A special thanks to Andy Kamenetzky from ESPN’s Land o’ Lakers Lakers blog for stopping by to answer some questions I had regarding Milwaukee’s opponent this evening. Check out Land o’ Lakers and see a few answers I had for him as well.

1. He’s smart enough to do it, but will Kobe be willing to let Gasol and Bynum dominate the Bucks?

Given Gasol’s exceptionally aggressive nature Wednesday against the Clippers, I’d like to think Kobe will try to keep that going, for the sake of Pau and the matchup. And he’s already praised Bynum’s “thirst to score.” And for all the talk about Kobe’s high shot count this season, he’s done a pretty fine job moving the ball around. But as is always the case with Kobe involving teammates, there’s a leash, and it can be frustratingly short. Kobe’s natural desire to take games over, even when not always necessary, can also equal big men receiving too few touches over stretches.

But in fairness to Kobe, there are kinks being ironed out in Mike Brown’s offense, one of them being Gasol’s role. Pau’s number hasn’t been called enough by the coach, as opposed to Bryant. There’s also an onus on Pau to seek out more scoring opportunities with the ball in his hands, even if he’s theoretically working as a facilitator on a particular set.

2. Is there anyone on the Bucks who is a bad matchup for the Lakers?

Jennings, over the summer. (Photo via SoleCollector)

Quick point guards who can penetrate are never easy for the Lakers to corral. Brandon Jennings fits that bill. That he’s connected more consistently from distance this season makes him an even bigger challenge to cover. And considering Jennings talked some smack to Kobe this offseason, even tongue in cheek, he’s probably looking forward to sharing the court with 24.

Even possessions with Beno Udrih off the bench could be an adventure. Steve Blake’s injury, plus Darius Morris playing like the rookie he is, recently prompted Mike Brown to use rookie Andrew Goudelockas a defacto point guard. He responded well against the Clips, but his minutes this season have been a roller coaster on both sides of the ball. Goudelock is extremely easy to screen off, and Udrih loves to work in pick-and-roll situations. That could be a bad combination for the Lakers.

3. Without Andrew Bogut (ankle fracture), can Milwaukee even be competitive tonight?

On paper, the Lakers appear the better team. Even with Bogut healthy, they’d boast a decisive frontcourt advantage. Their defense has often been smothering. And with all sincere respect to Luc Mbah a Moute’s D, Kobe’s been on a prolific — and pretty efficient — scoring jag of late. Plus, the Bucks will be playing the second end of a back-to-back, while the Lakers will be rested and the schedule has finally allowed some practice time. There’s a lot setting up nicely for the Lakers.

Having said that, the Lakers are hardly bulletproof. For starters, they’re 1-6 on the road. Granted, the majority of those losses were against good teams, but 1-6 is 1-6. No game outside Staples can be presumed a victory. The offense is also a decided work in progress, and prone to turnovers, which could be exacerbated by the Bucks’ ability to force them. Plus, the Bucks’ bench is a considerably better bet to produce points. (Frankly, any bench is.) Thus, the game is hardly already in the refrigerator, as the late Chick Hearn would say.

For a Bucks perspective on things, I put these questions to our very own Ian Segovia as well. His thoughts:

1. Kobe is going to be Kobe. He’s going to take over 20 FGAs and give the ball to his big men just a handful of times. Even if Kobe decides that he’s just going to take 80 shots against the Bucks, Gasol and Bynum will still dominate the Bucks on the glass. They’ll gobble up offensive rebounds and tip-ins.

2. Jennings versus anyone the Lakers throw against him. He won’t have to expend too much effort chasing the likes of Fisher and Morris. Neither guy has the defensive chops to handle Jennings. This isn’t surprising. Top point guards have been manhandling the Lakers for several seasons already. However, the Lakers are defending the paint well. Laker’s opponents are only finishing 59% at the rim.

3. Winning is one thing. Staying competitive is something completely different. The Lakers offensive rating is ranked just 16th in the league and they are one of the slower NBA teams. Their offense is mostly post-ups, isos and spot-ups. The Bucks main defensive problem without Bogut is defending the PNRs. Rose and the Bulls ran the high screen perfectly last night (ok, Rose and the Bulls always run that perfectly). The Lakers don’t run PNRs and when they do, they’re awful at them (PPP for PNR ballandlers is just 0.72 and roll men are just 0.76). Even without Bogut, the Bucks can handle that offense.

