I’ve watched Oklahoma City and more recently, the Minnesota Timberwolves, load themselves up with talented young players. I’ve seen them flounder and flourish. I’ve also seen the risks. The Washington Wizards present the flip side of the destroy and rebuild plan. Sure, they landed John Wall, but they also have hitched their wagon to Andray Blatche and Javale McGee. It’s a dangerous game.

Dangerous as the game may be, I’ve wanted to see the Bucks play it since it was obvious Michael Redd wasn’t enough to make the Bucks relevant. Playoff appearances may generate some revenue, but title contenders are what really sparks fan interest. Title contenders capture hearts and minds. The middling records and low playoff seeds the Bucks have been shooting for since 2003 haven’t been of much interest, they’ve been Band-Aids on a basketball wound.

Many have been begging for the tank. We saw it roll out for a little bit in 2006-07, but the Bucks got burned, landed the sixth pick and Yi Jianlian. But with Redd coming off the books in 2011 and John Hammond the new GM, it seemed 2008 would be the start of a new era. An era where the Bucks would spend a couple years losing then many years reaping the benefits. Joe Alexander didn’t work out, but Brandon Jennings seemed like just the young dynamic talent the Bucks would be acquiring over and over for the next few years.

But the Bucks were ahead of schedule in 2009-10. The planents aligned and some how that team started playing like a real threat, eventually landing a sixth seed in the playoffs. That team’s success looks to have the Bucks set on an infinite loop of mediocrity.

Scott Skiles, Andrew Bogut and Jennings made them a playoff team and a two month out of body experience for John Salmons altered the course of the franchise. Suddenly, they weren’t going to be rebuilding, just adding on.

So we’re still here. Still not good enough to contend and not bad enough to land a potential star. That’s a problem. But the biggest problem the Bucks have is that they can’t go back now.

Beg all you want, but this team can’t and won’t be tanking any time soon. It’s too difficult now. This is what would have to happen for the Bucks to completely blow things up:

• Trade Bogut for nothing. No lottery team would ever trade for Bogut, it wouldn’t make sense. No contender that would look to add Bogut could give up any sort of value to a rebuilding team.
• Lose Brandon Jennings. Is Jennings going to want to sit through a rebuild in Milwaukee? Tank now and Jennings is gone after two more seasons, no question. It would take at least two seasons before the Bucks could get together enough young talent to move forward with.
• Fire Scott Skiles. Skiles can’t be the coach of a rebuilding team. He’s too good. I have a hard time believing a team Skiles coaches will ever win less than 30 games. Freak out about his rotations and handling of Stephen Jackson all you want, this dude is a terrific basketball coach.

Look at those three bullet points once more. How could the Bucks possibly spin those items as positives to the casual fan that follows the team and wants to see a win when they come to the Bradley Center? Impossible.

If this were Portland and the Bucks had a die hard base, maybe they could level with the fans and get their point across. In Milwaukee, where the Bucks rank a distant third on the major league level and probably fifth after Marquette and the Badgers, these moves would be unforgivable.

Even if they could some how find a way, the Bradley Center’s uncertain future further muddies the situation. The blow up is a four to six year plan. Six years from now the team could be on the way out of town. More than anything, the Bucks need to sell themselves to Milwaukee again to get funding for a new arena. A blow up may be the thing that sells them to the die hard fans, but after the past 20 years, stringing together a bunch of 50+ loss seasons right now wouldn’t appeal to the average tax payer. This isn’t baseball and the Bucks don’t have the goodwill the Brewers had.

So clamor all you’d like, but things aren’t changing any time soon.

Milwaukee will keep trying to catch lightning in a bottle like they did two years ago while the rest of us stand watching in the rain.

Jeremy Schmidt writes the Milwaukee Bucks blog Bucksketball.com. Follow him on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

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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!

One pixel on this venn diagram equals 8 miles.

