The Bratwurst - Milwaukee Bucks Blog

It’s New Years, it’s time for positive thinking — so no negativity tonight. Besides, there were actually some positive things to be taken from the New Jersey game on Saturday.

First order of business, though: IPM data has been updated, and I’ve added a new wrinkle. The Team Power Rankings will now include two sets of rankings: overall rankings as before, and rankings with only the last two weeks taken into consideration. Hopefully this will give a little insight into who is playing well right now versus who has posted the best results over the whole season. One interesting nugget from the 2-week rankings: the Boston offense is really sputtering right now. They haven’t been one of the top 3 teams since mid-December. Also, a ray of hope for Bucks fans: while it hasn’t shown up in the won/lost column, their offense is getting more efficient.

On to discussing the New Jersey game:

It doesn’t bother me that the Bucks lost. Anytime you play such a close game — the biggest lead all night was 6 points — the outcome is essentially random, and you’d think that the edge has to go to the team with the best point guard. Well, Jason Kidd is about as good as it gets. The Bucks were in the midst of a 4th quarter 9-2 run that looked like it would carry them to victory when Mo Williams fouled out, and that was all she wrote. Oh well. When you lose a 2 point game because Jason Kidd was making 3’s and Malik Allen was banging in jumpers all night … those are the breaks sometimes. They made the shots that your defense wanted them to take.

Normally I would complain about Krystowiak using too much Bell/Ivey together and using Redd at small forward, but that made sense against the Nets. New Jersey basically uses a 3 guard lineup with Kidd/Carter/Jefferson, and that doesn’t change when Bostjan Nachbar comes in.

All things considered it was a good, exciting game and with all that’s gone on with this team in the last week, I’m glad they still have some fight left in them. It bodes well for the New Year (as long as Krystkowiak does something original about the small forward situation).

I have to relate my favorite New Jersey Nets experience:

Several years ago I was visiting friends in New York and we made the trek out to the swampland to Continental Airlines Arena to catch the Nets and Bulls (this was when the Nets were going to the finals and the Bulls had Jalen Rose and Jay Williams running the show. Needless to say, the game wasn’t very competetive).

This was after the first season of American Idol, and to capitalize on the popularity the Nets were running a season-long halftime show called “New Jersey Idol.”

It was an elimination singing competition, where the fans’ cheering would decide the “winner”, who would advance to a later game in the season.

So Joe Piscopo is the host (I couldn’t believe it either! JOE PISCOPO!) and he introduces the 3 contestants for the night. He says that they will each sing for 30 seconds or so, then the fans are supposed to “vote” by cheering for their favorite as he holds his hand above their head.

The first girl is okay, the second isn’t so good, and the third one really sucks.

So Piscopo holds his hand over the first girl’s head to a smattering of applause. The second one gets slightly less, quite indifferent applause. The third girl … gets booed. Seriously, hard core, 10,000 people booing her.

While she is highlighted on the scoreboard, in reaction to the booing, she takes one step forward and starts flipping the entire stadium the bird. She storms off, the camera following her. She rips her access pass off of her neck, throws it aside, and walks off the court, flipping off the whole crowd with both middle fingers. Meanwhile, the entire crowd kept booing her until she dissapeared up the tunnel. And her whole middle finger display was highlighted on the jumbotron the whole time.

I turned to by wife and said, “Well, we just got the New Jersey experience, no doubt about that.”

I guess any NBA team would completely fall apart if they lose one key player (except San Antonio, apparently), and you would expect that to happen to the Bucks if they lost Redd or Bogut or Williams. But who would have guessed that Desmond Mason was the key to the whole house of cards?

I don’t blame Coach Krystkowiak for getting himself kicked out of the game against Chicago. The season is going down the tubes and it’s time for him to pull the “coach freak out” motivational ploy. He may have felt that the officiating had been bad in the 4th quarter, but I’m not so sure — in addition to the Ivey/Hinrich loose ball call (which the officials probably did blow), he was unhappy about a screen that Aaron Gray set on Ivey (which was hard but legal) and a call that went against Charlie Villanueva even though it appeared he was tripped by Nocioni (replays showed that Charlie V grabbed Nocioni’s jersey first). If Krystkowiak was going to flip out at the officials it should have come a couple of weeks ago in the 2OT loss to Cleveland, when the officials missed LeBron James stepping out of bounds twice at the end of the first overtime. But as a motivational ploy, it was necessary against Chicago.

However, this game was lost because of the rotations, not the officials. While I applaud Krystkowiak for getting away from the “two platoon” rotation strategy, he has not handled the loss of Mason properly.

I grant that he is pretty much being screwed over by Bobby Simmons, who has been absolutely useless. Obviously he can’t play more than 15 minutes, and even that leads you to hold your breath. Something is wrong with him, and it may have to do with the 3 game “personal leave” he took earlier in the month. He hasn’t been the same since, and one hopes it’s not because of a major or tragic personal issue.

I’ve written plenty that I can’t stand using Michael Redd at small forward, but in this situation it’s unavoidable at least a little. But his offense has fallen apart in the last 3 games, coinciding with the injury to Mason. Redd can’t handle the physicality of playing small forward, and doesn’t put enough defensive effort into it. So while 10 minutes a game at the “3″ is probably necessary right now, why not try to limit his time there?

