The Bratwurst - Milwaukee Bucks Blog

Didn’t get a chance to watch the game, but Michael Redd dropped 45 and the Bucks beat the Lakers.

Terry Stotts appeared to actually do more coaching and keep a tight reign on who was getting minutes.  More minutes for the starters, especially on a younger team where fatigue isn’t much of a concern, sounds like a good strategy.

I would still like to see someone other than Michael Redd, namely Andrew Bogut, go nuts and lead the team one night.

After yet another Bucks collapse after having a lead, it is time for me to send out the SOS.  Save our souls or fire Terry Stotts.

A coaching change might actually do the team well, despite what many say.  Obviously, this is a team with talent.  This isn’t a bottom cellar team.  They have the pieces to be a playoff team, they just need molded.  Some of that molding is already complete, the Bucks are completely capable of getting leads in the first half, and getting hot and coming back from deficits.  The offensive powerhouse that is the Milwaukee Bucks is built to do this.  A coach is needed to manage the other aspects.

The Bucks came into the second half of Saturday night’s game with a 14-point lead.  Come the end of the third quarter though the Bucks looked like a different team and the Celtics were on a roll.  What was happening?  The current starting 5 was on the court looking like a dysfunctional team, getting beat both on offense and defense.  Terry Stotts had two choices once he saw this swing starting.  He could call a timeout, change up the lineup, slow the game down, and instill a defensive mindset in the players on the court.  He could have also called a timeout and set-up a series of go-to plays designed to screen off defenders and get a Andrew Bogut/Michael Redd pick-n-roll play.

What did Terry Stotts do (which may spawn the popular catch phrase What Would Terry Stotts Do - WWTSD)?  Terry Stotts, probably working on alcohol addiction at this point, took the first step.  He admitted his team had a problem and called a time-out.  It was at that point he walked out of the Coaches Anonymous meeting.  The Bucks changed absolutely nothing.  They came back out looking like the deer-in-the-headlights team.

The offense was still terrible.  There wasn’t any flow to the game, Michael Redd was still dribbling too much, Andrew Bogut still couldn’t get the ball in the post, and Mo Williams is well Mo Williams.

The defense remained in the headlights as Paul Pierce continually drove the lane and made the free throw lane look like Interstate 90 on Thanksgiving week (a blood bath of mangled deer carcasses).

Yes, the Bucks have two starters that are out (Charlie V and Bobby).  Yes, Michael Redd isn’t the floor leader that Kobe Bryant is, but he can’t and won’t be traded.  Yes,  Andrew Bogut has yet to find a crunch time move.  Yes, Mo Williams is an average at best point guard.  Yes, Steve Blake has yet to play well in a Bucks uniform.

Most important, however, is the fact that Terry Stotts has been unable to don the blaze orange and hunt for a victory.  In the events that the Bucks have a quiet floor leader (Michael Redd), the coach needs to step up and manage the team.  He needs to establish the tempo of the game and call plays that will enable the team to win.  He needs to shake up the line-ups when things aren’t working.  He needs to reign in his point guard and star shooting guard who tend to dribble more and think less in crunch time.

Instead of leading his deer into the woods, away from the men in blaze orange, Terry Stotts lets the Bucks play on the Interstate.

Terry Stotts needs to go.

Consider my application hereby submitted for the future Milwaukee Bucks Head Coach vacancy.  Larry Harris, my phone number is 608-774-0704.  Demonstration of ability to yell at millionaire underachievers available upon request.

The Bucks have been terrible in crunch time this year.  I have a few thoughts as to why.