Bogut was 3-for-10 with twelve rebounds and four assists in twenty-five minutes. In addition, his two-man game with Jennings was on point. Gooden was 4-for-10 with half as many rebounds and assists as Bogut in twenty-three minutes. He also was called for two defensive three second violations in the fourth. And his half-hearted effort to defend against Joe Johnson’s penetration may as well have been no effort at all.

Quick thing here: Skiles moving Ilyasova to the bench was a great move. He’s playing like gangbusters. But that move had good reasoning behind it. Ilyasova looked listless when he was starting. Bogut is active and doing well in rebounding and defense. His shot is just off. Reps are required to get it going again. He can’t do that while on the bench.

Scott Skiles Explaining why not to sub late in games, still not explaining why not to sub for an entire quarter:

We got a little bit of a hold on the game, and if you wait so long, bring the other guys back in it’s kind of unfair to them at that point.

Bogut playing late against the Hawks does guarantee the win. It makes it a completely different game. Maybe the Bucks get blown out by 20. But at least we’d all know that Skiles doesn’t just wake up in the morning and feel completely different about everyone.

Ian Segovia has seen 500 Days of Summer a handful of times. Enjoys it more than most Bucks games. Follow him on twitter. Like Bucksketball on Facebook.

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A lively Stephen Jackson against the Spurs on January 10. (AP Photo/Jeffrey Phelps)

“That’s a dumb question, because my role was the same, I just didn’t get the shots that I should get. So, I just played defense and went out there and tried to help my team. The shots didn’t come, I didn’t force them. I don’t think my role was different, that’s just how the game go.”

- Stephen Jackson after Monday’s loss when asked about his role after taking just one shot in 28 minutes

Stephen Jackson played in 761 NBA games over 11 seasons before Monday’s game. Never did he play more than 25 minutes and take one shot or less. Monday was a unique situation for one of the NBA’s notorious volume shooters. Jackson caught and released passes with serious quickness. He kept the ball moving like he was working on an assembly line. There’s some good and some bad to that.

He wasn’t a ball-stopper, which he’s been accused of being at times this season. But he wasn’t a creator either. He didn’t probe the defense with his dribble, he didn’t seem like a much of a threat to catch and shoot off a kick out, he just moved the ball along and went on his way.

It wasn’t like Jackson didn’t care. He played hard and gave a strong effort on defense. Coach Scott Skiles acknowledged as much after the game.

“I thought he was very good on Joe (Johnson) individually defensively,” Skiles said after the game. “Offensively, yeah, he just seemed to be moving the ball around, he didn’t get many opportunities.”

Have we ever known Jackson to wait for opportunities? He isn’t Andrew Bogut. He isn’t waiting on teammates to dump it down to him in the post. He’s typically the guy creating opportunities for his teammates.

But Milwaukee didn’t trade for Jackson in June hoping to get Royal Ivey.

They wanted a complete player. Someone who could be relied on for some scoring punch, some assists and the sort of defense Jackson played Monday night. There was lots of talk about his ability to create shots for not only himself, but for others. We saw little of that creativity from Jackson against the Hawks. Not that it’s bad that Jackson was moving the ball. Forcing shots isn’t a great thing either. Jackson is better off swinging the ball around the perimeter than chucking contested 28-foot threes. Sometimes he’ll do that though, so it was unusual he had suddenly removed all those very Stephen Jackson specific aspects of his game.

The reasons for the sudden philosophical shift in the mercurial forward were flying around pretty quick last night. Lots of people are crying foul, saying Jackson was up to something. So far, we don’t have any evidence to indicate that’s the case. If Scott Skiles really thought a player was doing anything other than making what that player thought were the best decisions for the team, I have a hard time believing that player would have played virtually the entire fourth quarter of a game. He doesn’t often get into those kinds of games, especially in the fourth quarter of a game the team could really use.

We’ve seen two extreme sides of Jackson this season. There have been games where he’s come in and shot without conscience. In Milwaukee’s opener in Charlottes this year, hardly a moment went by when Jackson was on the court that he didn’t shoot. And in most games, when he hasn’t been shooting, he’s been looking to find teammates cutting or somewhere around the hoop. He’s taken more than his share of chances with the ball all season.