Speaking of Redd, considering that Krystkowiak preaches that defensive effort determines playing time, at what point does spotlight start to shine on Redd? His defense may have cost the Bucks the game on Friday. After the controversial call that got Krystkowiak sent to the showers, the Bucks were only down two and forced a missed shot. But Luol Deng — Redd’s man — came in untouched and slammed home the rebound. How could Redd botch that play so badly? When the shot went up, Redd was standing 3 feet from the basket while Deng was 10 feet away on the baseline. Redd did not put any effort into boxing out, never turned toward Deng, and never even raised his hands above his waist to go after the rebound. He stood there like a spectator, watching his man flush the rebound home. All he had to do was look over his shoulder and box out 10 feet from the hoop and the result of that game might have been different.

Moving on about the rotations, how could Krystkowiak put a lineup on the floor of Williams/Ivey/Bell/Villanueva/Bogut and stick with it for 6 minutes in the 4th quarter? I know he clings to the idea that Bell can play defense, but how can you possibly compete with two total offensive non-factors on the floor? Are you trying to shut the Bulls out? Because that’s how good the D would have to be.

Bell cannot guard small forwards any better than Redd can. Bell gives up 6 inches and 25 pounds to Deng. What is he supposed to do? Meanwhile, Bell continues to seemingly go out of his way to shoot the Bucks out of games. He’s shot 4-28 (14%) in the last 6 games and yet has somehow played 132 minutes. And it’s not like he’s on a 6 game cold streak — he’s down to 28% shooting on the year. At least he hasn’t guarded anyone effectively either. What does this guy have to do to get benched? Check into a game without his shoes on? He should be spelling Williams for 8-10 minutes a night and that is it.

So what should the rotations be? Given that Simmons is only good for 15 a night and we want Redd at small forward for no more than 10, that leaves 23 minutes to be filled. You simply have to start putting Charlie Villanueva there and playing him alongside Yi.

Villanueva isn’t going to do any more damage defensively than Bell or Redd already have, and at least he’s got the length and strength to make opposing small forwards work to get the ball. That would have the added bonus of giving more court time to Yi, and also make room for a few minutes per game from Michael Ruffin (who is back and in uniform). Additionally, it would keep bigger, physical forwards off of Redd and allow him to get his offensive game back, which has really suffered from the pounding at the “3″. When was the last time he went 6-11 from the free throw line? It’s got to be partially attributed to him getting hit more often.

The Bucks can’t win without their best players on the floor and their five best players are Redd, Bogut, Williams, Yi and Villanueva. It’s that simple.

My suggested rotations:

Point guard: Williams (38 mpg), Bell (10)
Shooting guard: Redd (30), Ivey (18)
Small Forward: Simmons (15), Redd (10), Villanueva (23)
Power Forward: Yi (33), Villanueva (12), Ruffin/Gadzuric (3)
Center: Bogut (33), Voskuhl (12), Ruffin/Gadzuric (3)

I don’t see any other way. They can’t win with Bell playing a significant part of the backcourt or Redd being a big part of the frontcourt.

I can’t believe I watched the entire Nuggets game. That was painful.

I think that the single most disapointing thing about this Bucks team so far is that they have been blown out by every single good team they have played on the road (unless you count Cleveland and Portland. But it’s debatebale just how “good” Cleveland is and nobody knew Portland was good at the time). Orlando, Houston, San Antonio, Boston, Denver — Those games seem to be over before they start. Why can’t they even stick semi-close to those teams?

In the case of the Denver game, I think the altitude effect cannot be ignored. Since the game was the day after Christmas, you have to assume that the Bucks flew into Denver that day, and so only had a couple of hours to get acclimatized. That’s a significant issue — the Bucks are something like 7-30 all time in Denver for a reason. The altitute and accompanying fatigue is going to affect players in two ways: it kills the big guys’ stamina and the jumpshooters’ lift. It was pretty clear that Redd, Yi and Bogut were all suffering. Redd was missing all of his shots short, Yi was just completely out of sorts, and Bogut was a step slow.

On my honeymoon my wife and I hiked the Inca Trail to Maccu Piccu (I know, how romantic), a trip which spends 3 days between 8000 and 12000 feet. While everyone in our group had varying degrees of trouble from the altitude, one man had it really bad. I woke up one morning to the sound of him vomiting outside of his tent (some honeymoon), one day he trailed the rest of the group by an hour, and he needed supplemental oxygen at one point.

The problem? He was in the best shape of all of us.

Specifically, he was in great shape and very muscular. As I understand it, when you get in shape your lungs become more and more efficient at using a higher percentage of the oxygen you breathe. The more muscle you have, the more oxygen you need. So the people who have a hard time at altitude are those whose lungs are used to converting most of the air they breathe into oxygen — while most of us just need our lungs to work a little harder at altitude, physically fit people actually wont get enough air until their bodies get used to it.

Interestingly enough, the heirarchy of people who have the easiest time handling altitute are: Really skinny, non-muscular endurance athletes (like marathon runners), smokers (because their lungs are aready used to being inefficient), pretty-fit people, unfit people, muscular people. Professional basketball players definitely fit in the final category.

So now that I’ve explained away the loss to Denver, it’s up to the team to forget about it as well. At some point all of the blowout losses to good teams have to start to weigh on a teams’ psyche.

So at least now the Bucks get to play a team with far worse problems than they have.

Wow, was I ever wrong about the Bulls this year. Turns out that all of that depth and energy they had was obscuring that fact that they don’t have any dependable size on their team. The backcourt of Hinrich and Gordon has been exposed as way too small, Deng has been awful compared to the stardom that was being projected for him, Tyrus Thomas has not been ready to handle the job as a starter, and Ben Wallace — the goalie that was supposed to make it all work — has lost his dominance. Joakim Noah has been the Bulls’ best player. Enough said.

