Drew Gooden will get by a guy like Pau Gasol for a layup and get a technical foul two seconds later. Drew Gooden will finish a wide open fast break layup and fall down for no conceivable reason. Drew Gooden will do his damnedest to defend Andrew Bynum and throw a pass through traffic into Derrick Fisher’s body. None of these things, not the good ones, not the bad ones, should be surprising.

Gooden was all Milwaukee really could counter the Lakers front line with, and he did his best. He’s typically a pretty uneven player, but Saturday night, he was better than that. He made a higher percentage of his shots and performed as well as you could expect against the Lakers tough front line. He often has the best numbers of any of Milwaukee’s starters, but Saturday night, he actually played the best too.

Elbow jumpers. I wonder how many Livingston has made in his life. It’s a pretty effortless shot for him, especially when he’s able to take it coming out of a post up. He displayed an uncommon blend of leaping ability and power with a dunk on a scrambling Andrew Goudelock. I’m sure Bucks fans are getting more comfortable with the idea of him as the starting shooting guard each game.

Before the game, I was thinking if the Bucks were going to be competitive, it would be because Jennings has 30 points and eight assists or something like that. Jennings had 10 points and five assists coming into the fourth quarter and the Bucks led by seven. Huh? Your guess is as good as mine. Saturday night’s was an okay game from Jennings – he handled the ball well, had only one turnover and pressured Laker point guards well, but only scored 12 points. And the Bucks still won and even shot 50% from the field. Weird.

He was like the perimeter version of Ilyasova. He hit two threes, helped facilitate ball movement, grabbed some boards and shot a good percentage. If Milwaukee’s reserves can make shots at a rate better than 50%, that would go a long way towards moving them forward without Bogut. Obviously they won’t every game, but on a night when the starters were solid, but not great, it was a big pickup.

While using most of his energy guarding the Lakers tough front line, he wasn’t the rebounding force he’s often been this season. But he helped the Bucks shoot better than 50% with his efficient night. Hit a three, grabbed enough boards in the fourth quarter to keep the Lakers from coming back – a game you’ll certainly take from Ilyasova.

I don’t know where LRMAM belongs on this team. He definitely belongs somewhere, right? Without Bogut, the Bucks can’t afford Moute’s weak offense and the best offensive options for the power forward and wing spots are clear.

I look at his stats and then I think about what I saw and then my brain hurts. No matter how I slice it, Gooden was an offensive force. He was wild though: looking unruly on his drives to the basket. Plus his passes are always just a bit off. But it isn’t offense that he needs to replace. He has to replace Bogut’s all-world defense. For that he is woefully incapable. Sure, let’s give him a pass today because he was protecting the rim against Derrick Rose and that’s a problem for 98% of the league. But Gooden and the other big men need to reliably guard the paint on their own. Often the wings had to swarm into the paint which left easy passes to make to open shooters from the post.

Jennings was all fire in the first quarter. After that he did what stat geeks like to call ‘regressing to the mean.’ He was unaggressive in the second and third quarters and ineffective in the fourth. He’s going to lead the Bucks to a lot of close losses. Jennings wasn’t looking for teammates as much as he usually has this season. Perhaps he feels a lone without his buddy Bogut. The pair was looking awfully good together before the injury.

It took a Bogut injury and Ilyasova foul trouble, but Leuer finally got back on the floor after he was benched for no discernibly good reason at all. The dude just knows how to ball: has a wonderful understanding of floor spacing and how to cut. Plus he has a swell jumper.

Offensively, Bogut isn’t where he wants to be, he isn’t where the Bucks want him to be and he isn’t where Scott Skiles wants him to be. Skiles was asked about Bogut after the game and he said he thought Bogut struggled tonight. Asked if he was concerned this far into the season that Bogut hasn’t been able to find his touch on his post-up moves and Skiles said, “A little bit.”

Take that for what you will. The center’s absence late in the game did little to increase Skiles’ popularity in southeast Wisconsin.

It can’t be all 30 point games and it can’t be all 5-20 nights for Jennings. There has to be some kind of middle. Monday night was just a little better of the middle. He shot a decent percentage, but most importantly, he was in attack mode all night and was finding teammates regularly. Jennings detractors often point to his low assist totals as a sign he’s not much of a real point guard. They didn’t have much to point to Monday.