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

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The East isn’t really the Least any more.

The 2004-05 season was the last time the Eastern Conference featured a playoff bracket without one team with a record either at .500 or below. You have to go back to the last lockout season, 1998-99 to find a season in which a team made it to the playoffs in the Western Conference with a .500 record. The West has been the best, in terms of volume of strong teams, for quite some time.

And the West is still deeper this season, with current eight seeds, the Houston Rockets and Memphis Grizzlies generally well regarded and currently sporting 10-7 records.

But this season, the Eastern Conference is as tough as it’s been 1-8 since the middle of the 2000s. The current top five is Chicago, Atlanta, Orlando, Miami and Philadelphia. Miami, Orlando and Chicago features superstars with supporting casts that have been tinkered with for multiple seasons now in an attempt to play to the strengths of their stars. Orlando has been an early surprise, but if they intend to keep Dwight Howard, and it seems they do at least through this season, they’ll always be relevant. Chicago and Miami are legitimate title contenders.

Atlanta and Philadelphia are on opposite ends of the “pretty good, but not great” spectrum. Philly is young and coming up. Jrue Holiday could still be something special and they have a number of guys in their early 20s learning how to be really good NBA players. We don’t know how good they’ll be by the end of this season or next, but we know they are a team worth watching for now thanks to their 12-5 record. The Hawks still have Joe Johnson and Josh Smith, so they still matter, as Bucks fans can attest to after Monday night’s loss. Al Horford is hurt, but the Hawks are still a tough team.

It gets no easier after that.Right below the Hawks are the Indiana Pacers. A bad, playoff team last season, but likely a good one this season. They added David West and George Hill. Paul George is another year older and an inch or two taller. They are not a team to be taken lightly.

The Celtics are older and are dealing with injury problems, but are you ready to write them off? More importantly, if you’re a Bucks fan, are you ready to safely assume Milwaukee will be able to leapfrog them in the standings? I sense some serious “nos” right now. The Celtics sit seventh in the West. One spot ahead of the New York Knicks.

I know, Milwaukee waxed the Knicks less than a week ago. How can I be seconds away from writing about the Knicks like they are a team that matters? They have carmelo Anthony and Amar’e Stoudemire. You really think they won’t figure it out eventually? They point guard situation isn’t going to improve much, even when Baron Davis debuts. But would you rather have Milwaukee’s roster or two star/superstar players? Maybe Mike D’Antoni gets fired and everything comes together. Or maybe Mike, Melo and ‘Mar’ figure it out. Regardless, I’d bet on them to finish better than .500.

I’d bet on each of these teams to best that .500 mark actually.

Would you bet on the Bucks to do the same?

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• Kyle Lowry

He’s not just a character from Bad Boys When I wrote that, I was under the impression that Will Smith’s character in Bad Boys had the first name Kyle, not Mike. I corrected it because it’s inaccurate, but I stand by the line as one I enjoyed. So read it again and then read this next sentence. He’s been a bad man this season.

The Rest

In Houston, it’s raining quite a bit. The Rockets have been very good at home this season, and while they didn’t land that superstar they were hoping for this off-season (or any off-season lately for that matter), they still have waves of talent to throw at teams. They aren’t all that unlike the Bucks, but they are a little better across the board.

And Andrew Bogut has always struggled against Samuel Dalembert in his career, so be on the watch for that.

Game tips at 7:00 PM on FSN.

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

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The Bucks tag team of Bogut and Mbah a Moute: “Twice the mayhem!”

It’s easy to credit Andrew Bogut with the success of the Bucks defense. In the way that we give quarterbacks or point guards credit for wins, we often attribute the success of an NBA team’s defense to its center. He’s the quarterback of the defense. Maybe he’s like the middle linebacker then. If that’s the case, Bogut has been the Bucks version of Ray Lewis over the past two seasons.

When healthy, he’s blocked shots, rotated and taken charges as well as any center in the league not named Dwight Howard. There are numbers to back that up too. We see the big block numbers and the impressive charge totals and we can see that he’s doing things very few centers in the league do very plainly.

The numbers don’t paint such a clear picture when it comes to Luc Mbah a Moute.