As everyone knows, that cost Scott Skiles his job, and now nobody knows what the Bulls will bring to the court on any given night.

The Bucks have actually recovered from the other road blowouts fairly well this year, and now they need to do it again. I’m starting to feel bad for Krystkowiak and his small forward issues, as it’s beginning to look like Bobby Simmons is not ready to contribute much. He was brutal in Denver (with a -0.01 IPM), showing that maybe he really can’t handle more than about 15 minutes. You would much rather have Redd match up against Hinrich or Gordon instead of Deng, so Bell at the “2″ isn’t that great an idea. Maybe it’s time to go for broke — Villanueva at small forward, sink or swim.

The season is probably at a crossroads now — Yi is playing better, injuries are causing a little adversity. How they play the next few games will be an interesting barometer showing if this team can make a run for a playoff spot or will sink deep into the lottery again.

“I’m just totally embarrassed to be a Bucks coach right now.”

Well said.

First of all, some congragulations are due to the Bobcats for even making a game of it on Saturday. After playing Friday night, the suffered through a myriad of travel delays and wound up having to take a bus from Midway Airport to the Bradley Center, arriving one hour before tip. If I was a betting man I’d have called my bookie upon hearing that and said; “Yo, Moose! Gimme FIVE DIMES on the Bucks!” It’s a good thing I’m not a betting man, though, because the Bucks were seven point favorites and I would have lost.

I must say, I was mighty worried when I sat in my seat during warmups and saw that number 42 was listed along with the starters. I was really hoping that Bobby Simmons would get the start in Desmond Mason’s place, and not only because Charlie Bell has been simply awful this season (while it is true that Simmons has been about as bad).

I’ve said before that I can’t stand seeing Michael Redd play small forward. The best athletes in the game play the “3″, and Redd is nowhere near among them. Moving him up takes away the size advantage he usually has against opposing shooting guards, and makes him both guard and be defended by someone who is bigger, stronger and faster than him.

In the case of a game against Charlotte, this problem is even worse, because moving Redd to small forward means he will spend the entire game being guarded by Gerald Wallace and Jason Richardson, two players who he is at a significant athletic disadvantage to. At least if Redd stayed at shooting guard he would see very little of Wallace (who plays a lot of power forward in Charlotte’s system) and get to feast on Matt Carroll for a while. As it turned out, this matchup would contribute to Redd suffering through a pretty horrific game by his standards.

So it was with dismay that I saw that Krystkowiak started Charlie “The Defender” Bell, giving up 3 inches and 25 pounds to Richardson and guaranteeing a miserable night for Redd.

But then Bell really helped the Bucks’ offense.

Apparently Bell was under strict orders not to shoot at all, which was a very good move considering he is shooting 29% for the season and the Bucks’ 4 other starters all shoot between 44.1% and 51.7%. It was quite comical to see Bell (3 or 4 times) passing an open jumper (one could almost see the thought process: “Open shot … No! Coach said he’d kill me if I did! Mo, here, take the ball!”) but one certainly couldn’t argue with the results. Despite taking no shots in 32 minutes, Bell had 7 assists, one turnover, and the Bucks would lead by as much as 22 on a night where they shot 49%. The final score (4 point margin) wasn’t indicitave of the game — the result was never in doubt for the entire 4th quarter.

I saw an interesting post at MKE Bucks Diary where Ty writes that Bell had the second best game of any of the Bucks. I find this to be a major stretch, but Ty is a big believer in Wages of Wins and Win Shares, so it makes sense to him. Personally, I have a major problem with the Wages of Wins school of thought, but that’s not the point of this post. If anyone wants to know why then drop me a comment and I can email my thoughts on the issue to you, but for now I’ll just leave it at that. By IPM and from my view in the seats, I’d say that Bell’s box score was pretty good for him and in the same neighborhood of a typical Desmond Mason line (but to do it without taking any shots is pretty nice).

But did Bell’s defense help the Bucks win? Quite the contrary. Considering that the team needed to win without much help from Redd (thanks to the unfavorable matchup) it was a good thing that Yi posted by far his best game because Bell got torched all night long. It appears to me that the way that any player helps his team win is by defending well enough to keep his opponent’s production below average while maintaining at least average production himself. So to be a positive player Bell needed to defend well to hold up his end of the bargain.

By looking at the box score it is easy to tell what Bell’s IPM was (0.563 — a little above his average but still not great). So what I wanted to do was try to judge Bell’s defensive effort by calculating the IPM’s of the players Bell was guarding. Fortunately the Bobcats use a pretty short bench, so seeing the matchups was pretty easy, and the Bucks didn’t screw around with many switches or much zone — Bell checked Jason Richardson in the first 3 quarters and Matt Carroll in the 4th.

It would be easy — and too simplistic — to look at the box score and see that Richardson went for 30 on 11-19 shooting and think that Bell’s defense wasn’t up to snuff. Richardson normally averages 17 points a night and has averaged a 0.750 IPM, which is quite average. In this game he had a 0.947 IPM, which is near all-star level. So I dug a little deeper.

I looked at Popcorn Machine’s game flow and ESPN’s play-by-play to assemble a “Bell’s man” box score, tabluating statistics that ocurred only when both players were in the game, and assigning Carroll’s stats to the 4th quarter (when Charlotte went with an Okafor/Wallace/Richardson frontcourt).

