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Posts Tagged ‘Andrew Bogut’

Andrew Bogut is out and replacement options are thin

January 27th, 2012 Jeremy Schmidt 17 comments

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.

Read more…

Categories: Bucks Player Features Tags: , , , , , ,

Bogut Out Indefinitely

January 26th, 2012 Ian Segovia 16 comments

Andrew Bogut rolled his ankle upon falling on Houston point guard Kyle Lowry in the Bucks 105 – 99 victory on Wednesday.

John Hammond Announcement on the Bucks Twitter page:

Andrew returned to Milwaukee this morning to be evaluated by Bucks orthopaedic physician, and to undergo a MRI exam on his left ankle. The results of the MRI identified a left ankle fracture which will keep Bogut out indefinitely

Fracture’s are often a bigger nuisance than a clean break.

Ugh.

This season, the Bucks are 0-4 without Bogut.

Ugh. Read more…

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The East is as good as it’s been since 2004. So, the Bucks are in trouble

January 25th, 2012 Jeremy Schmidt 5 comments

I don’t wish to alarm you, but slowly and surely over the past few years, something has changed in the Eastern Conference, little by little. And this season, it’s more evident than it has been in quite some time.

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. Read more…

Categories: Game Previews Tags: , , ,

500 Days of Skiles

January 25th, 2012 Ian Segovia 4 comments

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…

Categories: Bucks Player Features Tags: , ,

There are no stupid questions about Milwaukee’s 97-92 loss to the Hawks

January 23rd, 2012 Jeremy Schmidt 19 comments
Atlanta Hawks 97 Final

Recap | Box Score

 92 Milwaukee Bucks
Andrew Bogut, C 25 MIN | 3-10 FG | 0-0 FT | 12 REB | 4 AST | 6 PTS | 0

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.
Brandon Jennings, PG 40 MIN | 9-22 FG | 0-0 FT | 5 REB | 11 AST | 21 PTS | -2

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.
Stephen Jackson, SG 28 MIN | 0-1 FG | 0-0 FT | 1 REB | 2 AST | 0 PTS | -1

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.
Drew Gooden, PF 23 MIN | 4-10 FG | 4-5 FT | 6 REB | 2 AST | 13 PTS | -5

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.
Mike Dunleavy, SF 31 MIN | 6-15 FG | 5-5 FT | 3 REB | 1 AST | 17 PTS | +2

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.
Ersan Ilyasova, PF 28 MIN | 3-7 FG | 4-7 FT | 11 REB | 0 AST | 10 PTS | -1

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.

Two Things We Saw

  1. The fourth quarter was a back and forth battle. Milwaukee needed stops on a number of occasions and Joe Johnson had really been getting into them. Yet still, no Luc Mbah a Moute and no Andrew Bogut. Very curious. Milwaukee had to double team Johnson late just to try and contain him and it led to two passes and a wide-open three from Josh Smith that pretty much sealed the game, given Milwaukee’s three-point shooting struggles. That a bad defensive rotation came with Bogut and Mbah a Moute on the bench left fans on Twitter pretty furious.
  2. Joe Johnson reminded us in Milwaukee once again that it’s very nice to have a superstar late in games. And if that star is 6-foot-8 and can handle the ball, it’s all the better. Johnson was giving Milwaukee fits late in the game, and while Jackson did his best, he simply didn’t have the athleticism to keep Johnson from getting into positions where he could make shots.

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