman in Milwaukee, I’m realistic. The folks at Under Armour will probably not allow it. Hopefully for Jennings sake they steer him towards somewhere warm at least.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana

The Milwaukee Bucks would do well to listen to the wise words of Spanish-American author/philosopher George Santayana when preparing for next months draft. Lottery swings and misses have become part of the Bucks lore since their first foray into the lottery back in 1992. But they can learn from mishaps.

Players and their styles trickle on down through time as younger kids grow up watching older guys. That’s why everyone says Lebron plays like Magic. Or Kobe has a little MJ in his game. Or Trevor Ariza has Scottie Pippen’s arms. Or Big Baby Davis has Oliver Miller’s stomach. It just happens like that. So in this draft class I’ve picked up on a few things that I remember seeing a little bit in Bucks of years gone by.

Today is part one. And we’ll start with one that scares me on a more personal level. I invested a lot of time talking about today’s past Buck and I don’t want to revisit that part of my Buck life any time soon.

Earl Clark reminds me of Marcus Haislip.

Every year Marcus Haislip and I would do the same dance. He would do outrageous dunks before games which would always tantalize me. I would be talking about him after the game like he actually got in, though he never did. This would go on for the season and then things would really heat up when summer league started. Haislip would go bonkers in every summer league game, once hitting seven threes to go along with his usual nasty dunks. I would go on and on about how much talent he had and then he would continue to rot on the bench.
I never got it. At the time I didn’t realize that guys like Haislip can’t just rely on their athleticism to get them by. I didn’t know they had to focus on defense and show effort to grab rebounds. This was always Haislip’s biggest problem. I’ll repeat myself: EFFORT was his biggest problem. Effort.

How hard is it to give effort? I don’t always work hard at my job, but when I’m given responsibility I see to it that it gets done. That is the kind of player that Milwaukee needs. Not another lackadaisical effort guy. We shipped out Tim Thomas years ago. We should have consulted Thomas way before picking Haislip anyway. “Hey Tim, does he remind you of you? He does? Okay, thanks.”

Now let me look through the dozens of scouting reports available about Earl Clark. I’ll start with his weaknesses as listed at DraftExpress.com, “doesn’t always play hard, high bust potential?, consistency, off-ball defense and mental toughness.” Yikes. Moving on to Collegehoopsnet.com, “he’s inconsistent. Needs to become more consistent.” Looks like they are concerned about his consistency. Chad Ford at ESPN.com has further concerns, stating simply that Clark “doesn’t have a great feel for the game,” and is “soft.” I don’t have the information from 2001, but I’d bet the fellow workout wonder Haislip had a lot of the same knocks on him coming out of college.

The best thing about Clark is that he was more productive in college than Haislip and may have the ability to move to the three. I also could be seduced by his productive tournament runs. Tournament runs are generally a good sign of things to come if my mind recalls correctly. I haven’t actually looked that up though. Regardless, it’s still a risk not worth taking. There should be better players available. And if Clark emerges in a few years as Marcus Haislip, but with a good head on his shoulders, then some team will have gotten very VERY lucky.

Haislip seems to be holding his own in Europe though. This was from a couple years ago I believe.

Francisco Elson
When much is given
much is expected. From Fran
we just asked too much.

When your team is asking Francisco Elson to log heavy minutes at the starting center position you know you’ve been hit by injuries. Fran did an admirable job and had one of the better “music clips” when he scored at the BC (Will Ferrell’s Elf (Double parenthesis, thanks Bau) quote of “Francisco that’s fun to say”) but he’s just another guy. The Bucks could have very well found someone younger and more exciting to be a crappy backup, and maybe that guy would have had some upside.

Keith Bogans
Dribbling adventures
were supposed to be offset
by shooting and d.

I had not seen a lot of Bogans before he came to Milwaukee. I knew he shot an okay three point percentage and had a reputation as an average to above average defender, but that’s all. What I wasn’t aware of was just how poor of a ball handler Bogans was. Yikes. This guy had more adventures dribbling the basketball than Bill and Ted did with their phone booth (Zing). He did do an okay job on defense, but his three point shooting was not what I expected. I honestly thought he would help propel the Bucks into the playoffs. Oh well. I’m sure we’ll never hear from him again, but Keith, it was fun while it lasted kind sir.

Luke Ridnour
A surprising shot
blocker and game icer,
his days may be numbered.

He’s not an intimidating anyone by any means and the numbers weren’t actually very good, but I won’t be quick to forget that Ridnour found a way to block three shots in one game this year. When friends of mine who don’t like the NBA would watch the Bucks and see him they’d be confused as to why “that little white kid” was on the court, so for him to send three shots back from whist they came is pretty awesome. Ridnour also was absolute money at the end of games from the line. Too bad the Bucks rarely needed someone shooting free throws at the end of games. Conventional wisdom would suggest that Luke is one guy the Bucks are going to be peddling hard this summer, so we may be bidding him adieu right along with Bogans. Thanks for the drama of the fight for the last spot fellas.