Monday he took zero chances. He played as safe as a player can play. When Brandon Jennings kicked out to him after a Milwaukee offensive rebound with the Bucks down three and 30 seconds to play, Jackson gave it up immediately when Jennings got back behind the arc and headed into the corner. Stephen Jackson, of all people, seemed to have little interest in offense with 30 seconds to play.

Jackson obviously wasn’t interested in talking about the differences in his game Monday when contrasted with his typical outings. That likely was his defense mechanisms kicking in once again. He’s been burned so many times before, it kind of seems like Jackson looks to take a shot at everyone else because he knows they’ll be coming for him. It seems like a product of coverage of him throughout this career and all that’s been written about his persona.

So as for why his game seemed so different, my guess is no better than yours. But we certainly saw a side of Jackson we’ve never seen before. If we can see a side that exists somewhere between that one and the one that shoots constantly, I think we’ll all appreciate Jackson a bit more.

Jeremy Schmidt writes the Milwaukee Bucks blog Bucksketball.com. Follow him on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

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Per  Charles F. Gardner, Stephen Jackson will not play Friday night.

Stephen Jackson suspended for Friday night’s game vs. Knicks. Source said he missed bus to morning shootaround.

Jackson’s Twitter account had him hanging out with someone named “jones” Thursday evening, presumably Dipset rapper Jim Jones (he did that song BALLIN’ a few years ago), as his next tweet was about Dipset. No word on whether or not they picked up Juelz Santana.

Jackson was very vocal post game about his displeasure with sitting for the entire second half Tuesday in Milwaukee’s 105-95 loss to the Denver Nuggets. According to Andrew Wagner, both Jackson and Skiles downplayed his comments on Tuesday as an outburst from a competitor who doesn’t want to lose.

It’s not all bad news though. Gardner also reports that Mike Dunleavy will return to the lineup this evening, quicker than most had projected. Dunleavy’s injection into the lineup could be the shooting boon Milwaukee’s been searching for. The small forward has hit 36% of his threes this season.

Shaun Livingston will start at the two in lieu of Jackson and forward Luc Mbah a Moute, who has only played in two games this season, will again be active.

Jeremy Schmidt writes the Milwaukee Bucks blog Bucksketball.com. Follow him on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

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It’s one thing when a team is caught off guard and unprepared. Sometimes reserve players have huge games or rookies that haven’t been around the league yet show off a part of their game that the league hasn’t caught onto yet. Those situations are understandable.  It’s another thing when a team does a few things repeatedly and keeps having success with it, even when an opponent knows what’s coming.

That was the frustrating scenario the Milwaukee Bucks lived through on Tuesday night. The Denver Nuggets were hitting the outlet off made baskets. They were hitting it off misses. They were going coast to coast. They couldn’t be stopped in the first half, even though the Bucks knew it was coming.

Layups and threes. It was so simple for the Denver Nuggets  Tuesday and it wasn’t an accident. Denver averages 33.5 shots at the rim per game, the highest number in the league and it isn’t even close. Miami ranks second with just under 28.5 attempts at the rim per game.

“The percentages league wide show that’s where you win: At the rim and behind the line,” Scott Skiles said before taking on the Nuggets Tuesday night. “People are always looking for the guys that have sort of the in-between game. But the percentage show, not that they’re meaningless shots, but that it’s the shots at the rim and behind the line. They pass the ball very well and you have to get back. They penetrate very well.”

So he and the rest of the Bucks were well aware of what the Nuggets wanted to do. Run, make layups and kick out for threes. At least it was in the game plan so the Bucks could prepare to stop it. Preparation doesn’t make perfect I guess.