• Terry Stotts never makes any line-up changes to interject fresh legs in the final minutes unless he has to because of foul trouble.  If your team ain’t scoring Terry you need to change something. 
• Mo Williams always plays regardless of the situation.  Steve Blake needs to play when the team is ahead, he has the right mentality for playing with the lead.  He is a pass first player that is well-suited to look for Bogut and Redd in crunch time.  He can’t score like Williams, but I have more faith in him as a decision-maker.
• Michael Redd dribbles way too much.  They need to develop crunch time plays, not crunch time time 1-on-5 situations like happened tonight vs the Pacers.  Both on-the-ball picks should be happening for Redd and off-the-ball picks by Andrew Bogut so that he can role to the basket.  This is not street basketball and Michael Redd is not Kobe Bryant.  Terry Stotts needs to teach and preach X’s and O’s.
• Ruben Patterson often doesn’t play in the final minutes in favor of Charlie Bell.  If the Bucks are winning Patterson should be on the floor.  He is the Original Gangsta and plays like a mad man on defense.  It should be made clear to him that on offense he only shoots if it is a dunk and that on defense he is needed on the court so that he can assault the opposing players with his  Jermaine-O’Neil-jacking-the-fan-on-the-court type anger.  It is far too often that players get easy layups on the Bucks late in games.
• No one should score against the Bucks on an easy layup.  You do not get to dunk or lay the ball in against the Bucks.  This is the NBA.  You will to get fouled and you will get fouled hard.  This is how good teams control the tempo late in games.  Fear.  Right now it’s a cake walk, and it’s sickening.
• Dan Gadzuric should never touch the ball on offense in a close game.  Come to think of it, why isn’t Brian Skinner on the court?
• Ersan does not in any circumstance belong on the court late in a close game.  In the event that he would need to come into the game a random fan shall be selected from the crowd to take his place.  He does not have pressure experience in the NBA yet and this isn’t the time for him to learn it.  He needs a good 1,000 minutes of regular season experience before I would even consider putting him in late in games.

In summary when the Bucks are winning they need Steve Blake and Ruben Patterson.  They also need to tighten up the defense and foul people hard if they try to lay the ball in.  They either dunk it over Andrew Bogut’s head or settle for jump shots.  Bucks defenders need to develop the “Over My Dead Body” mentality in the final minutes of a close game, because right now they are a pathetic basketball team in the closing minutes.

The Bucks blew yet another lead tonight.  They couldn’t manage to score in the final 3:30 against the Indiana Pacers.

It was painful to watch on TV.  One of these times I’m just going to break down and start crying over all of the squandered ability.

The talent is there.  The intelligence is not.

So, you may have noticed the absence of this website from the internet for the past week.  There is good reason.

The hard drive this website was on failed, which took down every website I have.  My gracious web host then tried to restore from backups and get things back on the road.  That didn’t quite work out like planned, the backup data was corrupted.

I didn’t have a local backup of the site yet (I had been asleep at the wheel for the past few months I guess).  I wasn’t too concerned though, I would just reimport everything from RSS.  Then it dawned on me that I hadn’t subscribed to my own site’s RSS feed.  No luck there.

What I ended up doing was taking all my stored posts on the hard drive of my desktop and laptop and re-posting them without their original date, time, and affiliated categories.  I’m just going to leave the time stamp as it is, however, I will be going through and recreating all the categories.  In the long run having the wrong date won’t matter much.  Temporarily seeing a story from August on Andrew Bogut playing for Australia may be weird, but it will disappear quickly.

The important part of all of this is that I have taken the steps to make sure it won’t happen again.

Andrew Bogut had a good showing against Team USA, but unfortunately for him (and fortunately for US basketball fans) Team USA was able to hold on and advance past Australia 113 to 73. The low point for the Australian team probably was the second quarter when they managed to score only 6 points to the Dream Team’s 32.

I wasn’t able to catch this game on TV due to some timing conflicts with a speaking engagement in my life, but Bogut put up a fairly strong performance according to what the stats and game recap indicate.

Andrew led the Aussies and had a game high (that he shared with Carmelo) with 20 points off of 5 for 11 shooting, including a 1-3 night from downtown. He was strong from the free throw stripe missing only two of his nine throws. He finished the game with six boards. The only weakspot was his four turnovers, which were to be expected with the pressure defense that Team USA employs.

From the game recap…

After the game Bogut conceded that the second quarter hurt Australia’s chances of making a real game of it.

“We just turned the ball over too much. They didn’t really shut us down. They forced us into turning the ball over and we didn’t really get any shots while they were able to run and get some dunks. If you play the USA like we did in that quarter, you’re going to lose,” he said.

But the center is hopeful for the team’s future.

“It’s definitely something to build upon for Beijing. We have a young team, a lot of college kids playing against NBA guys. Hopefully we can get a core group out of this bunch of players for Beijing and move on.”

It would have been nice to see a few less giveaways on Bogut’s part, but all-in-all I’m satisfied with Andrew’s performance in the tournament and look forward to seeing him returning to a Bucks jersey in a little over a month.

The Bucks defeated the Charlotte Bobcats 104-100. Redd against paced the team with 21 points. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has my favorite recap where the highlight how Charlie Villanueva fouled out the first two games. I wasn’t able to watch this game, so I don’t have any legitimate insight to add other than Dan Gadzuric still had another terrible shooting outing, even though he didn’t start.

