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.
After Brandon Jennings’s comments regarding the Bucks offense not running through him the way it did last season, many pointed to Jennings low assist totals and high volume of shots as proof that the Bucks offense still runs through Jennings. I looked up the numbers, saw a team leader in scoring and a guy second in usage rate and thought, “is he crazy?” But it’s worth digging a little deeper to see just what kind of shots Jennings is getting and how they come within the Bucks offense and what ever happened to that 10 assists per game proclamation.
When an offense is running through a point guard, that generally means the point guard is operating as the ball handler in a pick and roll scenario or is penetrating a defense through isolation and making decisions after getting past the first defender. The percentage of Jennings possessions in which he’s the ball handler in a pick and roll scenario or in isolation comes to 49.3% of his possessions.
In comparison, Derrick Rose, clearly the focus of the Bulls offense, handles the ball in either of those scenarios on 57.4% of his possessions. Rose’s numbers fall right in line with other elite point guards that largely operate their team’s offense. Chris Paul is right at about 60% of his possessions spent in these scenarios and Steve Nash percentages are even higher, with better than 66% of his time in these possessions.
But the results on those possessions between Jennings and Rose, or most any other ball dominating point guard, are dramatically different. On pick and rolls as ball handler, Jennings manages .84 points per possession while shooting sub-40% and 34.2% from three, while Nash scores .96 points per possession and shoots better than 50% and 40% respectively from the field and three. In isolation, the numbers are even worse.
Construction workers are trying to see if any positives can come out of the Bucks bricks over the first seven games.
“It’s starting to get a little bit ridiculous.” – Brandon Jennings
It really is, Brandon. After another sub-40% shooting effort (38.6%) in their Saturday night 87-81 loss to the New Orleans Hornets, the Milwaukee Bucks saw their team shooting percentage fall under 40% for the season (okay, so 39.9%, but still). More importantly, they saw the players who seemed to be coming around, regress. Most importantly, they saw their record fall to 2-5.
Offense is first and foremost the biggest hurdle the Bucks have in front of them right now, but inside of this one, the Hornets were able to capitalize on a defensive match-up in the fourth quarter to hold onto their lead.
David West must have stopped somewhere in Wisconsin and picked up a deer hunting license for the way he was shooting down the Bucks Saturday. He spent the majority of the game abusing smaller Bucks defenders in the post with incredible aggressiveness or killing them softly with an all touch fadeaway. Before entering the game in the fourth quarter, West had already piled up 22 points on 10-11 shooting (he’d finish with 25, 10-12 FG 5-7 FT). Out of other options, Scott Skiles went to Andrew Bogut on West in the fourth quarter . New Orleans saw this as an opportunity.
As soon as Bogut picked up West, New Orleans planted him outside and saw the paint open up for them. The Hornets scored eight of their 32 points in the paint in the final 6:32 of the fourth quarter after West checked in. Hornets coach Monty Williams, saw an opportunity.
“As soon as they did that, Emeka posted up and got an and-1,” he said. “If they take something away, we go to something else. They didn’t want to double team tonight, I think because of our shooters. We took advantage of what was there.”
Those shooters played a role in the quarter too. The Hornets sandwiched threes from Trevor Ariza and Marco Belinelli around a Jennings three to maintain a seven point lead with under four minutes to go. Milwaukee defenders repeatedly were beat off the dribble in the fourth quarter, forcing their teammates to collapse. They could only watch helplessly as the Hornets hit two crucial, wide open threes. Read more…
After all these months of basketball inactivity, it’s certainly nice to have an actual real live NBA regular season game to look through. That it’s a Bucks loss is a bummer though. Fortunately, from failure, lessons can be learned.
Lesson One: Ersan Ilyasova’s consistency may still be an issue.
It’s one game (I should just preface every one of these lessons with that, huh?), but it was a game that illustrated why the Bucks opted for an Ilyasova replacement at power forward. The Bucks Turkish backup can be an effective player off the bench, but when a player relies on his jump-shot as much as Ilyasova does, he’s bound to have some nights off. And when a player is a little smaller and less athletic than others that play his position, he’s bound to rely on that jump-shot. It’s a dangerous cycle. I’m not saying Drew Gooden is the answer to all things at the power forward spot, but he’ll probably hover around 50% shooting every night and grab anywhere between seven and 10 rebounds. Even if he does a few bonehead things along the way.