The Nuggets took 75 shots on Tuesday. 58 of those shots were at the rim or behind the arc. Of those 58, they made 27, accounting for 66 of their 105 points. That’s not factoring in free throws courtesy of the Nuggets assault on the rim either. Denver made 29-37 free throws. That’s 95 points on free throws, layups and threes.

The Bucks made 28 of their combined 62 attempts at the rim and behind the arc. The 28 baskets accounted for 63 points. Milwaukee made 12-14 free throws. 85 points.

The Bucks lost by 10, appropriately enough.

Milwaukee even took 16 more shots than the Nuggets. The problem was the 29 shots the Bucks took between 3 and 23 feet from the basket. The Nuggets rarely bother with those shots. They attempted just 17 on the night. Denver knows what a good shot is and they chase those shots with conviction all game long.

“When you’re watching the Nuggets play, when an open guy is open, he gets the ball,” Skiles said after the game. “They have several guys with vision and they see people and they get the ball. So they really put the pressure on your defense to cover them individually, and then you gotta be aware and scramble out to people and contest shots. We’re not close to really understanding yet how hard we have to play and how hard we have to compete and attention to detail and a whole bunch of things like that.”

Scrambling out and matching up in transition was a huge issue for the Bucks on Tuesday. That sort of attention to detail has been a problem all season long.

“One thing we talked about this morning in shoot around was get back,” Stephen Jackson said after the game. “The coaches did say that a couple times. But for some reason they was just getting rebounds and getting out. We wasn’t able to get back. When you getting contested shots and they gettin’ layups, it’s goign to be hard to win like that. We just didn’t pay attention to detail in our scouting report.”

Skiles was pressed further in the post game. A reporter said his team “wasn’t that good to play this cool.” But Skiles brought up a valid point that gets glossed over very often.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” he said. “You’re dealing with human beings, you know? You don’t always know what it is. We have to talk to the guys, we have to try and figure out why it is that we’re doing those kinds of things. You’re right, they just ran right by us. We had several clips at halftime, you guys all saw it, where we just stood and kind of let them run right by us. And that was point number one in the game plan and obviously we failed.”

The Bucks aren’t robots, the Nuggets aren’t robots. And you can see in the above clips how frustrated the Bucks were getting. They knew it was coming, but they couldn’t figure out how to work together to stop the fast breaks. That’s what the Nuggets do. Human beings are prone to imperfection and the Bucks’ transition defense was rife with imperfection against a Nuggets team that feasted on it every chance it got.

They were simply better at doing it than the Bucks were at stopping it.

Most teams the Bucks have played this season been better at most facets of the game than the Bucks. Yes, the team is made of up individuals, but this is a results driven game. If the Bucks can’t start stopping what they know is coming, if they can’t start paying attention to detail, frankly, if they can’t start winning, this season is going to get away from them as fast as the Nuggets did.

Jeremy Schmidt writes the Milwaukee Bucks blog Bucksketball.com. Follow him on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

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Jackson posts up in some rare minutes against the Nuggets. (Photo by Gary Dineen/NBAE via Getty Images)

Stephen Jackson isn’t some nefarious, selfish prima donna. In fact, I’d wager that most of us, if not all of us have a friend like Stephen Jackosn. Maybe your friend doesn’t record raps in his spare time or make millions of dollars, but he or she probably has a similar throught process.

Jackson has a habit of missing the obvious, of taking things too personal.

I can’t count the number of times over the past two seasons that Scott Skiles has sat a player who hasn’t been playing well for an extended stretch, even for a half. If he went to someone new for a spark and the new guy helped to give the Bucks a spark, Skiles has always stayed with that new guy and tried to ride it out. He’s never seemed like a message sender. He’s just a guy who wants to play the guys who are playing the best.

In case you hadn’t noticed, Jackson hasn’t been playing the best this season. And with this team, there isn’t the typical talent gulf between the third best player and the tenth best player. Some guys are better than others at certain things, but very few Bucks have obvious talent advantages across the board, Jackson included.

So when Skiles went to Tobias Harris to start the second half, it didn’t seem like he was sending a message and he said as much later.

