(Squad Six made the trip to Indiana tonight. They were amazing and I know because they let me tag along. I’ll have more on that on Monday.)
Milwaukee allowed 40-points in the second quarter against the Indiana Pacers Friday night. Predictably, things changed after Scott Skiles had a few words with his crew at halftime.
The Bucks allowed just 30 total points in the second half and used their defense to create something they haven’t had very often this season: easy offense. Milwaukee topped the Pacers for their first road win of the season, a hotly contested 94-90 victory. A scrappy, undersized Bucks crew used their speed and quick hands to really bother the Pacers, forcing them into four turnovers in the game’s final six minutes alone.
With starting center Andrew Bogut nursing a migraine and not with the team, the Bucks flourished in the fourth quarter with an undersized group featuring Ersan Ilyasova battling 7-foot-2 Roy Hibbert at center and Luc Richard Mbah a Moute at power forward. Read more…
Only a day ago I was wondering if Brandon Jennings was even an okay shooter. I was concerned we would never again see the flashes of dominance or awe inspiring games that we came to expect last November. Less than 100 games into Jennings career, and here I was worrying that he was washed up.
That’s why I write about basketball on the internet and don’t work for a team.
In what he deemed his most impressive performance to date, Jennings carved up the Bobcats for his first triple double, finishing with 20/10/10 (6-8 FG 3-3 3FG). And while the numbers looked very nice at the end of the night, the most impressive part of Jennings game was the way he controlled EVERYTHING. All summer long we heard Jennings fawn over his new teammates and predict that he’d average 10 assists a night this season and with two separate 10 assist games this season he looks on track. His assists weren’t what most caught my eye in last night’s game though.
A year ago, we would often see Jennings make a shot or two and then take a couple more, because maybe he was feeling it. If he was? Things would get very awesome, very quickly. But if it turned out that he wasn’t? Things usually got ugly. That’s not an ideal scenario. Ideally, you’d like a point guard to get his own shot when it’s there, but work to get his teammates good looks too. And that’s what Jennings did so well Saturday.
There were no instances in which he took shots simply because he was hot. He waited for his opportunities and made the most of them. 20 points on just eight shot attempts is pretty phenomenal. It was refreshing to see Jennings finish 3-3 on his 3-point attempts after a rough first two games. Scott Skiles said he spoke with Jennings about staying on balance on his shots before the game and the advice seems to have paid off wonderfully. Read more…
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…
UPDATE: I’ve got the whole video thing going now. So that’s kind of cool. This is just the tip of the iceberg my friends. Here’s the video of the play diagrammed below, so you know what I’m talking about.
Every so often I’ll be diagramming a play from a Bucks game that I thought was particularly effective. Today’s diagram is from a open Carlos Delfino jumper last night that began with 3:38 to go in the fourth quarter. He missed the shot ultimately, but the creation of it was very well executed. For a team that’s been struggling with that sort of thing, it was a relief to see.
Leave some feedback and let me know what you think.
(NOTE: Squiggly lines are dribbles, dotted lines are passes, lines with a line at the end are picks and lines with arrows are cuts.)
Milwaukee may consider changing their logo this pre-season to something more appropriate.
The body count keeps rising in Milwaukee and the Bucks significant depth is getting an early test. Of course, it’s still pre-season, so if the injuries are going to come, let’s go ahead and get them all out of the way now.
Milwaukee was able to beat the Bobcats Saturday night, 86-78, despite playing without Jon Brockman whojoined the list of the walking wounded with an ankle sprain in Friday night’s loss at Detroit. Since things are going as they are right now, Larry Sanders sprained an ankle himself in Saturday’s game, playing only nine minutes before leaving the game for good and Brandon Jennings suffered a scare himself, coming down funny on his ankle in the third quarter.
I’d expect all of the Bucks players to find a way to be ready when things get started for real in a few weeks, but this has certainly been a health challenged squad thus far. Six different Bucks players have missed games or parts of games due to injuries … THROUGH THREE PRE-SEASON GAMES.
All health problems aside, it’s nice to see Milwaukee back in the win column and some key players playing well again. Read more…