My data and caluclations are available here.

It’s pretty clear that the Richardson/Carroll duo destroyed Bell. The pair posted a 1.013 IPM while guarded by Bell, to Bell’s 0.563 (difference of 179%). Because I felt that Ty’s writings were worth some extra thought, so for comparisons sake I also ran the same data using Wages of Wins metrics (PAWS — Position Weighted Win Score) and found Bell to have a 2.90 PAWS (which is very good) while Richardson/Carroll posted an amazing 11.15 — a 384% increase over Bell’s production (PAWS methodology available here).

The biggest indictment of Bell’s defense, though, is the fact that the Richardson/Carroll combination against Bell was more effective than either players’ individual full-game numbers (0.947 for Richardson and 0.368 for Carroll). This means that both players were less effective when not being guarded by Bell.

So the money question is: with Mason out for two months, can the team be effective with Charlie Bell as a starter? The answer is an emphatic no.

While the defensive data is only for one game and thus a very small sample size, Bell’s body of work from this and last year suggest that he will always have trouble guarding bigger players. It’s a fact of life — his size kept him out of the NBA for 5 seasons at the beginning of his career, his shooting ability is what got him here, and the fact that he had to play so many minutes last season was a big part of the reason the Bucks lost 54 games in 2006-07. While Redd may be a lousy defensive player — maybe even worse than Bell — chances are that if his man scores 19 Redd will almost always top that with 25. Bell will not do the same.

Of course, it’s all good if Bell continues to have 7 assist/one turnover games, but that is simply not realistic. Should that drop to a more realistic 3:1 ratio, the drop in his metric rankings (expecially PAWS) would be significant. While one turnover in a blowout is no problem, 2 or 3 in a close game becomes a major issue when that player is a complete nonfactor offensively.

The “don’t shoot it, Charlie” strategy worked well for one night — but that was against a tired, jetlagged team and Bell played a perfect game offensively for his role. Long term it’s not a good idea, both because Bell’s defense isn’t good enough to make up for his offense and Redd can’t handle playing small forward and guarding the Carmelo Anthony’s of the world.

It’s easy to pick apart all of Harris’ moves with the benefit of hindsight, but you know what hindsight also shows? That no matter what he did, a best case scenario is that this team was pretty much stuck in the 40-45 win range. There were some rumors before last season (before the Villanueva trade) that the Bucks were close to getting Carlos Boozer. That would have been nice, but all the other injuries would have still kept last years’ team in the lottery. Even the Paul/Bogut question doesn’t send the Bucks deep into the playoffs – New Orleans has yet to even get there with Paul.

Even Harris’ bad moves haven’t really cost the Bucks much. Besides costing a second shot a Paul Millsap, his mistakes just mean that the end of the bench will be relatively expensive 3 years from now.

However, there are some lessons to be learned from Harris’ moves; both his mistakes and accomplishments:

1: Long term contracts to non-starters are mistakes.

While there are rare exceptions, almost all long-term deals to non-all-star players are mistakes in the long run. Especially in the case of non-starters like Gadzuric and Bell. While it sounds nice to have stability at those reserve positions, in reality long contracts create more problems than they are worth. If you want to make a trade it’s harder to throw in one of these bench players to make the salaries work. If you get lucky in the draft or sign someone good from Europe, then you probably wind up with a better, cheaper player than the long-term guy but don’t get the advantage of having a trade chip. And if the player in question winds up not playing up to his contract … ugh.

2: Hoarding second round draft picks is important.

As the draft has become so much more top-heavy with young and foreign players, second round picks have become more valuable sources of backup players (such as those with major international or college experience). In the last 4 years, 18 second rounders are still paying dividends (Varejao, Ivey, Duhon, Ariza, CJ Miles, Turiaf, Monta Ellis, Louis Williams, Andray Blatche, Ryan Gomes, Amir Johnson, Craig Smith, Daniel Gibson, Alexander Johnson, Paul Millsap, Chiekh Samb, Glen Davis, Jemareo Davidson, plus nine more from the 2003 draft). That means that a second rounder has about a 20% chance of being a good pick, and it’s a cheap investment – usually 2 years at the minimum with a team option on the second.

3: Building through free agency is risky, risky business.

People knock the Bucks for signing Bobby Simmons, but that’s unfair. First of all, the entire free agent class of 2005 – except for Michael Redd and Gerald Wallace – was total busts. Second, the Bucks had the cap room and they had to use it. It’s not like you can just decide not to bother using your space, hold it for next year, and sell that to your fan base. However, superstar players don’t just spring out of nowhere. When Simmons blossomed into a moderately above average player, that’s what he was. And because there aren’t that many good options in free agency, you have to overpay to get guys like him.

So here it is – Harris has had some hits, had some misses, but his tenure as GM was screwed before he ever got the job. He was shafted by Ernie Grunfeld twice and condemmed to chasing free agents to build his team.

“Denver trades Kevin Willis and Aleksandr Radojevic to Milwaukee for Scott Williams and a future first round pick (2004). Milwaukee trades Willis to Houston for a 2002 second round draft pick�

“Milwaukee trades Ray Allen, Ronald Murray and a first round pick (2003) to Seattle for Gary Payton and Desmond Mason�

That 2004 first round pick would cost the Bucks Josh Smith. Smith may be a head case, but he’s a difference maker. This would be a 50+ win team with him. The 2003 pick wasn’t as vital, since it only became Luke Ridnour, but who knows what might have happened with the Bucks holding two top 15 picks in a great draft (and David West, Travis Outlaw and Josh Howard still available at #14).

