Bad start all around for the Milwaukee Bucks
After the Bucks generated no offense at all in the preseason I and others expressed concern. "Naaahhh" said the Bucks through their media mouthpiece the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "It was just the preseason, we were just fuckin' around." And when the defensive improvements that appeared early on took a severe backturn in the waning exhibition games, we were told not to be concerned, that guys were resting, or hurt, or, oh I can't remember their other excuses.
We were clearly right to be concerned. The Bucks put on an absolute dogshit performance last night in their opening game. They were horrible in nearly every aspect of basketball.
How bad was it? Last year the worst offensive team in the Association averaged 97.4 pts per 100 possessions. Last night the Bucks averaged 89.5 pts per 100 possessions. Last year the worst defensive team in the Association allowed 110.0 pts per 100 possessions. Last night the Bucks allowed 114.0 pts per 100 possessions. Thus, if last night was a harbinger of things to come, the Bucks may be looking at the futility daily double... I don't even want to contemplate it... they may be both the worst offensive and the worst defensive team in the Association. Let's hope last night was in someways an aberration. But there are still plenty of things to learn.
What went wrong?
1. Mo Williams was horrible. He shot the ball 14 times, missed 10, and showed no inclination to carry out any of the duties traditionally assigned to a point guard. He made no attempt to set up his teammates (he had 1 paltry assist... 1!!) and he made no attempt to penetrate to the basket (he had 14 FGA and not a single solitary FTA).
2. The Bucks frontline was destroyed... mutilated... drawn and quartered... and left to rot in the Orlando sun. Just take a look at the Eff48 numbers below for the Bucks starting frontline and the Eff48s for the Magic's frontline. Its a view to a kill... its as if the Magic were playing against air while the Bucks players were playing in sand. And the scary thing is I can see it happening almost every night.
3. Charlie Villanueva forgot the season started. Seriously, how can you have that much talent and play that lackadaisically, poorly, and unproductively? Its the start of the season, Charlie. Where's the passion??
4. Bogut looks like an absolute clod on offense. His footwork is terrible, he has no jump shot... I mean zero... no reliable moves around the basket, and he got basically pushed around and bitchslapped by the far superior Magic C Dwight Howard. This is the last season of decision for Bogut as far as I'm concerned. This is it. If he doesn't show dramatic improvement over what he has displayed thus far in his career he's El Busto, Kent Benson Redux.
5. The Bucks "power forwards" Yi and Villanueva, combined to haul in 9 rebounds in 45 combined minutes for an utterly embarrasing .20 reb/min rate. They better step that up.
What went right?
1. Bobby Simmons looked spectacular. To my eyes he is not only all the way back, he looked better than he did when we last saw him in the 2005-06 playoffs. He must keep it up, and he has to start over Desmond Mason.
2. Yi looked relatively okay. He didn't look "great" as the Bucks announcers kept saying in their never ending and absolutely annoying attempt to pander to the Chinese audience. He was, in relative terms okay. I was expecting much worse. But the fact remains, in absolute terms his production numbers for a PF were awful. His Eff48 was a below average 15.36. And his 3 rebounds in 25 minutes is simply not acceptable.
Bucks Diary Eff48 Scoreboard (see footnote for Eff48 easy primer)
Bucks (Team Eff48: 15.6)
Simmons....33.9
Bell.......26.4
Redd....21.9
Bogut.....18.2
Yi......15.3
Gadzuric....8.7
Mason......8.2
Williams......2.9
Villanueva...-(2.5)
Magic (Team Eff48: 21.9)
Howard....48.0
Lewis......43.2
Turkoglu....33.4
Foyle......25.4
Dooling....20.1
Bogans....16.9
Nelson....16.5
Arroyo....5.3
Footnote: Eff48 measures each players accumulation of positive statistics minus that players accumulation of negative statistics times 48. The NBA median Eff48 score is 19.6. Anything below that is obviously poor. Anything below single digits is absolutely awful. By contrast, anything over 23 is generally good. Anything over 27 is very good. Anything over 31 is exceptional. And anything or 40 is spectacular.
posted by Ty Will @ Thursday, November 01, 2007
4 Comments:
This is one heck of a good game summary....can't argue with anything you've posted above.
I'm just hoping that you aren't writing the same and I'm not reading the same in about two-three weeks. Otherwise it's going to be a long season.
At least we were able to get Bob Lanier for Kent Benson....
You've hit on it. Some of these players still have perceived value. We can churn them over if we commit to it. But I get the feeling Sen Kohl is no longer into those kind of trades. I think he thinks he's been burned too many times before. But that's almost the only way the Bucks can restock talent quickly, so if that is his attitude we are in trouble.
As for Bogut specifically, did you see that mess he called an offensive game? On a couple of his "drives" he literally looked like he was stumbling. And that airball he shot? It looked like someone on the Magic snuck some stick-um on the ball just before he released it. I kind of fell off his hand rather than having an actual basketball trajectory.
That wasn't NBA basketball the Bucks played last night. It just wasn't. Here is what I gathered from watching the game.
-How was Bogut so dominant in college? How was that possible? He looked like a high schooler at times out there last night. He looked slow, uncoordinated and disinterested most of the time.
-Yi does have potential but unfortunately potential doesn't win games in sports.
-Villanueva looked worse than Bogut.
-I had great expectations for LK even before he was named head coach. I thought he was a natural for replacing Stotts and would have a Phil Jackson-like affect on this team. Based on the way LK coached last night, he may be a clone of Stotts. He rarely was coaching his players on how to improve on the floor. During most of the timeouts, he was arguing with refs over calls that were made correctly. I was totally unimpressed with how poorly he had his team prepared to play.
As Tyrone has posted, it was a horseshit performance. The thing is I don't know if it will get much better. It just seems to me that there are a bunch more talented/better coached teams in the NBA.
We are fighting at RealGm over whether this was just a bad game and the team will improve, or this was a foreshadowing of a 30-win season.
We'll know a lot more after the two games this weekend.
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