The Bratwurst – Milwaukee Bucks Blog

The last grasp for a playoff spot slipped through the Bucks’ fingers on Monday night as they dropped their second straight home game to a team they should have beaten. Incredibly, this team is now 19-33 and has the exact same record they did at this point of last season. Last year the excuse was injuries. Now, according to Coach Krystkowiak in Tom Enlund’s Journal-Sentinel story, this season’s excuse is that some of his players don’t care.

“…. We’ve been talking about together. It’s really easy right now to start separating. And it’s happening.

‘It’s happening and we need to put an end to it and we need to figure out which guys want to be a part of it, which guys are in, and we’re going to go down swinging with guys that are going to play hard. ….. it’s not about individuals. It’s about us surviving. We’ve got a nucleus of guys in that room that are interested in doing that and some others I’m not so sure about”

Oh, that’s nice. So not only do you just blatantly blast all of your players by saying that “some of them” are quitting (but by not naming names then you basically bring that speculation upon all of them) but you also set up playing time for the remainder of the season as the ultimate arbiter of who cares and who doesn’t — at least in the eyes of the fans.

So I guess that means that a player who is 100% committed to team ball and cares about winning will play 48 minutes a night, right? So by that logic, then against the Clippers:

Charlie Villanueva cared 33% about winning (if he cared more he wouldn’t have sprained his ankle).
Mo Williams cared 81%.
Michael Redd cared 80%.
Desmond Mason cared 78%.
Andrew Bogut cared 70%.
Royal Ivey, who cared 80%+ about winning while Redd was hurt, only cares 23% on Monday.
Yi Jianlian cared 56%, but would have cared less had Villanueva stayed in the game.
Michael Ruffin cared 23%, even after having a game ending play drawn up for him two days previously.
Charlie Bell, apparently still wishing he was on the Heat, cared 36%.
Jake Voskuhl cares 6%.
Bobby Simmons cares 10%.
Dan Gadzuric doesn’t care at all.
Awvee Storey doesn’t care.
Neither do David Noel or Ramon Sessions. Even if they are hurt.

Yet again, Larry Krystkowiak proves why college coaches don’t succeed in the pros. In college you can get away with the “you are with me or you aren’t” garbage for several reasons. The talent pool isn’t all that deep, so as long as you play your best couple of guys you can get away with benching someone else now and again to prove a point and not ruin the results on the court in the process. College coaches are in control of their players’ scholarships, and so could actually run off a player if he won’t get on point. College coaches are coaching kids who are growing into adults, so they can improve and change.

The pros are different. The players are adults. They already have maximized their talents, otherwise they wouldn’t be in the NBA in the first place. They have more money than the coaches. The coach is much easier to replace than the players. The players have all the power. The professional coach has to make the best out of what he has.

Instead Krystkowiak went to the media and dared his players to quit on him.

Not a smart thing to do when five of his players have contracts longer than his and three (including Bogut) players have contracts of the same length.

To be sure, some of this isn’t Krystkowiak’s fault. How many games could his coaching have cost them to this point in the season, five or six? That would still leave the Bucks at 25-27, in the sixth spot in the playoffs but only three games from falling out. This team simply isn’t that good.

It’s not Krystkowiak’s fault that the small forward position has been an open sore all season (for all of my harping about Villanueva playing the 3, it probably wouldn’t have worked very well). Or that he was given a roster with only four guards. We will never know the truth about playing time being promised to Yi, but that’s become another problem when Yi started playing so poorly in January.

For all of Krystkowiak’s blustering about “team ball” and eliminating personal agendas, it seems like Phoenix was doing okay while dealing with those sorts of problems involving their two best players (Stoudemire and Marion), running up a 36-15 record. Seems like it doesn’t matter just how self-centered a player is, so long as he is good.

And, by the way, are Larry Harris and Krystkowiak on the same page? During a season ticketholder function this past weekend, Harris said that he is committed to building with the nucleus of the team that is in place (specifically mentioning Redd, Bogut, Yi and Williams). Just two days later Krystkowiak is throwing out the blanket, “some of these guys don’t care” statement? Harris also said that he’s more interested in building through free agency rather than the draft, which leaves me shaking my head despondently. While what he meant was that he’s not interested in blowing up the team for draft picks and cap space, his statement also says that he still thinks this team, as currently constructed, is good. That’s wrong.

You should always be looking to build through the draft. Chasing free agents is fools gold. Take a look at the list of 2005 free agents – besides Michael Redd, Zaza Pachulia and DeSagna Diop, every single player who hit the open market has been a nonfactor or a bust (yes, including Bobby Simmons). Basically, free agents are such an expensive proposition that the odds that they will be worthwhile investments is extremely long.

The answer is the draft. They are going to have yet another high lottery pick this season, and hopefully Harris can make a deadline deal to turn Villanueva into another pick.

Because goodness knows this team isn’t going to win much the rest of the way. Krystkowiak made sure of that when he spouted off to the newspaper last night.