Fall behind early, battle back admirably, close the lead to an obtainable amount in the fourth quarter and then turn the ball over and stall offensively at key moments, preventing a seemingly waiting to be had game.

Happened again against Orlando, as it has so many times this season.  Milwaukee dropped a tough to watch professional version of Monday night’s not-so-classic UConn-Butler battle for the national title, 78-72.

Tuesday was the lowest of lows for the Bucks starting five.  Coach Scott Skiles took the drastic measure of inserting an entirely new five man group after Milwaukee’s first unit failed to score for the first 6:39 of the game.  Facing a 14-0 deficit, Milwaukee didn’t have just have a hole to dig itself out of, the Bucks were more like the child trapped at the bottom of the well.  And, as they so often do, the Bucks worked hard at getting out of that predicament.

From the moment the Bucks starters made their mass exit until just 2:01 remained in the game, Milwaukee out-scored Orlando 58-44.  Consecutive rather wacky baskets from Drew Gooden (is there anyone else on the Bucks whose shots are ever described as wacky?) left the Bucks even with Orlando, 72-72.  But the Bucks would out-cold their opponent once again, missing their final four shots, while mixing in a costly and completely avoidable turnover.  The Magic capitalized on the Bucks misfortune and put to bed a game they really had no business winning.

Fortunately for Orlando, Milwaukee had even less business winning it.

Read more…

Recap/Box Score/Enemy

Once upon a time the NBA was a league full of really good centers.  Every few nights a Hall of Fame caliber big man would march into your arena, looking to take apart your team inside.  But that’s not really the case anymore.  It’s a guard dominated league these days.  Typically, when your team’s starting center is out, it’s not that hard to get by with a backup for a while, because there are only a few really worrisome centers left in the league.

Unfortunately for the Milwaukee Bucks, the best of a thin bunch plays for the Orlando Magic and his arrival in Milwaukee Wednesday coincided with another migraine for Andrew Bogut.

Without their defensive anchor and already playing short-handed up front, Milwaukee had few answers for Dwight Howard. Howard feasted on a Bucks front line fighting an up hill battle, posting 31 points and 22 rebounds in a 93-89 Orlando overtime win.

Overtime?  The Magic needed overtime to topple a Bucks team without Bogut?  They did.

Milwaukee’s offensive issues have been well documented this season, but what’s kind of flown under the radar has been their ability to drag their opponents into the muck with them, make them fight it out on the same level.  They pulled this trick off once again against the heavily favored Magic.  Sure, Howard had a big game, but the Bucks sent him to the free throw line 24 times to earn those points.  Howard obliged and made just 13.

When Howard wasn’t shooting free throws, his teammates weren’t having overwhelming success elsewhere.  Orlando turned the ball over 19 times, leading to 20 Bucks points and the Magic shot just 43.4% from the field while hitting only seven of 27 three-point attempts.  Milwaukee did what they needed to do defensively, as they have so many times before this season.  They brought Orlando down to their level.

But if Milwaukee is going to bring teams down into the dirt with them, the Bucks need to be the ones to climb out first.  Milwaukee didn’t make things easy on itself early with a six for 22 first quarter effort, but strong second and third quarters left the game within reach.  It was the same costly errors that have plagued them throughout the season that let this game slip away.  A shot clock violation with 3:42 to play, seven offensive rebounds for the Magic in the fourth quarter, a ball dribbled off a foot into the Magic in crunch time, those things all end up coming back to haunt teams.

Milwaukee did enough right to stay in it against the Magic for virtually the entire game Wednesday. They just couldn’t do enough right to win.

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Recap/Box Score/Enemy

In Orlando Wednesday night, Milwaukee made a run in the fourth quarter to make things look respectable, but trailed by double digits virtually the entire game.  The culprit?  A shooting percentage that hovered under 33% again for the majority of the evening.

It was the same story that’s played out so many times before for the Bucks this season.  Shoot so horribly throughout the majority of the game, then try and furiously scramble back into the game once a few shots finally fall.  The Bucks made exactly one third of their shots before the fourth quarter, and then shot 12 of 21 in the final period.  They pulled within five at one point, but after Hedo Turkoglu answered with a three, they failed to get inside of eight points the rest of the way.  They got close enough in the fourth that it seemed feasible and really made you damn their 15 of 32 outing from the free throw line.

But an offense like the Bucks holds them back so dearly.

If Milwaukee was just bad offensively, and by that I mean a steady 40% shooting team through the first three quarters, they would have kept the game close enough for their final run to possibly put them over the top.  Milwaukee’s rarely just bad offensively though.  They’re more frequently historically bad offensively.

Their outing dropped their offensive rating to 99.7 for the season.  No team since the pre-Chris Paul New Orleans Hornets of 2004-05 has been so bad.  Those Hornets are the ones that were held hostage by Baron Davis and suited up 22 different players that season while starting 19 different faces.  Starters on that team include: Casey Jacobson, Lee Nailon, Jackson Vroman, Bostjan Nachbar and Junior Harrington. That’s the team the Bucks are playing like offensively.

The season before though, two teams finished with an offensive rating lower than 99.7.  The Toronto Raptors and … Scott Skiles’ Chicago Bulls.  Skiles was fired after 66 games, but the team continued to play horribly after his exit.  That scenario likely won’t play out this season, as Milwaukee is still one of the league’s premier defensive squads and firing Skiles hardly seems like an offensive solution for this team, but it’s worth mentioning nonetheless.  The last time a Skiles team performed this poorly offensively, he ended up out of a job. Read more…

Enemy: MagicBasketball.net

Point Guard
Keyon Dooling vs. Jameer Nelson

Nelson is a good matchup for Dooling.  He’s small and not overwhelmingly fast, so Dooling should be able to put lots of pressure on him using his length advantage.  Nelson knows this offense very well though and always keeps spacing on the court.  He’s a very good shooter and certainly someone who Dooling cannot leave to double team Howard should the Bucks choose to do so.  Historically, Milwaukee wants to prevent the Magic from getting many open looks outside, so look for Dooling to rarely stray from Nelson.

Advantage: Magic Read more…

(Photo by Fernando Medina/NBAE via Getty Images) Warrick found little room to operate Tuesday night

One thing was very clear by the end of Tuesday night’s Bucks game in Orlando: Orlando is very good, much better than Milwaukee.  Breaking news, I know, but I just wanted to get that out there so we were all on the same page, just in case by some chance we weren’t.  The Magic are a NBA Finals contender and the Bucks are finally scraping back towards respectability, unfortunately that’s just the reality of the situation.  So it’s hard to be too heartbroken about a blowout loss in The Magic Kingdom.  The Bucks had been playing some of their best basketball of the season before Tuesday’s game, but it was apparently too much to ask for that to continue on through the evening.  The question going forward will be whether or not Tuesday had more to do with playing against Orlando or whether the not-so-long-ago inconsistent Bucks have once again reared their ugly head.

Offense

Non-existent once again, the Bucks shot just 36.3 percent.  When Jodie Meeks is getting playing time at this point, it’s generally a bad sign.  It seems to mean no answers are apparent or the Bucks are looking tired and ragged.  Both of those schools of thought applied to a Bucks team in the second game of a road back-to-back. Read more…