He doesn’t have big block or steal numbers. He’s more like a corner back that doesn’t get thrown at. Those guys don’t pile up interception totals, but the guy they were covering all game ended up with just two catches for 17 yards.  There isn’t a statistical category that makes it plain for us to see how much Mbah a Moute matters, so he doesn’t get quite as much credit for Milwaukee’s defensive success over the past few seasons, even if he is acknowledged across the league as a standout perimeter defender. The perimeter defender is viewed as a one-on-one stopper, not as someone who brings his teammates to a higher level defensively.

But that Bogut and Mbah a Moute tag team absolutely drags everyone on the Bucks up a couple of notches on the defensive side.

The Bucks star defenders hadn’t played a game together this season before Friday. Consequently, Milwaukee’s defense had been more middling than anyone remembered before Friday. Bogut and Mbah a Moute went to work righting those wrongs this weekend.

In the six games previous to Milwaukee’s match-up with the Knicks on Friday, the Bucks had a defensive rating of higher than 100 every game with an average of 109. Scott Skiles must have been on the verge of bare knuckle boxing every player on his team. But Bogut missed two of those games and played less than 20 minutes in one. Mbah a Moute played in none.

In the games against the Knicks and Heat, Milwaukee’s defensive ratings were 86.9 and 88.2. The Knicks have a bad offense, but it’s always nice to hold a bad team down. The Heat, weary as they may have been (and I think that’s being overblown, it’s still early in the season and it was just a back-to-back. Have they never played a back-to-back before? My goodness. The way people are talking, you’d think the Heat ran four marathons as a team right before Sunday’s game.), are the league’s finest offensive team, with an offensive rating of 108.2. Milwaukee held them 20 points per 100 possessions below that mark.

You probably will believe this: Bogut and Mbah a Moute lead the Bucks with defensive ratings of 97 and 98 respectively.

So maybe the Bucks are on the way back. Back to what, we’re not sure. They could be back to mediocre, the kind of team that tosses in enough impressive wins to keep eyes on them, but enough bizarre losses to keep from achieving anything of consequence. Or maybe they are on the way back to 2009.

Either way, don’t hold your breath or onto those hopes for a top draft pick. It looks like these Bucks aren’t going to be that bad so long as they have their defensive tag team on the court.

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• Jeff Teague

Joe Johnson is the obvious choice here, but I find Teague a more entertaining player. He’s explosive, athletic and quick as hell, plus this season he’s hitting threes. With Johnson and Josh Smith taking the majority of the shots, he’s been left out a bit offensively, but he can do some big things when things line up right for him. Against the Wolves five games ago, he had 20 points and 10 assists.

The Rest

The Hawks of the past few years are kind of what the Bucks have been shooting for ever since the Hawks eliminated them from the playoffs two seasons ago. They are consistently relevant, but not very dangerous. We know they’ll be in the playoffs and we know they won’t win a title. But they get that sweet playoff revenue and occasionally they win a series and stay in the minds of NBA fans into late May.

This is essentially what the Bucks want this year’s team to be.

Game tips at 7 PM tonight at the Bradley Center. It appears nature will finally cooperate and deliver us roads that won’t be insufferable to drive on. So there’s that.

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

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From Eric Maroun of Hardwood Paroxysm

Eric Maroun wrote an awesome post over at Hardwood Paroxysm. It compares each player’s Usage Rate to their PER. Usage Rate is the percent of possessions a player uses while on the court. PER measures the overall statistical contribution of a player.

The Bucks chart suggests that Stephen Jackson, Beno Udrih and Tobias Harris eat up too many possession when they’re on the court. It also suggests that Jon Leuer isn’t involved in the offense enough.

I, too, made some graphs, albeit they are much less impressive. But I think they can show us a few interesting things.

A lot has been touted about the shot creators the Bucks got this offseason. It stands to reason that a team’s best creators should possess the ball most often, but do the Bucks do this:

This graph compares Usage Rate against Assist Rate. Assist Rate is the rate of assists vs possessions used. Shaun Livingston’s assist rate has been downright monstrous this season; looking even greater with the few possessions he has gotten to use.

This graph compares Usage Rate against Turnover Rate. Turnover Rate is the percentage of possessions ending in a turnover. This graph lines up well with the PER vs Usage Rate graph: Jackson, Udrih and Harris come off poorly in both. At least Udrih and Harris are somewhat redeemed by their shooting – both have True Shooting Percentage over 55 percent – and Harris is just a rookie, but Jackson has too large of an effect on the team for a someone playing less than well (to put it mildly).