So all in all, Harris has done a pretty good job. He’s built a competitive team without the necessary draft picks to do the job right.

I’ve updated IPM rankings through December 22. They are available on the right side of this page.

I went back and forth on this move until I finally decided that it deserves its own post — and for you to decide if it was the right move at the time.

2005: Drafted Andrew Bogut ahead of Marvin Williams and Chris Paul:

First of all, at least Harris didn’t take Marvin Williams.

The NBA has a dirty little secret: despite what the marketing people and TV analysts tell you, most teams have no chance of winning a championship at any given time and it can’t be done by slowly building deep teams around chemistry and balance and a good-but-not-great big man. No, you win championships by having superstars. Specifically, Hall-of-Fame level superstars. The type of guys who don’t come along often and once they do, don’t change teams often. Actually, You need two of them at the same time. Jordan/Pippen. Olajuwon/Drexler. Shaq/Kobe. Duncan/Parker/Ginobli. Shaq/Wade. That’s how you win titles. With great players.

Detroit isn’t really an exception to this – they had two underrated, borderline superstars (Billups and Rasheed Wallace) and two other all-stars (Ben Wallace and Richard Hamilton) and an unprecedented lack of injuries for two years to win their recent title.

As it’s turned out, Harris passed on a great player – Paul – for a moderately above average one. Some day Chris Paul might carry a team to a championship while it’s pretty clear that Andrew Bogut might someday be a good third option on one. But second-guessing 3 years later is easy. Was drafting Bogut the right or wrong move at the time?

The case for Andrew Bogut:
Good big men are a rare commodity, and when they come along everybody knows it before they hit the league. Look at the best big men in the league: Howard, Stoudemire, Yao, Camby, Shaq, Okafor, Duncan, Garnett. The only ones of that group not taken in the top two of the draft were Garnett (because he was the first high schooler in 20 years) and Stoudemire (because the whole “5 high schools in 4 years� and other character questions scared teams off). That’s why when you get a chance at a good big man you do it – because you never know when you will get a chance at another one. Olowakandi aside, if there’s a big guy worth taking at #1 then he won’t disappoint you.

It’s not the Bucks’ fault that the year they won the lottery the big guy available just happened to be a little short on the athleticism that separates the “next generation� stars like Howard and Stoudemire.

Bogut has basically become what everyone thought he would be, except for some reason people thought he had 18-foot range on his jumper coming out of college. As he’s bulked up his jump shot seems to have gotten worse and worse, but maybe that’s actually a good thing – the last thing the Bucks need is a center who likes to float around the perimeter. He’s a high-percentage scorer, good rebounder (an a team where he gets no help at that) and an underrated defender (if you factor in the fact that he and Varejao take by far the most charges in the league, Bogut is actually pretty good at that end).

Bogut was the boring pick but the right pick. While Chris Paul may be a once-a-generation talent, there are still darn good point guards and combo guards regularly available at the top of almost every draft (Derrick Rose, OJ Mayo, and Eric Gordon next year, for example). However, there isn’t a true center on the horizon (trust me – if Roy Hibbert was going to be good he’d have been the #2 pick this season or #1 last year).

If they hadn’t taken Bogut they’d be looking for a big guy for 20 years.

The case for Chris Paul:

One of the main arguments why the Bucks didn’t seriously consider taking Paul in 2005 was the wealth of point guards they already had. TJ Ford was a question mark coming off of his neck injury, but all indications were that if he could play at all he would be 100%. They also had a capable, inexpensive second option available in Mo Williams should Ford not be able to go. Sounds like a pretty good reason to not take Paul.

But it’s actually the exact reason why they should have taken Paul.

In college, everything about Chris Paul pointed to stardom – he was the unquestioned leader of a Wake Forest team that was #1 in the country for a while with him as the only NBA player. His character was well known – off court he is very quiet and unassuming and on the court he has a “win at all costs� mean streak. He’s a cold-blooded leader. His athletic ability was unquestioned – as fast as anyone this side of TJ Ford, if maybe a little smaller than you would like. His stats were eye-popping: 2.5 steals per game, 3:1 A/TO ratio, 85% free throw shooter. He may as well have had “NBA Stud� tattooed on his forehead.

Meanwhile, everything about Bogut said “moderately above average.� Solid character, not that athletic in an athletes game, and he played in a pretty weak college conference.

Paul’s rookie season turned out to be a complete anomaly – every other point guard in the league since Magic Johnson has needed at least one season to get his feet wet. It turned out that Paul was ready to go from day one, but the more realistic assumption was that he would need a year as Ford’s backup to grow into an NBA role. This also would give Ford time to prove his health and raise his trade value. Mo’s contract was so favorable that teams would have been salivating to get their hands on him, and once Ford proved himself to be healthy the bidding could start. You think Phoenix would rather give up a low first rounder for 2 years of Mo for $3 million or sign Marcus Banks for 5/$25? Additionally, TJ turned out to be perfectly tradeable, so that point guard logjam would have cleared itself out perfectly well.

And now, 3 years later, it’s turned out that Larry Harris passed on the second best player in the game to snap up the 75th best.

Andrew Bogut over. Chris Paul: another perfect example of why you always take the guy who has the best chance of being a great player rather than the guy who best fits your team. Just like Bowie over Jordan.

