Milwaukee's hopes may rest on Drew Gooden's wacky game. (AP Photo/Jeffrey Phelps)

We know Andrew Bogut is going to be out (UPDATE: We now know it will be 8-to-12 weeks too. Damn). His ankle won’t unfracture quickly. Whether or not this torpedoes Milwaukee’s already fragile season largely depends on who replaces the majority of Bogut’s 30 minutes each night.

The early candidate is Drew Gooden. He will likely get the start in Bogut’s spot against the Chicago Bulls on Friday and Los Angeles Lakers on Saturday. For the time being, he’s Milwaukee’s best option for big minutes.

That isn’t saying much.

Last season, Gooden’s PER while playing the center position was 13.6, roughly six points lower than his PER at the power forward position. The numbers have remained consistent to last season this season. Gooden’s PER as a center this year is 13, while his PER at the four is 29. The smaller sample size for this season makes me hesitate a bit, but since they are consistent with last season, it seems to be a pattern worth recognizing as far as Gooden’s role on the Bucks is concerned, although Gooden did post an 18 PER while playing center with the Mavericks three seasons ago.

The aggressive, athletic Gooden can occasionally thrill, but he often seems to make the most simple parts of the game difficult. Many passes become no look ones. Pump fakes turn into foul drawing exhibitions. Suddenly, Gooden has developed a taste for the outside shot too, which is probably better than him shooting 22-foot jump shots, but isn’t an ideal shot for a starting center that has never demonstrated that range before.

An apparent general lack of attention to detail seems to make Gooden a less than ideal candidate as a back line defender. Simply, he isn’t the guy who erases the mistakes of his teammates. But if Gooden isn’t a perfect fit offensively and isn’t the defender Milwaukee thrives with, is there a better internal option to replace Bogut?

Nope.

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Pictured: Every Bucks Season Ever

500 Days of Summer on girls being full of it:

Tom: Look, we don’t have to put a label on it. That’s fine. I get it. But, you know, I just… I need some consistency.
Summer: I know.
Tom: I need to know that you’re not gonna wake up in the morning and feel differently.
Summer: And I can’t give you that. Nobody can.

Tom isn’t asking her to love him. He just wants her to stop yanking him around. One minute Summer tells Tom she’s not interested in something serious. The next: kisses, hand-holding, sex. Heck, she kisses him on the street then breaks up with him.

Scott Skiles can be Summer for positions 2 through 4. Flirt a little with the steady Shaun Livingston. Have a midnight fling with Stephen Jackson. Go wild with the mysterious, foreigner Ersan Ilyasova. Bat your eyelashes at the cute boy next door, Jon Leuer. That’s fine. Some of these suitors have looked better than others at this point in the season, but it’s still too early to settle down with any quite yet.

But at the 1 and the 5, you are MARRIED to Brandon Jennings and Andrew Bogut. Flirting with Drew Gooden for an entire fourth quarter is unacceptable. He had a soul patch on the back of his head. That is not Dad-approved! Read more…

A lively Stephen Jackson against the Spurs on January 10. (AP Photo/Jeffrey Phelps)

“That’s a dumb question, because my role was the same, I just didn’t get the shots that I should get. So, I just played defense and went out there and tried to help my team. The shots didn’t come, I didn’t force them. I don’t think my role was different, that’s just how the game go.”

- Stephen Jackson after Monday’s loss when asked about his role after taking just one shot in 28 minutes

Stephen Jackson played in 761 NBA games over 11 seasons before Monday’s game. Never did he play more than 25 minutes and take one shot or less. Monday was a unique situation for one of the NBA’s notorious volume shooters. Jackson caught and released passes with serious quickness. He kept the ball moving like he was working on an assembly line. There’s some good and some bad to that.

He wasn’t a ball-stopper, which he’s been accused of being at times this season. But he wasn’t a creator either. He didn’t probe the defense with his dribble, he didn’t seem like a much of a threat to catch and shoot off a kick out, he just moved the ball along and went on his way.

It wasn’t like Jackson didn’t care. He played hard and gave a strong effort on defense. Coach Scott Skiles acknowledged as much after the game.

“I thought he was very good on Joe (Johnson) individually defensively,” Skiles said after the game. “Offensively, yeah, he just seemed to be moving the ball around, he didn’t get many opportunities.”

Have we ever known Jackson to wait for opportunities? He isn’t Andrew Bogut. He isn’t waiting on teammates to dump it down to him in the post. He’s typically the guy creating opportunities for his teammates.

But Milwaukee didn’t trade for Jackson in June hoping to get Royal Ivey.

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UPDATE: Jackson has tweeted an apology.

Per  Charles F. Gardner, Stephen Jackson will not play Friday night.

Stephen Jackson suspended for Friday night’s game vs. Knicks. Source said he missed bus to morning shootaround.

Jackson’s Twitter account had him hanging out with someone named “jones” Thursday evening, presumably Dipset rapper Jim Jones (he did that song BALLIN’ a few years ago), as his next tweet was about Dipset. No word on whether or not they picked up Juelz Santana.

Jackson was very vocal post game about his displeasure with sitting for the entire second half Tuesday in Milwaukee’s 105-95 loss to the Denver Nuggets. According to Andrew Wagner, both Jackson and Skiles downplayed his comments on Tuesday as an outburst from a competitor who doesn’t want to lose.

It’s not all bad news though. Gardner also reports that Mike Dunleavy will return to the lineup this evening, quicker than most had projected. Dunleavy’s injection into the lineup could be the shooting boon Milwaukee’s been searching for. The small forward has hit 36% of his threes this season.

Shaun Livingston will start at the two in lieu of Jackson and forward Luc Mbah a Moute, who has only played in two games this season, will again be active.

Jeremy Schmidt writes the Milwaukee Bucks blog Bucksketball.com. Follow him on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

It’s one thing when a team is caught off guard and unprepared. Sometimes reserve players have huge games or rookies that haven’t been around the league yet show off a part of their game that the league hasn’t caught onto yet. Those situations are understandable.  It’s another thing when a team does a few things repeatedly and keeps having success with it, even when an opponent knows what’s coming.

That was the frustrating scenario the Milwaukee Bucks lived through on Tuesday night. The Denver Nuggets were hitting the outlet off made baskets. They were hitting it off misses. They were going coast to coast. They couldn’t be stopped in the first half, even though the Bucks knew it was coming.

Layups and threes. It was so simple for the Denver Nuggets  Tuesday and it wasn’t an accident. Denver averages 33.5 shots at the rim per game, the highest number in the league and it isn’t even close. Miami ranks second with just under 28.5 attempts at the rim per game.

“The percentages league wide show that’s where you win: At the rim and behind the line,” Scott Skiles said before taking on the Nuggets Tuesday night. “People are always looking for the guys that have sort of the in-between game. But the percentage show, not that they’re meaningless shots, but that it’s the shots at the rim and behind the line. They pass the ball very well and you have to get back. They penetrate very well.”

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