So how should the Bucks deal with the Knicks tonight? It’s very simple and I’ll let another chart by Maroun do the talking.

Contain Bill Walker at all costs

Ian Segovia is not a graphic designer. He is a Bucksketball Contributor. Follow him on Twitter. Like us on Facebook

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Leuer is posing for a completely different picture

The big day is here Badger fans! Leuer is starting. Rejoice! Between him and Greg Stiemsma this is the greatest year for Badgers in the NBA ever.

Going into the season, it looked like the Bucks power forward spot was jam-packed and Leuer might not get a chance to shine. But he’s starting tonight against the Pistons. How did we get here and are the Bucks heading toward a new status quo?

• No back-up center

Leuer impresses the Bucks enough that they decide to fill the last roster spot with him instead of a free agent backup center. Drew Gooden has to take backup center role.

• Luc Mbah a Moute’s Knee Tendinitis

LRMAM would have been a prime candidate to take the power forward starting position, but he has only been able to play two games this year.

• Larry Sanders has great fine motor skills, but poor basketball skills

Sanders is a nice artist. Heck, he could be the best player the Bucks have, but we’ll never know because he can’t hold on to the ball for very long (very long = two seconds).

• Ilyasova has decided to not show up this year.

Ilyasova is not playing his game. He’s taking three less shots per 36 minutes than his career average. Yes, his rebound is still there, but Bogut’s been out for a considerable chunk of the season and someone had to grab rebounds.

It’s questionable as to whether Ilyasova fits into this brave new world the Bucks are exploring where Teamwork is Magic. He has always been sort of an unrepentant chucker and a ball-stopper.

• Leuer’s Performance

There’s been a bit of serendipity in Leuer’s rise to the starting spot today, but it’s been for the best as he is clearly the Bucks best offensive option at the four. And all that luck would have meant nothing had Leuer not performed well. He’s scoring 1.42 PPP(points per possession) in spot-up situations and 1 PPP in post-ups. He’s shooting 66.7 percent at the rim. Physically, he’s just a terrible man defender, but has been shown decent help defense. That’s to be expected from someone coming out of the Bo Ryan system.

Is he going to keep the starting job? Obviously, this depends all on Leuer. He already has Scott Skiles confidence as evidenced by the crunch time minutes Leuer got against the Spurs. Skiles is more than willing to play rookies as long as they get it and so far it looks like Leuer just gets it.

• What about Brockman?

What about Brockman?

• Speaking of Bucks Power Forwards

Anthony Mason owes Wisconsin a lot of money. I enjoy this.

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• Greg Monroe?

Monroe is the team leader in points and rebounds. He is tied for steals. He is two assists behind Ben Gordon for the assists lead. Andrew Bogut completely outclasses him.

The Rest

The Pistons aren’t just losing, they’re doing it in a spectacular fashion. They’ve lost five straight games by 14 points or more. They are bad. So bad, that this could be the worst Pistons team ever. Piston Powered has more.

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In fact, you could say that I loathed Robinson. Not all the time, just sometimes. Definitely after game 5 against the Sixers when he missed a 10 foot baseline jumper to win. I made the astute observation that “Big Dogg friggen’ sucks” while I bawled into my fists.

I don’t cry anymore about sports. I wish I would though. Because that would mean that the Bucks would at least be in big moments.

***

Andrew Bogut is back everyone. The similarities between Bogut and Robinson are startling. Both first round picks, both were surpassed by players drafted after them, both had incompetent GMs ruining the early parts of their careers, both were stable and you knew what you were getting from them every night.

Being back home and having Bogut back in the lineup will remedy a lot of the issues the team faced in its west coast road trip. Rebounding will be back and the defense will be stout again. Everyone will be back in their natural positions, but minutes will once again be sparse for the young guys. Of particular note is whether Larry Sanders can keep up the passing that he showed during the trip that he has never shown before.

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• Tim Duncan

It says a lot that even though Duncan is a shell of the former player he once was, that he’s still very serviceable. If Andrew Bogut wasn’t returning tonight, then he might’ve just looked like his old self. He’s not rebounding like he used to, but the bank is still open for him.