Good or Bad Pick? What’s the Right Answer?

So you see why I call this “The Move That Cannot Be Categorized�? There really isn’t a right answer. How much better would the Bucks be today with Paul instead of Bogut? They would probably have Pachulia, and since Paul missed almost 20 games last year there’s no guarantee that last season would have gone any better. Say the Bucks would have won 10 more games with Paul than with Mo. That doesn’t get them very far – right there with the Knicks. So instead of Yi, they would have Joakim Noah.

Additionally, a starting lineup of Paul/Redd/(Simmons or Mason)/Villanueva/Pachulia still has lots of the same questions they do today – no bangers, no rebounders, no defenders. It would be a more exciting lineup; and having a guy who can get into the lane and draw a foul would be nice, I guess. But is that a great team? Not really.

I’m proud to say that in 2005 I was telling everyone who would listen that the Bucks should take Paul. But I was saying that as a fan. That doesn’t mean that if I was the GM then I would have taken the little guy over the big guy.

I guess that the bottom line is that this is the only move that Harris has made that could have changed the direction of the franchise, and that hasn’t happened. They are still a .500 team with only one borderline all-star and their absolute best-case-scenario is the second round of the playoffs.

But does that mean Bogut was the wrong pick? No … it really doesn’t. It means that there’s more luck involved than this than anyone would like to admit.

I’ve gone back and forth with concluding that Bogut over Paul was good or bad. And I think my final conclusion is …. Good pick. Even with Paul, there is no guarantee that this team would be much better. However, with Bogut in place it will be easier to retool the roster over the next 5-6 years than it would without him because it’s true – there aren’t many quality big guys around.

Up next: (part five in a four-part series) Has Larry Harris done a good job? The Conclusion.

In some ways, it’s a little harsh to give it to a GM who has made some mistakes because that does come with the territory — if you take a risk there is a pretty good chance it will come back to bite you.

There is a consistent theme to Harris’ mistakes, and they point to his major failing that I will mention again and again: he has been way too optimistic about how good his team was. That’s the sort of thinking that leads a GM to discard second round picks in favor of projects and that’s what leads GM’s to mortgage the future on long term “win now, pay later” contracts.

Just because he’s made a couple of colossal errors doesn’t mean that he’s a bad GM or that he wont learn from his past errors, but these moves are the reasons why this team has not been able to improve beyond a .500 team under his watch, and it’s going to take a major leap from the personnel in place for this team to get much better.

Bad Moves

2005: Traded Desmond Mason and a 2006 first round pick to New Orleans for Jamaal Magloire. This trade looked great at the time but would have been a complete disaster had New Orleans not used the pick to select Cedric Simmons. Simmons projected as the sort of tough, rebounding, shot blocking power forward the Bucks would need (and would probably have taken had they kept the pick) but instead has turned out to be an unqualified bust. Other than that, this trade is a perfect example of Harris’ overarching optimism clouding his view of the reality of his team – he felt that the Ford/Redd/Simmons nucleus was ready to make a deep playoff run immediately, and didn’t want a slow rookie season from Andrew Bogut gumming that up. Unfortunately, he failed to realize two things: (1) the team wasn’t that good in the first place and (2) neither was Magloire. It turns out that a slow recovery from a broken finger wasn’t what has dragged Magloire’s play down from “All-Star� level two seasons previously; it was that he had had a fluke good season in a horrible conference with no good centers in it. So all the Bucks got out of the deal was 2 years without Desmond Mason screwing up the offense, 1 season of Bogut’s development being screwed up by playing out of position, and one 8th seed playoff trip. I originally had this trade listed as good because it seemed so benign, but I’ve moved it to bad simply because they may not have taken Cedric Simmons with the pick, or may have pulled off some ridiculous, convoluted trade involving TJ Ford and the pick that would have netted them LaMarcus Aldridge or something like that. But we’ll never know, because despite having Bogut and Gadzuric and the chance to sign Pachulia for $4 million, Larry Harris had to have another center.

2006: Drafted David Noel (2 years/$1 million). I normally wouldn’t crack on a second round pick, but this one deserves it because it was such a wasted opportunity. Harris’ optimism about the team’s prospects got in the way as instead of trying to find a player who could help them immediately he went for a guy who might be good in 3-4 years (which sucks since he’s only signed for two). Noel busted onto the scene at the NBA Draft combine when he graded out as the best athlete there, which if you think about it is really meaningless. He may have played on big-time college teams at North Carolina, but was only good enough to start for one year. Now, before the draft I remember hearing rumors that the Bucks had promised the pick to Craig Smith, which would have been great had he not gotten taken before they got the chance. However, considering Smith shows that Harris wasn’t scared of taking an undersized power forward, and there was another one out there whose college numbers had all the math guys screaming “steal of the draft�: Paul Millsap. A stud at Louisiana Tech who led the NCAA in rebounding for 3 years, Millsap has become a 20 minute per game energy machine for Utah. He’s a dirty work player who shoots a high percentage, rebounds like a maniac and plays solid defense. He’s the sort of difference maker that would mean an extra 3-4 wins a year for the Bucks, and there’s no doubt that he’s the sort of player the Bucks needed to add at the time. But Harris took the guy who did a really good shuttle run.

