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.”

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The Philadelphia 76ers have been something of a league darling early on in the 2011-12 NBA season. The Milwaukee Bucks have been largely ignored. The Sixers hadn’t lost at home before the Bucks took the floor against them early Monday afternoon on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The Bucks hadn’t won on the road. The stage was set, either for something wholly predictable or one of those upsets that would have had analysts and fans alike shrugging their shoulders, owing it to the lockout.

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).

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Tobias Harris isn’t raw.

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.

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This year is very quickly spiraling into last year.

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.

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Scott Skiles has generally led up-tempo teams, even in his few years in Milwaukee, but the scoreboard never reflected as much.

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.”

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