Maybe he was tired of hearing everyone complain about his shot-selection or his ball holding or whatever else we’ve all been complaining so much about. Whatever the reason, Jackson took just one shot on Monday night, which was a fair amount of unbelievable. It wasn’t like he wasn’t playing hard – he drew a particularly nice charge on Joe Johnson in the fourth quarter. It was strange to see him so uninvolved with the offense though. He just moved the ball quick and went on his way while Jennings, Gooden and Dunleavy did the heavy lifting in the fourth quarter. Very un-Jacksonlike. He’s a man who could stand some balance in his game now that we’ve seen both extremes.

He said after the game that shots didn’t come tonight and that his role was no different. He went as far as to say a question about whether or not his role was different tonight was dumb. For the record, this is the first game in Jackson’s career that he’s played at least 25 minutes and attempted one or fewer shots. Seemed like a relevant question.

Gooden is so many things. Ridiculous. Polished. Aggressive. Complacent. Clever. Foolish. He’s all these things at once. It makes for a maddeningly frustrating player to watch and it was curious that he played so much of the fourth quarter. Yes, he has the ability to make a shot and his drives to the basket do often result in the free throws that Bogut never draws, but he’s just so damn all over the place. Despite the okay numbers, he had some costly defensive three second violations in the fourth. But hey, somehow he hit a three to tie it with a minute to go.

I give up.

Dunleavy still didn’t hit a three. So he decided he could be useful in other ways. Instead of coming off screens behind the arc, he curled in an extra step and shot twos. His form is terrific, spin unreal and release the same every single time. But really, he needs to start making some threes too. A good time to start would have been the one he missed with Milwaukee down three and no one within five feet of him with 30 seconds to play. Also he turned it over on Milwaukee’s last important possession. Sigh.

Ilyasova is very, very tough. He has to be leading the Bucks, if not the league in one handed rebounds that were tipped away from two or three other defenders. Jon Leuer has lost some playing time, a lot of playing time, lately, but be sure that Ilyasova is earning his share of what were Leuer’s minutes.

One of Livingston’s biggest assets is his size, not only because it lets him post up smaller players on offense, but because Milwaukee can easily switch with him and virtually anyone else on pick and rolls. Against the Heat, with James and Chalmers and Cole and Battier all involved in the pick and roll game, it was useful to have Livingston able to defend any of them. He had another strong, multi-faceted offensive game doing a little scoring, dishing and rebounding.

Bogut’s offense is still touch and go. It’s difficult to project when he’ll play well and when he’ll be leaving hook shots a foot short. But with Luc Richard Mbah a Moute back, Milwaukee certainly looks to have their defensive tag team ready to regain the belt. The Bucks held Miami to their lowest scoring game of the season and Bogut played a huge role in that.

Jennings wasn’t getting the same looks against Heat point guards Mario Chalmers and Norris Cole that he was getting against Iman Shumpert and Mike Bibby of the Knicks. Miami was forcing him to take more shots in the in-between area, not as many three-point looks and not as many looks in the paint. Jennings struggled to hit what three-point looks he did get, but he did his best to keep penetrating and keep feeding his teammates. He even chipped in on the glass, with no rebound being bigger than the one he grabbed late in the fourth quarter and put back in to basically ended the game.

Jackson did not start for the second straight game, but he did play in this one. He started slow, but hit two big threes, one late in the third quarter and one to start the fourth. He’s a gambler on D and he was able to poke the ball out while helping on defense on a couple of occasions as well. He looked to pass and had a couple of pretty assists too.

Jackson isn’t a lost cause, even if people have been writing him off after his latest mishap. He still has the talent to be a useful player, as he demonstrated against the Heat. And most importantly, this isn’t a guy who has quit on his teammates or anything like that. He’s still a competitor, and he’s still competing.

Ilyasova came in quick for Jon Leuer and made it difficult for Scott Skiles to take him back out. He was terrific on the glass and from a competitive standpoint. This was a classic Ilyasova game, right down to the made three-pointer. It makes sense that in an ugly game, Ilyasova was one of the players to shine.