Tonight the Bucks continued rolling and stomped on a bunch of guys wearing Dallas Mavericks jerseys. Dallas didn’t play Dirk Nowitzki, Greg Buckner, Devin Harris, D.J. Mbenga, Jerry Stackhouse or Jason Terry, which creates an easy win for the Bucks.

If this was the regular season and Dallas didn’t play those players, the Bucks would have used their starters to destroy them. Unfortunately, it’s still the preseason and the Bucks are missing now two starters. Bobby Simmons is going to be out for a month now with a heel injury, a downgrade in status from his previous “day-to-day” (which I previously believed meant I would be seeing him tonight).

So out of a starting lineup that included Andrew Bogut, Villanueva, Simmons, Michael Redd, and Mo Williams, we’re now looking at Dan Gadzuric, Villanueva, Ruben Patterson, Michael Redd, and Mo Williams. I don’t buy into the starting point guard debate at all (despite the national’s media attention to a non-existent issue), Steve Blake will not start, Mo will.

The loss of Bobby Simmons won’t hurt nearly as much as the loss of Bogut. Ruben Patterson, an off-season acquisition (the defensive stopper I said we needed), has played very well so far. What is more surprising though is the emergence David Noel. He has already shown that he has quite the desire to prove himself in the L and has the skills to back it up. Without knowledge of the long-term Simmons issue, I sat at the game tonight wondering what Stotts/Harris would do with Noel, whether they would let him ride the pine all season or send him to the D-League to develop. That won’t be an issue to start the season, he’s going to get action right away. The development of David Noel is the second most important storyline to watch on the Bucks now, number one being how the Bucks fair without Bogut.

Observations from tonight’s game…

• Mo Williams takes far too many bad outside shots. If he takes better shots his shooting percentage is going to go through the roof.
• The Dan Gadzuric/Brian Skinner storyline was mute in my mind tonight. What they do against a bunch of second-tier players doesn’t matter to me. I want real game situations.
• Terry Stotts did the right thing by keeping Michael Redd on the bench for much of the game, while the Bucks had the lead.
• What’s wrong with Ha Seung-Jin? I want to see him play.
• I was impressed with Steve Blake’s hustle. He will push Mo this year for playing time in the clutch.
• Charlie Villanueva avoided foul trouble tonight. I’m going to guess he fouled out of the first two games because he just came out with a huge chip on his shoulder from the off-season knacks on his defense. Once he calms down and learns how to be effective, he’ll be fine. Again like Gadzuric and Skinner, it’s a wait and see against better players issue.
• In my first time seeing Ersan Ilyasova play in the NBA he looked pretty good. He looked like he belonged. He’ll get minutes in the wake of Simmons being gone. David Noel will really push him.
• Damir Markota won’t make the team, just a guess. He doesn’t seem to get any minutes and looks a little loss when he is on the court.

Milwaukee 91, Mavericks 78 - JS Recap, NBA Recap, ESPN Recap

It appears FortressOnFourth.com is no more. I’m trying to search for the story of why it is gone, I’ll let you know when I know more.

The Bucks have been terrible in their past two games. Absolutely terrible. They have shot the ball poorly, they have played defense poorly, they managed it only score 4 points in a quarter (with the starters on the court). They desperately need to step it up Saturday night.

Thankfully, it’s still the preseason. Terry Stotts still needs to kick the boys into gear though. At this point they can’t have any worse luck with injuries, they need to keep the starters on the floor and just pound someone into the ground. Get that good morale flowing into the regular season. They certainly can’t go in playing like this, they’ll get stomped on.

Rockets 111, Bucks 97 - ESPN Recap
Mavericks 88, Bucks 71 - ESPN Recap

The Milwaukee Bucks rolled over the Denver Nuggets last Saturday after a terrible showing on their Texas roadtrip, they were led by 28 points from Michael Redd and 19 from Ruben Patterson.

Point of concern? Charlie Villanueva has yet to light up on opposing power forward. Plays haven’t been called for him yet (they haven’t been called for anyone really) and he has had foul trouble problems off and on. He’ll get plays called for him and will learn to avoid foul trouble, so I’m not concerned, yet. He will have to step his game up big-time though when the regular season starts.

Point of joy? Steve Blake has looked good so far. Ruben Patterson has been able to score, which should pressure Bobby Simmons to play better once he comes back.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel had the best game recap I was able to find.