The Bratwurst - Milwaukee Bucks Blog

That’s not hyperbole.

In Monday’s “ho hum, another road blowout to a good team … lets make it by 45 this time” exercise in futility, Bell saw his role increase to that of starting point guard. This is the reward for an 8 game stretch in which he has played 176 minutes and shot 5-39 (.128).

Bell is now shooting .267 this year, and has managed to play 594 minutes. He is on pace to play over 1600 minutes for the season, and should his shooting not improve dramatically it will be the worst performance in the near-60 year history of the league.

Since the NBA was founded, only ten times has a player seen over 1000 minutes and failed to shoot 30%. The worst of those was Red Holzman in 1951-52 — and he shot .280. 6 of those performances were before the shot clock was even implemented in 1954. Bell has been worse than all of them.

Only two recent seasons have been close to as bad as Bell — Bobby Hurley shot .283 in 1995-96 and Nikoloz Tskitishvili shot .293 in 2002-03. But both of them have some sort of excuse for their performances. Hurley’s game was nothing like it had been before his car accident, and it was just amazing that he was alive and living a normal life, much less playing in the NBA. Denver was trying to force-feed the 19 year old Tskitishvili minutes to see if they had, indeed, made a mistake by drafting him over Amare Stoudemire. Bell has no such excuse.

If you only look at players who played over 500 minutes in a season then three other times a player has shot .267 or worse — all of them before the shot clock era.

It’s absolutely incredible. It’s simply pathetic. But what is Krystowiak supposed to do? He didn’t put this roster together! Between dead weight Bell, Gadzuric, Simmons, Mason (who gets an excused absence) and Storey (who Krystkowiak doesn’t seem to feel is fit to see the court), that accounts for 38% of the roster and 37% of the Bucks’ salaries. Why would Larry Harris have not even bothered to sign a #3 point guard? While it was beyond the realm of possibility that Bell would be as bad as he has, isn’t it likely that at some point you would need a fifth guard on the team?

I guess that despite letting Lynn Greer go, there was no reason to sign Dee Brown for the minimum. He’s only the starting point guard and second leading scorer for Galatasaray Cafe Crown, who at 12-2 is running away with the Turkish League.

How can this team get any better? The problem is that Harris has created a roster so chock full of long contracts that except for Yi, Bogut and Voskuhl’s expiring contract, nobody would have any reasonable trade value. Sure, you might get some interest in Villanueva, and you could come up with all sorts of idiotic trades for Michael Redd (stuff like Redd for Larry Hughes), and if a title contender like San Antonio or Phoenix lost Parker or Nash for the year maybe they would want Mo. But there is zero chance that you will ever get rid of Gadzuric, Bell or Simmons without taking back something even worse. So making a trade is pretty much out of the question.

So what do you do for band-aids, now that Simmons is getting worse by the game and that Bell is trying to rewrite the NBA record book for futility?

1: Call up Ramon Sessions. You really have no choice at this point. You need a backup point guard in the worst way, and since Bell is officially worthless and you need Ivey to back up both guard spots, there are minutes available for Sessions. He cannot be worse than Bell.

2: Sign Ruben Patterson. He had a non-guaranteed, veterans minimum deal with the Clippers, so you have to think he’d be available for the same deal to the Bucks. He’d step right in as the starting small forward and even though he can’t possibly be as good as he was last year he’d still be better than Simmons and probably Mason as well. To make room for Patterson somebody — David Noel or Awvee Storey — would have to be cut. Storey would probably be the man for the chop, since Noel is injured and thus probably can’t be cut anyway. Besides, with Patterson’s and Storey’s track records of violent practice incidents, you might not want them on the same team.

3: Start Charlie Villanueva at small forward. Once again, you don’t have a choice. The problem with this team is not the top five players — Bogut, Redd, Yi, Williams, Villanueva. It’s the guys behind them. You cannot be competetive while Simmons and Bell are getting big minutes and sucking the life out of the team. You have got to get your best players on the floor as much as possible, matchups and “we are going to be a defense-and-hustle-team” be dammed. Besides, while the final stats may look like Villanueva played poorly against Detroit, that’s not really true; in the first half he shot 3-5 and had 2 offensive rebounds, and the Bucks were only outscored by 4 with him in. Then he didn’t get back into the game until the end of the third quarter. Why not?

This season is not lost yet. The problem is not the headline guys — it’s the guys behind them. Harris has to get busy making up for his mistakes in player contracts and Krystowiak has to start thinking more critically and originally to maximize this rosters’ strengths.

Or we can all just sit back and enjoy watching Charlie Bell continue to shoot himself into the record books.