• Tony Parker

As Duncan has declined, Popovich has put the offense in the hands of Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili. Well, just Parker now since Ginobili is injured. In one sense the Bucks dodged a bullet by missing Ginobili. In another sense, Jennings has to get his pick and roll defense together before Parker burns him like Nash did on Sunday.

The Rest

The hole left by Manu’s absence is being filled by a Danny Green/James Anderson/Gary Neal platoon. Winning that matchup is of prime importance to the Bucks. Also of prime importance, Matt Bonner vs. Jon Leuer. That isn’t just the matchup we all want. It’s the battle we need.

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Losing to the suddenly mighty Clippers itself isn’t real cause for concern. That 36.3% number from the field that’s becoming commonplace once again? That’s an eye-catcher in the same way a black spot on a broken television is. But it’s not striking me as the root of the problem with the Bucks currently. It’s more the result of what may be a broken mindset.

I present this quote from Stephen Jackson after Milwaukee’s 92-86 loss to the Clippers Saturday night.:

“We need somebody to step up and knock down shots for us. It has been difficult on this trip, for sure. We haven’t gotten anybody with any consistency knocking down shots.”

This is the same sort of thing we frequently heard from Scott Skiles last season. Here’s a Skiles quote from a loss in late January in which the Bucks shot under 40%.

“We had so many good looks again. We had our chances to create some momentum for ourselves, and we unfortunately just couldn’t knock them down.”

“Knocking down shots” was a problem for the Bucks last season and it’s been a problem early on this season. At some point, you can’t help but wonder if maybe the Bucks just aren’t getting the good shots they think their getting.

Through seven games, Milwaukee is taking the second most shots in the league from 3-9 feet. The average shooting percentage on these shots across the league is 36.4%. Milwaukee shoots right about average and attempts 15.7 of these shots per game. Literally speaking, these are not high percentage shots and Milwaukee takes a lot of them.

The highest percentage shots on the court are, obviously, at the rim. Across the league, the average shooting percentage of shots at the rim is 63.4%. Milwaukee takes the fifth fewest shots at the rim per game and connects on 67.2% of them. The second most efficient shots possible, are three-point shots. The extra point is seductive. Unfortunately, Milwaukee has failed to acquire competent three-point shooters.

Milwaukee’s best three-point shooters, Mike Dunleavy Jr. and Carlos Delfino, have been limited to eight games and 32 three-point attempts between them. Brandon Jennings and Jackson, both shooting under 30% on three-pointers this year and both coming off a season in which they each shot roughly five threes per game while failing to surpass 34% in accuracy, are shooting a combined 12 three-pointers per game.

Coach Skiles said after the Clippers game that Milwaukee’s problem wasn’t one of effort. He’s right. Milwaukee’s problems go far beyond effort. All the effort in the world can’t get the right players taking the right shots from the right spots. Andrew Bogut’s expected Tuesday return will help the team for certain, but he wasn’t the cure all to this team’s woes last season.

It’s tough to know what needs to change for the Bucks to start getting easier or higher percentage shots, and even tougher to expect these poor shooting results to improve any time soon.

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• Steve Nash

He’s still the real deal in Phoenix, even if his teammates are not. Aside from Nash, the cupboard is pretty bare. The Suns current scoring leader is Hakim Warrick. He averages 12.7 points per game.

The Rest

Sunday’s game, in Phoenix at 7 PM Central time, will not be one of the most enjoyable in the NBA this season, but it’s an opportunity for the Bucks to turn a road trip from horrible, complete failure, to just failure.

The Suns are in disarray, caught between being a rebuilding team and being competitive. They won’t be either this season. Think the 2006 Bucks with Steve Nash in Michael Redd’s role as star. Speaking of Redd, he’ll be with the Suns this evening, but he’s still not ready to play.

Outside of Nash and Warrick, the Suns are always wise when they involve Marcin Gortat as much as they can.

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

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The Milwaukee Bucks faced the same problem against the Kings and the Jazz in their past two games that they faced at the beginning of the season last year. They were the favorites! They need to be underdogs, need us to write them off before the game gets started.

Fortunately they are playing a team with Chris Paul and Blake Griffin tonight.

Things could get ugly.