“I just thought he (Jackson) looked fatigued,” Skiles said after the game. “I thought he and Bogues both looked a little fatigued. We just tried to get some energy into the game.”

Jackson certainly didn’t react like someone who felt they had been pulled for such simple reasons. But he’s a human being, a specific kind of human being. Like I said earlier, we all have a friend who has trouble understanding the simplest of concepts. It’s not that your friend or my friend or Jackson is stupid, they all just have a habit of making things into a more personal situation than necessary. Given Jackson’s persecution, some deserved and some undeserved, throughout his time in the league, his defenses probably kick into gear quicker than most.

“If they want to blame it on somebody I’ll take the blame,” Jackson said after the game last night. “It is what it is. I guess they expected me to spaz out and go crazy. Too late in the game for that.”

When a reporter said he obviously wanted to be out there, Jackson was quick to point out that he couldn’t control that and he’d let the coaches have that. Jackson was then asked about Andrew Bogut’s minutes, equally limited throughout the game.

“Last thing you need to do is upset your best player. So, I don’t know. I don’t know what they was trying to prove. Hopefully they proved the point, whatever they was trying to prove. When they didn’t play me, my thoughts was just, ’support the young fellas, support everybody out there and try to get this win.’ If they want to make it personal, they can, I’m used to it.”

Jackson conceded that he hasn’t been playing well this season, but he failed to connect the dots any further than that. In his mind, his performance apparently hasn’t warranted any extra time on the bench given his track record of success over his career.

“I’m not playing well right now and I admit that. I’m not going to blame one person, but I will take the blame because I know I can play better.”

It may sound crazy, but Jackson is a sensitive guy. His defenses were up last night after the team lost and he seemed to have felt a bit embarrassed. He cares. He wants to be on the court and he wants to be playing well. He isn’t going to go into shut down mode the way Corey Maggette seemed to have by the end of last season. That’s probably a good thing.

But he’ll need to realize pretty quick that Skiles has a habit of treating everyone on his roster the same way. The guys who play wel are going to find minutes. The guys who aren’t contributing are going to find the bench.

The team surely did their research on Jackson and knew he’d occasionally get quotable after games, so I don’t suspect they’ll be too concerned with last night’s comments. Jackson has a way of saying a whole lot of things at once without really meaning any of it. He’s not going to skip practices, he’s not going to miss a game. It will probably be business as usual today at practice now that he’s gotten some things off his chest.

Think about the way you handle things with your hard headed friend. You accept the good with the bad. The Bucks will do the same.

And they’ll hope more good is coming pretty quick.

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Something wholly predictable happened.

It was so predictable, that Scott Skiles basically called it before it happened. Before the game, Skiles said this to Charles F. Gardner of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

“For us, we’ve turned it over more in some games recently,” Skiles said. “That will be the end of us, if we have a high turnover game today. We really have to have a low turnover game and try to turn them over.

“The turnover battle is going to be big.”

The Bucks proceeded to lose the turnover battle 16-9, but more importantly, lost the points off turnovers battle 16-2. In a 94-82 battle, those 14 points proved important. If nothing else, this game was a testament to how well Skiles knows his team I suppose. Calling that turnover thing before the game? That’s impressive.

Less impressive was Milwaukee’s continued downward descent on three-point shooting. The three ball was kind to the Bucks in home games against the San Antonio Spurs and Detroit Pistons, but cruel in games against the Dallas Mavericks and Sixers. Milwaukee made just three of 14 threes against the Sixers, while Philly poured in 11 threes on 23 attempts.

Between the turnovers and the three-point shooting numbers, this one was easy enough to understand.

More difficult to understand were Andrew Bogut’s strong numbers. Bogut scored a season high 20 points and grabbed 11 rebounds, dished four assists and blocked three shots, rounding out his stat lie nicely.

But it was the way Bogut scored that was so unique (all stats courtesy of Hoopdata.com).