Very Bad Moves

2005: Bucks do not match Hawks offer sheet for Zaza Pachulia (4 years/$16 million). Harris couldn’t match this offer because it came after he had already wasted his backup center cash on Dan Gazduric (see “Horrendous Move�). The problem isn’t so much that the Bucks kept Gadzuric and let Pachulia go (at the time, Gadzuric looked like the better player), but that the botched negotiations with Gadzuric cost the Bucks a ton of money and two extra years on the contract (to say nothing of losing the better player) and it was all to sign a career backup, considering that Andrew Bogut had just been selected. Meanwhile, Pachulia has played pretty well for Atlanta.

2006: Traded a 2007 second round pick to San Antonio for Damir Markota. I don’t have quite as much a problem with the fact that the Bucks did this trade as I do with the way it was handled. Harris had done well scouring Europe to that point (Bell, Ilyasova) so if he felt Markota had potential, why not take the shot. First of all, the Bucks never even had to bring Markota to the NBA in the first place. They could have let him stay in Europe, get a little older, and develop his game. Once they did bring him in, why let him stagnate on the bench? Why not use him? Why not send him to the D-League? It worked pretty well for Ilyasova the year before. It was just unreal – last season got worse and worse, the pick the Bucks owed to San Antonio got better and better, and Markota still sat on the bench, even in March and April when the season was completely lost. Since he was released this year, it appears to me that Harris figured out early on that he had really screwed this one up — Markota wasn’t that good in the first place and sending him to the NBDL wouldn’t fix that. Adding to the problem, Markota was supposedly 19 years old last year, but was apparently regularly seen in Water Street bars after games. Seems that he used the same birth certificate-fixer as Yi and Ilyasova. Meanwhile, San Antonio wasted the 2007 pick on Marcus Williams, who they cut in training camp. But the Bucks still are looking for that backup power forward who can rebound, and two of the three picks after the Bucks should have picked this year were Glen “Big Babyâ€? Davis (currently seeing important minutes on Boston) and Jemareo Davidson (Charlotte’s 4th best player this year).

Very Very Bad Moves

2005: Traded a 2006 second round pick to Cleveland for Jiri Welsch. This one just didn’t make any sense at all. I mean, everybody already knew that Welsch sucked. He was 25 and on his third team already. Cleveland was being laughed at to no end for blowing a first round pick to bring him in as a designated shooter, only to find that he couldn’t shoot – he was white and slow, so everyone must have just assumed he could shoot. Why would Harris let the Cavs out of their gaffe? I don’t understand the logic of; “if Cleveland gave up a first rounder for him, then we are getting a bargain by only giving up a second rounder for him.� If he’s bad, he’s bad, right? It’s the same sort of logic as; “Hey, the 49ers were going to take Aaron Rodgers #1 overall, but now he’s available at #20, so he must be a great pick here!� If he’s a bust then it doesn’t matter where he was picked – he’s still a bust! Well, once again it must be an indication of Harris’ overwhelming optimism about his team – assuming that they were ready for a deep playoff run, and thus needed a veteran “designated shooter�. Or another Eastern European for Toni Kukoc to talk to. Meanwhile, Cleveland was able to spin that second round pick into another second rounder (actually getting their own pick back that they had traded in another deal) and used it on Daniel Gibson. Nice job, Harris – you took a problem off the hands of a division rival and gave them their starting point guard two years later to boot. Meanwhile, that Bucks second rounder was used by Orlando on Lior Eliyahu, while the next three picks were Alexander Johnson (serviceable backup power forward), Dee Brown (a favorite of mine who wound up getting a tryout with the Bucks this year) and – look! There’s that name again! – Paul Millsap.

2007: Matched Miami offer to Charlie Bell (5 years/$18 million). For a long time, I’ve been meaning to write a post about why matching this contract was really, really, really dumb, but with Bell’s shooting percentage getting closer and closer to 20%, that just seemed like piling on. Here’s the thing – Bell is supposed to back up your best player (Redd) and point guard who just signed a 6 year contract (Mo). He’s never going to start unless something goes seriously wrong. So why would you ever sign a backup – not a 6th man of the year type, a generic backup – to a 5 year deal? Especially one that will pay him until he’s 33, and well past his prime? Don’t get me wrong – Bell played so hard and so much the last two years that there is nothing wrong with him getting paid – even overpaid – for a year or two. But why for five? If Harris found him for the minimum, why wouldn’t he be able to do a little work and find someone else cheap and short-term who would give 85% of Bell’s production? Who knows when the Bucks might actually keep a second rounder and use it on a big guard who can play a little … Ramon Sessions, for example. Never mind that Bell didn’t want to be in Milwaukee anyway – let him go! It’s a FIVE year commitment to him! Until he’s 33 years old! It is guaranteed that you will be able to find another adequate backup guard one way or another! Matching this deal was so incredibly dumb that I wonder if Harris matched the offer out of spite for Bell’s trying to talk his way out of town. And my old posts prove that I felt that way long before Bell came out shooting a scorching 25% this year. Hopefully they can trade him once the restrictions on his contract end (in a couple of weeks).