Milwaukee was down three points with :55 to go when Gooden made the bizarre decision to attempt a difficult shot from inside the paint. It didn’t go down and it left more than a few people scratching their heads. Defensively, Gooden had some struggles too. On the very first play of the game, he lost track of a trailing David West on an Emeka Okafor/Chris Paul pick and pop and allowed a very open shot. He’s going to do that from time to time. As he continues to work with his teammates and the Bucks coaching staff though, hopefully he’ll cut down on those types of plays. It’s far too early to tell whether he will or won’t at this point. Statistically though, it’s nice to have Gooden’s numbers. Now he just needs to smooth the other parts of the game out.
Lesson Two: Brandon Jennings looks hellbent on getting his pass on.
A common criticism of Jennings last year was that all he was looking to do was shoot, specifically jump-shoot, the Bucks into or out of games. Now, this wasn’t entirely true, he had to shoot a lot when the team lacked talent on the wings around him and his low field goal percentage at the rim was what really brought down his shooting percentage. Wednesday though, he looked like he was penetrating with passing as his purpose. It took Jennings until December 12 last season to notch his first game with 10 assists and even then he needed 44 minutes to accomplish it. The second-year-guard indicated that he’d love for his assist numbers to be in the double figures every night this year and he played like that was his goal. He did so without being tentative in looking for his own shot though, which is a plus. Oh, and he was 2-3 at the rim. Success.
Lesson Three: Defensively, the Bucks may be a work in progress
David West lit the Bucks up, partly because of poor defense, partly because of Chris Paul and partly because he was hot. West was 7-9 from 16-23 feet Wednesday night. For a guy who typically shoots under 50% from that distance, that’s pretty incredible. Part of the reason West was hitting so many shots was because he was so open and that has to do with Paul. Bucks forwards, Gooden and Ilyasova mainly, had to lay off West to help out on Paul. Because Paul can get into the paint so easily, the Bucks have to cut off an easier shot for him and make West take the more difficult shot. Sometimes, West will get hot, but that’s still probably a better scenario than giving Paul shots in the paint. Still, the Bucks were too often slow to recover or unable to contain the Paul/West pick and pop. I noted in my recap that communication seemed to be an issue, that’s the kind of thing that will hopefully smooth itself out in time.
Jeremy Schmidt writes the Milwaukee Bucks blog Bucksketball.com. Follow him on Twitter. Then become a fan of Bucksketball on Facebook (to the right).
After a pre-season wrought with injury and uncertainty, the Milwaukee Bucks finally had their starting lineup and the majority of their players available to them Wednesday night as the regular season began. Now that an unimpressive 3-5 run through the exhibition season was in the past and the Bucks once again had more players on the court than on training tables, they would be able to display the impressive firepower they had spent the off season acquiring.
Not so fast.
For long stretches of Wednesday night’s 95-91 loss to the New Orleans Hornets, these Bucks looked suspiciously like the ones that hit the hardwood in the first half of the 2009-10 season. Take the beginning of the game for example. Milwaukee scored just 10 points in the game’s first seven and a half minutes. Later they sat on 81 points in the fourth quarter for over two and a half minutes.
Simply put, Milwaukee’s offense was stagnant at times. The big worry coming into the year was whether or not the Bucks would be able to improve their woeful free throw totals of last season. They did, thanks largely to the predictably impressive effort of Corey Maggette (16 points, 4-8 FG 8-8 FT). Milwaukee finished Wednesday’s game 17-28 from the free throw line, pretty good for a team that averaged just a hair over 20 attempts a night last season. At what price has that improvement come though? The ball wasn’t moving as freely Wednesday as it did last season. Milwaukee assisted on 57% of their made shots in 2009-10, yet Wednesday they only helped on 42.4% of their baskets.
The Bucks have certainly added talent, but not talent so great that the they will be able to get away with playing isolation basketball. They’re still a team that needs to put teamwork and defense above all things and it’s very likely that Scott Skiles has been pounding that message into his players and will continue to do so. Milwaukee showed signs of impressive individual and team efforts offensively, now they just need to do so for 48 minutes. It’s a challenge to get a team to do that 60 games into the season and it’s probably a bit much to ask to expect a team to have it down in their first game after an uneven pre-season. If the Bucks want to take advantage of the Bulls being without Carlos Boozer early though, they’ll have to figure it out sooner rather than later. Read more…