He made three of six attempts from 16-23 feet. To put that last number in perspective, Bogut was 0-24 last season from 16-23 feet. Two years ago, he made 11 shots from that range and three years ago five shots. It’s a shame Bogut attempted six shots from that range in a game no one saw, because it’s nearly impossible to believe.

It’s also useful that Bogut’s begun to make some shots from long range, because his former skill from 3-9 feet continues to allude him. He missed all four of his shots from 3-9 feet. He’s now 9-44 this season from 3-9 feet and shooting 20.5% from that range on the season. Last season was his worst shooting season from 3-9 feet over the past five and he shot better than 41%. So Bogut is currently shooting twice as bad as he ever has on his baby hook shots and short range post-up shots. Yikes.

On the plus side again, Bogut went 7-7 at the rim Monday. Bogut doesn’t often get a lot of shots at the rim, and typically when he does they are assisted, but Bogut had just one assisted basket at the rim. Having failed to watch the game due to a prior commitment at work, I can’t verify why Bogut was able to attack the rim with so much frequency, but if Bogut’s going to continue to struggle on his short post up shots, he’ll certainly need to find a way to keep putting up such strong numbers at the rim if he wants to maintain as high a shooting percentage as he had Monday afternoon.

And if the Bucks ever want to find a way to win a road game, a high percentage shooting Bogut will surely be a key.

Jeremy Schmidt writes the Milwaukee Bucks blog Bucksketball.com. Follow him on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

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Some players enter the league raw, some enter it polished and most fall into the vast space in between the two extremes. Age often plays a factor, but not always. Some players enter the league raw and exit the league raw. It’s the nature of the game. If basketball were only a physical competition, our all-time leaderboards and memory banks would have quite a different set of information. But basketball is about a whole lot more than your natural gifts.

Larry Sanders is raw. He’s just over 23, which makes him roughly three and a half years older than Tobias Harris, and a little old to be raw, but young enough to still have promise. Whether Sanders will ever cash that check of promise he’s been given remains to be seen. But with the 19-year-old Harris, we can feel a little more confident that he’s going to cash in.

And that’s the advantage of not being raw. If Sanders is raw and, let’s say, Kurt Thomas is well done, Harris is probably medium rare right now. He needs some more time on the grill, but we’re looking at the makings of a pretty nice dinner. But what makes Harris further along, a little better cooked than Sanders?

In his first game with extended minutes, the Bucks rookie shot one fifth as many free throws as Sanders did all last season. He was poised, but relentless in attacking the basket and working in the post.

He knows damn well how to use his strengths on the basketball court.

You could infer that from the way Scott Skiles has begun to hand him minutes fairly quickly in his rookie season – Skiles traditionally only plays players he thinks can help him win – but there’s no ned to infer when Skiles has legitimately has had good things to say about his rookie forward.

“He’s got a nice post up game, he’s got a nice overall game,” Skiles said recently. “When he’s in the game and he’s got people equal size or lighter … we posted him up against a bigger player in Hakim (Warrick) in Phoenix and he took the ball, shot right over him and scored. There’s a lot of things he can do.”

As Skiles noted, Harris has been an instant factor in the post. Before yesterday’s game, Harris was 7/8 on post-up attempts according to mySynergySports.com. I likened Harris to a baby ox when describing him to a friend yesterday. He has good size and strength, but he doesn’t look particularly muscular. I guess that’s the life of a 19-year-old. It also give hopes that he’s going to develop into a real force physically after a couple seasons working with an NBA training staff.

But as with any rookie, whether or not he can be consistent is what will decide whether or not he can put all of his tools to use. Harris already has the misfortune of being a rookie in a lockout shortened season. And if that weren’t enough, he missed the Bucks first six games after a bout with dehydration. So his conditioning needs work.

With conditioning, perhaps will come consistency, the key to more minutes.

“Tobias has some things you can’t teach,” Skiles said. “He’s a quick leaper, he can attack the front of the rim and he can make open shots. We’re very high on him, but we have to see what he can do game after game after game. Can he be consistent and things like that.”

