The Bratwurst - Milwaukee Bucks Blog

Against a team with a big, athletic front line, Coach Krystkowiak finally realized, “Hey, I’ve got guys like that too!” and he saw that it was good.

While the combination of Yi and Villanueva didn’t overwhelm Atlanta’s frontcourt of Josh Smith and Marvin Williams, they played them to a draw. Since the same could be said for the fairly underwhelming Michael Redd/Joe Johnson matchup and Bell/Ivey vs. Atlanta’s trio of barely NBA level point guards, Andrew Bogut’s excellent night (21 points, 10 rebounds, 4 blocks, 1 turnover) was enough to propel the Bucks to a win over a team that came in having won 3 of their last 4.

So Villanueva didn’t shoot very well (2-7 in the 4th quarter). But he still made one more basket than Smith and Williams combined in the 4th (1-8 shooting, 11 points between them) and had 1 fewer rebound than the pair of Atlanta forwards (6 vs. 7). That illustrates my whole logic about using Villanueva at the 3 — while he’s not a shutdown defender by any means, he brings enough offense that he should be able to make his matchup a push, scoring and rebounding enough to cancel out about as much as he allows. This is opposed to using Redd (whose defense isn’t good enough to stop small forwards and whose offense gets dragged down by playing the 3) or Bell (who, for all of his effort, simply isn’t big enough to play up front).

The result from using the big front line? A 52-40 rebounding edge, including 18 offensive rebounds for the Bucks. That’s how you win when you shoot 38% for the game and take one fewer free throw (23) than the opposition makes (24). The rebounding gave the Bucks 13 more shots than the Hawks, which made the difference in the game.

Hopefully we’ll see Krystkowiak try the big lineup again in the next couple of games. Golden State always forces a crazy series of matchups. You need the extra big man in against New Orleans because of their superior rebounders in Tyson Chandler and David West, and against Phoenix you need your best offensive players in the game as much as possible. It’s not going to work well every night, but this team isn’t good enough to win every game either.

One major source of frustration about this game was that Yi is still having such a hard time with having his shots blocked inside. He obviously trying — using a series of pump-fakes trying to get his man in the air before going up. However, if you don’t go up strong enough in the first place, the fakes aren’t going to work, and sometimes they just make things worse. Once last night he got the ball right under the basket, but one fake simply allowed Josh Smith to get close enough to him to smother the shot.

It’s interesting watching the difference between Yi and Bogut going to the hole. Bogut does a nice job of leaping with his body, warding the defenders away from his hands and allowing him room to complete his shooting motion. Yi, on the other hand, leaps with his arms, extending them straight up as he elevates and getting his elbows extended so he doesn’t have much power coming back down. It’s really annoying that the last place you want to see your athletic 7-footer is right under the basket — that should at least be a trip to the line every time. But instead it’s usually a highlight play for the defense.

From a rotation perspective, I guess the one thing that I would have done differently last night was after removing Yi in the 4th quarter, I would have brought in Gadzuric to play power forward alongside Bell, Redd, Villanueva and Bogut instead of bringing Ivey back in. After all, the Hawks were still going big with Marvin Williams, Smith, Joe Johnson and Anthony Johnson while replacing Lorenzen Wright with Al Horford. But the the Bucks smaller lineup went on a game-sealing 7-0 run, so all is well.

Three straight tough home games coming up. Hopefully this win — over a deceptively good team and without Mo Williams — will propel them to more success on this tough homestand.