The Bratwurst – Milwaukee Bucks Blog

Moving right along with the Bucks’ season in review, it’s time to look at the man in the middle and the man who should be in Miami.

Charlie Bell ($3.1M, 0.630 IPM): I feel that I’ve written enough about how much I couldn’t stand Bell’s negotiating tactics during last seasons’ free agency, how incredibly dumb it is to commit to a 5 year contract for a guy who is already in his late 20′s and who will never be a starter for you unless things have totally fallen apart, and whose unreal shooting slump early this year help push this season toward the complete disaster that it became.

It drove me absolutely crazy this season to see Krystkowiak constantly throw Bell out at small forward, where he works hard defensively (a one-on-one matchup with Tracy McGrady being highlighted in one of those “Where Amazing Happens” commercials) but is still way too short to be effective very often. With one exception , Bell’s defense on Carmelo Anthony stole the Bucks-Nuggets game in Milwaukee. But that still doesn’t make up for the number of times that Bell was forced into a defensive matchup that he couldn’t handle.

The bottom line is that you are never, ever going to win more than about 30 games with Bell playing over 20 minutes per game. He’d be a great 8th man, but he’s a lousy 6th man.

At least Bell proved himself to be somewhat internet savvy, complaining that the Bucks had matched his contract offer from Miami via his Myspace page, and occasionally posting on the RealGM message boards as “Flintstone” (a shout-out to the nickname of the group of players to make a beeline from Flint to Michigan State).

Bell didn’t do Larry Krystkowiak any favors as he shot the ball horribly and turned it over a little more than in the past, but otherwise played a typical Charlie Bell season , his assist rate was pretty good, he tries hard enough on defense and does very well when guarding players close to his height. When it was all said and done, the Bucks weren’t any worse with him on the floor as off. But based on the way that Bell’s minutes went up while in shooting got worse and worse in December then “¦.

Responsibility for Coach K’s dismissal: 15%

Andrew Bogut ($4.99M, 0.871 IPM): If the Bucks were a 50+ win team then Andrew Bogut’s season (14.3 ppg, 10 rpg, 1.75 bpg, 51% shooting) as a 23 year-old, along with the toughness exhibited by him only missing two games after surgery for a broken nose in March, would have people hailing him as the second best center in the East and a certain All-Star for the next several years.

But instead, the 26 win disaster of a season and Bill Simmons’ ego trip/excuse to make fat jokes about Wisconsin “candidacy” for the GM position overshadows all (Simmons’ claim that he should replace Larry Harris was primarily based on the fact that he wrote that Chris Paul would be the best player in the 2005 draft) . The NBA fanbase still assumes that Bogut is still a soft player, and by now 99 of 100 people insist that they knew without a doubt in 2005 that the Bucks should have taken Paul instead.

Playing through the broken nose both impresses and amuses me. It impresses me because he would have been perfectly justified calling it a season when the Bucks had only 24 wins when he went down, yet he returned to play in April and had his best month of the season (17.6 ppg/11.4 rpg, 56% FG). But the cynic in me notices that while the team had nothing to play for, he was gunning to get a signature on a contract extension this summer. Either way, I saw him get smashed in the face a couple of times in April, which even with the mask on, I sure can’t feel very good.

After three seasons of seeing Bogut develop, it seems to be pretty clear that he is rounding into form as the sort of player that can’t carry a team but can make a nice piece of the puzzle for a good team. If you replaced Yao Ming on Houston or Andrew Bynum on the Lakers with Bogut don’t you think those teams would be just as good? Bogut does the little things well , passes well, rebounds acceptably, takes a ton of charges, throws in a cheap shot here and there. If he’s on a good team that’s called playing winning basketball. He’s on a bad team so it’s called being a bust.

Bogut has one gigantic hole in his game (two if you count not being a genetic freak like Dwight Howard) , his shooting. His free throw shooting was a pretty brutal 58.7%, but it’s the complete lack of a jump shot that is the most mystifying , and unfortunate. When he entered the league he was advertised as having a solid 18 foot jump shot, but somehow that stayed behind in Australia. When he does chuck up a jumper, his form has regressed into an ugly, corkscrew release that is as likely to toss the ball directly out of bounds as it is to hit the rim. It’s funny, because I remember seeing him warm up in his rookie year by taking 18-footers and being impressed with his form (I remember this because I also remember noting that while his form looked good, he never seemed to make them).

If Bogut was able to add a 15-foot jumper to his arsenal, it would help every part of his offensive game. By forcing defenses to guard him at the free throw line it would open passing lanes for him, and he’s agile enough that he could take most 7-footers off of the dribble if they had to come out and check him. He would draw more fouls this way, and even if his free throw shooting didn’t improve much, it still would mean that his opponents would be in foul trouble more often.

Bogut made some waves last offseason with his comments about the NBA lifestyle, in which he said that most players were only concerned with living large and that 80% of players go broke after leaving the league. Never mind that Bogut’s comments weren’t so far off , the NBA Players Association says that 60% of former players go broke within 5 years , but since his actual experience with other NBA players’ lifestyles is pretty much limited to the 25 or so guys who have been his teammates, his comments about the hip-hop lifestyle sounds like a pretty pointed dig at a few members of his own locker room.

Bogut almost always plays with a sour expression on his face that seems to come from frustration with his teammates missing defensive assignments and he seems to perpetually be yelling at Charlie Villanueva about defensive positioning. All of that sounds to me that he needs a coach that has plenty of authority and doesn’t let mental lapses slide. Scott Skiles should be the perfect coach for Andrew Bogut. Skiles can pound accountability into everyone else and let Bogut worry about his own game and keep his mouth shut.

Andrew Bogut has one more major positive about him: while entering his fourth season, next year he will be the same age that Patrick Ewing was as a rookie. I’m not saying that Bogut has the same ability as Ewing, but there is definitely something to be said for the need to grow physically into the center position, and Bogut still has age on his side.

I think Bogut is the second-best center in the East and I’ll be surprised if he isn’t an All-Star next year. I also think that if the Bucks had won 38 games and made the playoffs, management may have looked at his development as reason enough to keep Larry Krystkowiak on for another season.

Responsibility for Coach K’s dismissal: Negative 25%

Up next: The Dan Gadzuric Experience