“His issue right now is just trying to catch up conditioning wise. He’s got a lot of facets to his game. It’s going to be interesting watching him play and develop.”

Thursday night’s five minute, four foul effort was probably not what Harris or Skiles had in mind after a strong first two games for the rookie, but there are bound to be bumps in the road as he works to get his wind back. As for what he can develop into once he does get that wind, a high percentage, high average scorer doesn’t seem out of the question. But the Bucks think he can be more than just a one dimensional player.

“He’s learning out there defensively,” Skiles said. “He hasn’t played very much and he hasn’t practiced very much. It’s not only trying to internalize our team defensive schemes, but also he’s playing against guys he’s never played against before. He hasn’t taken a lap around or anything like that. We’re confident fairly quickly he’s going to be a very good defender.”

A scorer and a defender? An original concept for the Bucks of the last two years. A welcome one too. The benefits of a rookie with some polish are showing already.

Jeremy Schmidt writes the Milwaukee Bucks blog Bucksketball.com. Follow him on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

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Losing to the suddenly mighty Clippers itself isn’t real cause for concern. That 36.3% number from the field that’s becoming commonplace once again? That’s an eye-catcher in the same way a black spot on a broken television is. But it’s not striking me as the root of the problem with the Bucks currently. It’s more the result of what may be a broken mindset.

I present this quote from Stephen Jackson after Milwaukee’s 92-86 loss to the Clippers Saturday night.:

“We need somebody to step up and knock down shots for us. It has been difficult on this trip, for sure. We haven’t gotten anybody with any consistency knocking down shots.”

This is the same sort of thing we frequently heard from Scott Skiles last season. Here’s a Skiles quote from a loss in late January in which the Bucks shot under 40%.

“We had so many good looks again. We had our chances to create some momentum for ourselves, and we unfortunately just couldn’t knock them down.”

“Knocking down shots” was a problem for the Bucks last season and it’s been a problem early on this season. At some point, you can’t help but wonder if maybe the Bucks just aren’t getting the good shots they think their getting.

Through seven games, Milwaukee is taking the second most shots in the league from 3-9 feet. The average shooting percentage on these shots across the league is 36.4%. Milwaukee shoots right about average and attempts 15.7 of these shots per game. Literally speaking, these are not high percentage shots and Milwaukee takes a lot of them.

The highest percentage shots on the court are, obviously, at the rim. Across the league, the average shooting percentage of shots at the rim is 63.4%. Milwaukee takes the fifth fewest shots at the rim per game and connects on 67.2% of them. The second most efficient shots possible, are three-point shots. The extra point is seductive. Unfortunately, Milwaukee has failed to acquire competent three-point shooters.

Milwaukee’s best three-point shooters, Mike Dunleavy Jr. and Carlos Delfino, have been limited to eight games and 32 three-point attempts between them. Brandon Jennings and Jackson, both shooting under 30% on three-pointers this year and both coming off a season in which they each shot roughly five threes per game while failing to surpass 34% in accuracy, are shooting a combined 12 three-pointers per game.

Coach Skiles said after the Clippers game that Milwaukee’s problem wasn’t one of effort. He’s right. Milwaukee’s problems go far beyond effort. All the effort in the world can’t get the right players taking the right shots from the right spots. Andrew Bogut’s expected Tuesday return will help the team for certain, but he wasn’t the cure all to this team’s woes last season.

It’s tough to know what needs to change for the Bucks to start getting easier or higher percentage shots, and even tougher to expect these poor shooting results to improve any time soon.

Watch This Guy Not Other Guys

• Steve Nash

He’s still the real deal in Phoenix, even if his teammates are not. Aside from Nash, the cupboard is pretty bare. The Suns current scoring leader is Hakim Warrick. He averages 12.7 points per game.