Divert your attention for a moment though and read what David Thorpe had to say about what improvements Jon Leuer could make going forward. The Bucks rookie has impressed as a one-on-one defender and shooter six games into his rookie season, and Thorpe sees reason to believe his intelligence will help him move past some early mistakes he’s made. If things get ugly early for Milwaukee against the Clippers, don’t be surprised if Leuer is on the court when the Bucks make an inevitable run back to respectability this evening. He has a way of doing that.

If things do get out of hand, don’t expect it to mimic Thursday night’s pattern. The Clippers don’t pose quite as many problems on the glass. Despite the presence of Griffin and DeAndre Jordan, the Clippers are the third worst defensive rebounding team in the league and the fourth worst offensive rebounding team. Yes, it’s early, but that’s what the numbers have reflected os far, and outside of the aforementioned Gribbin and Jordan, the Clippers lack prolific rebounders. If that holds up, then, oddly enough, this is the sort of game in which the Bucks could really use Andrew Bogut to protect the basket, but the kind of game where they shouldn’t quite miss him as much as a rebounder.

And while Milwaukee can always use whatever Bogut gives them as a scorer, there’s at minimum, faint reason to believe we’ll see another strong performance tonight from California native Brandon Jennings. Okay, that’s more speculation than anything else, fueled in part by the memory of a strong run he had against the Clippers in March of 2010, but I’ll hold on to my belief simply because I have so precious little else with this team right now.

Unfortunately, the Bucksketball staff won’t be around to get grades up immediately this evening, so you may have to check back in late tonight or early Sunday morning. But we’ll make up for it. I promise.

Your thoughts on tonight are always welcome below.

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

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”It’s personal so we are certainly not going to make it public, but Andrew needed to deal with it and will be mostly likely back on court in a couple of days,” he said.

Shoulders across Milwaukee are sagged in anticipation of another Milwaukee Bucks Brickfest without Bogut.

Sacramento offers the possibility of a more welcoming road venue though.  Through seven games the Kings rank 27th in the league in defensive rating, allowing 109.6 points per 100 possessions. The Kings defense could be the water the Bucks have needed so badly in this desert of missed shots their trip West has been.

Drew Gooden is coming off a productive if uneven performance against the Utah Jazz. Though he finished with a robust 24 points and 12 rebounds, Gooden makes a number of plays each game uncustomary of a player capable of such gaudy stat lines. The obvious fouls when he’s beat on defense. A three-point attempt. Desparate attempts to draw fouls 22-feet from the hoop that end in him airballing a shot. These are all typical Gooden moves that detract from his solid rebounding and scoring abilities.

He’ll likely get the nod at center again after an uneven first three games of the season. This season we’ve seen Gooden play poorly, get suspended, not play at all and post a very good stat line. Expectations for Gooden can’t be too high or too low coming into this evening. If the world were perfect, he’d seize this opportunity and turn in a more even performance with fewer mental mistakes, even if that led to fewer points.

When Bogut returns, a more confident, comfortable Gooden would be a nice asset to pair with him in the front court. Talent wise, that’s Milwaukee’s best best right now. But the luck it may require to have both of them functioning fully hasn’t hung around the Milwaukee Bucks organization much the past season and a half.

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• Marcus Thornton

Thornton, the recipient of a a four-year deal worth approximately $31-33 million over the past off-season, has been the Kings most consistent offensive player early on this season, only once failing to score at least 14 points and hitting a three in every game. After coming over in February from the Hornets last season, Thornton bumped his points per game average by better than 13 points and has kept pace this season. He doesn’t get to the line or pass a ton, but he can get points.

In this game, that might make him unique.

The Rest

The Kings shot 32.6% against the Nuggets yesterday and are playing their third game in three nights. John Salmons is some how worse than he was last season, but he still hasn’t been as bad as Stephen Jackson. It seems like it should be only a matter of time before that sentence isn’t true any more. DeMarcus Cousins may have earned back his starting spot after a big effort (9-12 FG, 26 points in 24 minutes) in defeat in limited minutes off the bench.

Joining Bogut on the injury list tonight will be Luc Richard Mbah a Moute, Mike Dunleavy Jr. and possibly Beno Udrih (h/t Jim Paschke).

Check out TrueHoop Network Sacramento Kings blog Cowbell Kingdom for more, including a 3-on-3 with yours truly later today.

