The Bratwurst – Milwaukee Bucks Blog

Tuesday night: Andrew Bogut, 19 points on 8-10 shooting.

Wednesday night: Andrew Bogut, 10 points on 4-5 shooting.

I don’t know how many times this can be harped on, but there it is: while Bogut’s scoring output has been less than what we want it to be, the problem isn’t all him — he just doesn’t get enough shots.

Good thing last night’s game started so late here that almost nobody would have seen it. Golden State has been on fire for the last couple of weeks, so a bad loss to them in the second game of a back-to-back isn’t the worst thing in the world. However, it does continue the annoying trend of the Bucks losses regularly being by 15 to 30 points. Good teams don’t get blown out as often as this one does. And it’s not like injuries are an excuse this season.

At least they fought back well against the Clippers, overcoming a 14 point deficit to get a 9 point win — a relative blowout, by Bucks standards.

The Clippers game featured an interesting defensive strategy. It didn’t work, but it was interesting. In the first quarter, the Bucks agressively double teamed Chris Kaman with Yi on every touch. Some thoughts about this:

1 — Did you ever think that Chris Kaman would become such a dominant force that it would require double-teaming from two seven footers to stop him?

2 — The strategy didn’t work very well, which is more a credit to Kaman’s passing than Bogut and Yi’s defense. After one turnover, Kaman made several nice passes which led to open 3′s (typically by Yi’s man, Tim Thomas).

3 — Mo doesn’t switch very well on the perimeter in these situations. There’s not much he’s going to do when he has to switch out onto a 6’10″ 3-point shooter (or a 6’7″ one like Corey Maggette), but on at least one of those double teams he simply ran toward the wrong guy (who Mason was already covering) so the Bucks wound up with a smothering double-double team on Kaman and Quinton Ross.

4 — After watching Mo get run around so badly in the double team and zone defenses, I have new appreciation for why Phil Jackson loves those 6’6″ point guards so much.

5 — Memo to Yi: just because you are supposed to double Kaman that doesn’t mean you do it when he gets the ball 20 feet from the basket.

Too bad the end result was a 13-2 Clippers run from all that. I would just love the Bucks to try the same Bogut-Yi double team thing with Eddy Curry. They’d probably force 15 turnovers.