Horrendous, Colossally Bad Move

2005: Signed Dan Gadzuric (6 years/$36 million). Resigning Danny G wasn’t the worst idea in the world, but the way Harris handled it was. Gadzuric had improved in each of his first three years in the league (and actually played pretty well in the first season of the new contract) but he was already 27 years old in 2005, so he wouldn’t continue improving that much. The thing about the whole negotiations is that Gadzuric – like Pachulia at the same time – was a restricted free agent and the Bucks had Bird rights on both of them. Harris could have waited, let Gadzuric and Pachulia’s agents troll for offers from other teams, and then chosen whether to match whatever came in. Instead, he ran out and offered Gadzuric a 6 year deal. Why do that? Why not wait and see if another team felt he was worth the full midlevel? Harris had already drafted Bogut, so just like the Bell signing, Gadzuric was never, ever going to be a starter under this contract. But he’s getting paid like one – he actually will be making more than Bogut until after next season. Now they are going to be paying him until he is 33, and since his game has completely fallen apart they are stuck with him. It just absolutely blows my mind that Harris would offer Gadzuric that sort of money and a contract of that duration to be a backup without even seeing what the rest of the market would bear for him. Would anyone else really have offererd Gadzuric a full-midlevel deal? Even if they had another team could have only offered him 5 years! It just doesn’t make any sense, and it wound up costing them Pachulia – a player with a cheaper, shorter term contract who wound up being a significantly better player. And by saving a few million on Gadzuric they could have matched Pachulia, not bothered with Magloire, and kept their 2006 first round pick.

Next: The Move That Cannot Be Categorized

It’s a pleasure to write this post tonight. With the Bucks’ recent slide, there’s been way too much negativity written on this site and now I get to highlight the good things that Larry Harris has done since becoming GM in 2003.

Here are the seven best moves he has made. It is worth noting that while Harris has failed to catapult the Bucks into NBA greatness, he has done a good job of creating a team that is competetive when healthy. The 2003-04 team was a major surprise (and only a late season slide from having home court advantage in the first round of the playoffs) and the 2005-06 team actually probably overachieved in large part to the moves highlighted in this post.

And now: Larry Harris’ seven best moves as GM of the Milwaukee Bucks.

Very Good Moves:

2004: Traded a second round pick (Bernard Robinson) to Charlotte for Zaza Pachulia. Despite some questions about his age and athleticism, Pachulia played very well in his one season with the Bucks. He raised his game in every way over his rookie season with Orlando, and the Bucks played much better with him on the court than off (although this might have something to do with “Dan Gadzuric as an effective player� being a myth). It’s too bad the Bucks screwed up his ensuing free agency.

2004: Traded Tim Thomas and Joel Przybilla for Keith Van Horn. Any time you work a deal with Isiah Thomas, it’s a good one. Too bad Harris hasn’t called Isiah more often. The Bucks saved a year on Van Horn’s contract, which gave the Bucks significant cap room after 2005. That expiring contract made it much easier to deal Van Horn the following season when it became obvious that he didn’t care about basketball any more than Tim Thomas did. Losing Przybilla was unfortunate, but he hadn’t done anything to that point of his career and if he had shown any potential up to that point than the Bucks could have offered him a minimum deal the following offseason just like anybody else. It was hard to believe that he’d ever turn into anything useful.

2005: Traded Mike James and Zendon Hamilton to Houston for Reece Gaines and 2 second round picks (2006 and 2007); traded Keith Van Horn to Dallas for Alan Henderson, Calvin Booth and cash. These two trade deadline moves were savvy ways to get well under the salary cap after the season and have plenty of room to resign Michael Redd to a max deal and also sign other players. While it seems obvious that any GM would do this in order to afford to resign an important player, Chris Mullin had botched the exact same situation when Gilbert Arenas had been in a similar situation with Golden State. So give Harris some credit for his forward thinking here.

2006: Traded Joe Smith for Ruben Patterson. I was against this trade from the beginning, thinking that by no means did I want a head case like Patterson in the locker room. However, he remarkably turned into a model season in the final season of his contract, and after injuries felled the entire rest of the roster he was their best player on many nights. However, all that good work didn’t help the 32-year-old Patterson rebuild the image that he had spent 10 years in the NBA trashing, as he was only able to parlay his best season in seven years into a non-guaranteed deal with the Clippers for the veterans minimum, and he was subsequently cut. Joe Smith had a decent season for Denver and Philadelphia, but predictably missed about 20 games to injury.

Great Moves:

2004: Signed Mo Williams as a restricted free agent away from Utah (3 yrs/$5 million). This was a great bargain and Williams has developed into a player who is now reasonably paid at 7 times the price. Williams didn’t play much for Utah in 2003, so one has to assume that Harris had his eye on Mo when he was drafted. However, since the story is that the Bucks’ 2003 picks were actually made by Michael Jordan (who was about to purchase the team in a deal that later fell through) Harris didn’t get the chance to take Mo himself in that draft. Instead the Bucks took Keith Bogans and subsequently sold him to Orlando, while Mo went 4 picks later. Interestingly enough, under the collective bargaining agreement at the time, it is possible that if the Bucks had taken Mo, they would have been the ones to lose him for a pittance a year or two later.

2005: Signed Charlie Bell (2 years/$3 million). Harris deserves credit for being one of the first GM’s to figure out how to mine an important source of talent: American players with a too small/too slow rep coming out of college who became big time players in Europe. Bell was a valuable, inexpensive backup to Michael Redd for a season, but playing a much bigger role for an awful team seems to have gone straight to Bell’s head, as shown in his contract negotiations last offseason.

2007: Drafted Yi Jianlian. Talent aside, the financial implications of having Yi on the Bucks may be so important that they keep the team in Milwaukee. His impact is that big. Selling broadcast rights to 10 different stations in China that reach a billion viewers per game, in-arena signage to Chinese companies, plus royalties on 100 million Yi jerseys will make a huge difference in the Bucks’ financial future. On the court, Yi’s development will determine how far this team can go over the next few seasons.