The Rest

Sunday’s game, in Phoenix at 7 PM Central time, will not be one of the most enjoyable in the NBA this season, but it’s an opportunity for the Bucks to turn a road trip from horrible, complete failure, to just failure.

The Suns are in disarray, caught between being a rebuilding team and being competitive. They won’t be either this season. Think the 2006 Bucks with Steve Nash in Michael Redd’s role as star. Speaking of Redd, he’ll be with the Suns this evening, but he’s still not ready to play.

Outside of Nash and Warrick, the Suns are always wise when they involve Marcin Gortat as much as they can.

Jeremy Schmidt writes the Milwaukee Bucks blog Bucksketball.com. Follow him on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

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Friday night was an exception.

The Milwaukee Bucks put on a speed clinic in the first half against the Washington Wizards, moving up and down the court like freshly slapped air hockey pucks in their 102-81 victory over the Washington Wizards. But the movement didn’t stop there. After the Bucks sprinted and passed the ball up the court quick as they could, the team took the next step that they’ve so often struggled with over the past few seasons. Their secondary breaks were producing points, their half court offense was resulting in easy buckets. They moved, they cut, they found each other.

It sounds so simple.

For Skiles it comes back to defense, as it often does.

“In the first half, I believe I’m correct on this, we had two stops in a row maybe four times, we had three stops in a row a couple times, we even had four stops in a row and we a had  a stretch of six stops,” Skiles said after the game. “So if you’re getting stops, you can push it. Long rebounds, ball’s coming out, guys are all in the NBA in the open floor and we have better ball handlers and passers this year, that’s how we’d like to play.”

But it’s often been anything but simple for Milwaukee. Friday night’s flair could be a sign of things to come though. Milwaukee’s offense has looked different with this season’s influx of ball handlers and, most importantly, ball movers. Now, multiple players feel comfortable bringing the ball up the court, making a move to the hoop and kicking out. We’ve always seen Brandon Jennings willing to grab a board and get out up the court, but so often he was pushing alone or finding teammates intent on holding the ball and planning out their attack.

But Mike Dunleavy? This dude never stops moving, never stops thinking and makes passes quick. Stephen Jackson? He might chuck up a bad shot, but at least he’s doing something quick. Remember the patented Michael Redd catch and hold? And hold. And hold. Who on this team is doing that? Evidence of the increased movement was everywhere: 26 assists were the product of players cutting to the hoop for easy buckets, the eight threes Milwaukee made often came from players making extra passes to open shooters on the perimeter and even the 20 turnovers the Bucks logged had something to do with the movement and speed.

“I thought we were trying to over pass a little bit, which we’ve done quite a bit, which I think is a good sign,” Skiles said. “It bodes well for us because of our talent at the one two and three spots. And we were moving and cutting and trying to hit cutters and they deflected a couple balls and got turnovers.”

Not that the offense can’t stagnate though. When Milwaukee stopped getting stops in the third quarter – Skiles noted they failed to get consecutive stops int eh quarter at any point – they scored just 13 points after dropping 65 in the first half. There are still bad habits that creep back in on occasion. The offense bogged down, the movement stopped and the pace became plodding.

No turnovers and no stops meant the Bucks were taking the ball out from under the basket and when they do that, Skiles noted that they become a very average paced team. Milwaukee turned back into a bunch of pieces working separately rather than a machine working together. It’s no surprise this is when they watched their lead slip from 24 to 12.

But the fun returned in the fourth quarter. Stops came again and the Bucks, especially Jennings, picked the pace back up. Jennings scored eight points in the fourth quarter (22 points on 8-15 FG with five assists on the night) and flashed some of the flair that we often see in his summer time mix-tapes but has largely been absent from his NBA game over the past two seasons, spare that first magical month.

“There’s two different BJs,” Jennings said. “There’s the summer time Brandon, where I just go crazy. But this is where I need to be more efficient. If I want to be one of the best point guards, I have to be more efficient and also, win.”

Jeremy Schmidt writes the Milwaukee Bucks blog Bucksketball.com. Follow him on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

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