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

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Seriously, bring back the high top and the Kanye glasses

Confession: I’ve never seen Brandon Jennings’ 55 point game. Yes, I’ve seen the highlights, but never the game in full. Even though I should probably be putting up some façade that I’m some sort of expert that has seen every Bucks game since Glenn Robinson was born, I’m not going to apologize for missing the biggest moment in recent Bucks history. If you must know, I was doing charity work to try to impress some ladies. So get off my case because I was helping sick children at the time. Now get back on my case because I was doing good things for terrible reasons.

So for me, the 55 point game has always been more of a statistic than an experience. It’s an outlier: a really large number that I look at with no emotion, sometimes even quizzically. And even though I can see past Jennings’ great con or at least I believe I can, I’m still disappointed by him and I honestly can say that I never suspected that. Because despite what some people may believe, there are a wealth of games that Jennings has played well in and do a much better job of showcasing his brilliance and identity. My favorite Jennings game was the one after the 55 point game against Dallas. This game was everything that he wants and defines him. The whole basketball world was watching – high stakes, chiaroscuro: not just toeing the line between scorer and creator, but destroying it all together. His box score for that game: 25 points, eight assists, a monstrous second half plus overtime and the charred remains of Rodrigue Beaubois.

The Allen Iverson comparisons were always bunk. Iverson is perpetually stuck in basketball adolescence. Mind you, it’s the greatest adolescence anyone has ever had anywhere ever, but he was never going to grow up. Jennings always has been moving toward some kind of basketball adulthood. I barely know what I mean by that, but I do know that it has something to do with my previous sentence about the line between scorer and creator and something to do with teamwork and something to do with his admonitions of his 55 points. It has something to do with him becoming more efficient, but not losing himself in stats the same way Terrell Brandon lost himself in assist to turnover ratio. Taking risks. Stopping to smell the flowers, then make a no look pass or a behind the back fake.

Sweep aside all the talk about swag and field goal percentages and what you find is that Jennings right now is about the struggle of becoming an adult. This makes him so much more relatable than he was before. And it’s what makes this season more intriguing than any season he’s had before or any season he’ll have after. The last two years were times for craziness. The future will be a time for settledness. Now is his time for becoming. He knows what he wants to be and he has all the style,  speed and handles to make it happen. But even Clark Kent had a hard time becoming Superman.

Tonight’s Game

Ok, that was just a lot of rambling about Brandon Jennings, but seriously, I think about him way too much. I was drunkenly yelling something about Brandon Jennings somewhere along Milwaukee’s North Avenue during New Years.  And I realize now that Jennings is the only girl in my life. I think about him way too much. Everything he does affects me more than it should. And when he inevitably leaves, I’ll say he wasn’t that great anyway. If I had his number at that moment, I would have called him and left the best voicemail ever. I think about him too much not just because he’s the Bucks best chance for a star (as well all know stars=wins), but he’s also the Bucks only shot for any kind of acceptance, aesthetically or otherwise, both locally and amongst the basketball blogosphere. Heck, he might be the only guy that can end the Bucks leaving Milwaukee rumors.

I also rambled about Jennings because I did not want to talk about the upcoming game against the Jazz. In terms of watching this game, on a scale of 1 – 10, I’d rather have Batman punch me in the face.

Mike Dunleavy Jr. is expected back for tonight.  Beno Udrih is day-to-day. Tobias Harris has muscle soreness, but getting better. Game is in Utah at eight pm central time.

Watch These Guys, Not Other Guys

• Al Jefferson

Al Jefferson in the Salt Lake Tribune:

[Andrew] Bogut’s a special player. … I love playing against him because he makes me step up.

After being embarrassed by a Nene-less Nuggets team, Andrew Bogut needs to bounce back. That’ll be tough against Al Jefferson who has a very refined post game. But the Jazz have been allowing centers to average 19.3 points and 12.8 rebounds per game against them.

The Rest

Somehow Utah scores less than the Bucks, so this game could get ugly quickly. Hey! There’s Alec Burks, we wrote a lot about him this summer. Oh, he never plays, never mind. Well there’s everyone’s second favorite Badger, Devin Harris. Between Harris, Leuer and Greg Stiemsma, this is truly a golden age of Badgers in the NBA.

Ian Segovia is a contributor to Bucksketball.com. Follow him on Twitter, fan us up on Facebook.

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