The Bratwurst – Milwaukee Bucks Blog

Sure, the Bucks didn’t play a perfect game on Monday but this game shows how difficult it is to win on the road in the NBA — poor officiating decides close games.

Specifically, the officials missed LeBron James stepping out of bounds twice on Cleveland’s final posession in the first overtime. It didn’t help that they later called a James foul a travel on Redd; or that they ignored Bogut getting fouled after rebounding a missed free throw late in the second OT.

Of course, the Bucks did plenty to insure their loss on their own — throwing away two inbounds passes, for example, doesn’t help. But it only highlights the real problem with this team, the problem that I have harped on all season: they can’t blow anybody out. If this game had been played the exact same way at the Bradley Center then a couple of breaks would have gone the Bucks way and they would have won. Well, you can’t count on those; to be sure of a win you simply can’t get yourself into close games where the outcome is essentially random.

Of greater concern is the Bucks’ incredible inability to get decent shots out of designed plays late in games. Twice they ran plays — once out of a timeout late in regulation, again late in overtime off a call Krystkowiak signaled in — in key situations where they never even really initiated the play, and both times Mo wound up forcing a 3 as the shot clock expired. What is going on here?

In another note, does anybody else have HDTV through Time Warner? I think something is wrong with my cable box — among other problems, my HD feed switched to standard definition sometime in the 4th quarter. Did that happen to anyone else?