The Bratwurst - Milwaukee Bucks Blog

As if it wasn’t enough that the Bucks start the season with 12 of their first 18 on the road, now the preseason schedule includes a quick little jaunt to China for a pair against Golden State.

On the bright side, both games will be televised nationally in the US, bringing their total TV appearances this season up to, I believe, three.

With a new coach and a roster that isn’t quite “his” yet, there was a good chance that the team would stumble out of the gate whether or not the NBA had stacked the deck against them. Now, it is almost guaranteed. In the long run it’s probably a good thing, since this team isn’t a likely playoff team anyway, so a couple of more losses early in the season means better draft position. But why should I have to be thinking draft position before training camp even starts?

In another incredible coincidence, the Bucks finish the preseason on October 24th in Chicago, before opening the regular season on October 28th … in Chicago. You just gotta use that “Skiles comes back to face the Bulls” angle as much as possible, I guess. One advantage, though, is that means two road games with very little travel.

Now that John Hammond has had a few months to work his magic, I can’t help but feel a little … underwhelmed. What’s got me so down? Maybe it’s just a dose of reality. It’s not easy to rebuild an NBA team — lets face it, when you make a trade the only reason teams will make them with you is because they want to get rid of the guy you are dealing for. Not everyone can get the my-good-friend-is-the-most-inept-GM-in-all-of-sports-and-has-a-Kevin-Garnett-to-trade discount that Danny Ainge got. You can’t expect a 25 win team to become a 50 win team overnight. But how much closer is this team to being a 50 win team in three years?

The Yi-Jefferson Trade: There’s no doubt that Jefferson is better than either Yi or Simmons, but is he a difference-maker? It’s clearly a good trade for the Bucks — they wanted to get rid of Yi and Simmons because they aren’t good basketball players, the Nets wanted to move Jefferson because he’s overpaid in three years. It’s easy to call this a “win now” move (since Jefferson is expensive and not incredibly young) but even if Jefferson is better than the players he replaced (including Mason) how many more wins can he get you by himself? 2? 5? Much is made of Jefferson’s declining rebounding over the past couple of years, but that’s not necessarily a problem. RJ’s rebounding may have hit a career low this year but his team actually outrebounded their opponents for the first time since they made the finals 4 years ago. And what did that get them? Their first trip to the lottery since Jason Kidd arrived. Basically, the team needed Jefferson to do other stuff than rebound. However, the Bucks will need RJ to hit the glass in a big way, so it’s an open question as to exactly why he didn’t board well last season.

Drafted Joe Alexander: I can’t help but think that this was a mistake. Everything about him screams “workout warrior who isn’t that much of a basketball player.” He played pretty poorly the first half of the season, got some attention by finishing the season strong, and burst onto the scene by blowing everyone away with his athleticism at the NBA combine. How often do these workout warrior types pan out in the pros? Didn’t the NFL learn from the Mike Mamula and Matt Jones fiascos? The bottom line is that Alexander has not played all that much basketball in his career. It’s great that he wants to be in Milwaukee and wants to improve his game, but does he have the skills to do so? An even bigger problem, in my mind, is the attitude that moving him to power forward is a logical thing to do. Nobody had ever suggested that Alexander was a power forward until he was drafted by a team that needed him there. How does this make sense? About the best thing I can say here is that Alexander looked awful at the summer league, and how a guy plays at the summer league seems to usually project him to do the opposite in the regular season.

Since the Jefferson trade was already done, then the Bucks should have tried to make a predraft trade. Once that didn’t work, they should have taken Jerryd Bayless and tried to work out a deal with someone else at that point in order to trade down for a power forward (such as Darrell Arthur).

Drafted LR Mbah a Moute: I’m going to recuse myself on this one, since my opinion about how the Bucks should have taken Richard Hendirx are plenty well known. But one thing about Mbah a Moute — if he does turn out to be great and Alexander doesn’t, then the Alexander pick will look even worse.

Traded Mo Williams: Talk all you want about “improved chemistry” and whatnot, for all of the games that the Bucks will theoretically win because of the steady hand of Luke Ridnour, it will be offset by the number of games (3-5 a year) that Mo could win by himself. That doesn’t mean the trade was a bad one, though. As Mo’s responsibility within the team rose, the team’s record got worse. If you are going to have a below-average record then you may as well not have an undersized point guard who is under contract for 5 more years. If this team is going to make a huge leap this year they need two things to happen: Andrew Bogut to make a leap, and Ramon Sessions to make a leap. Should Sessions become a must-play guy, it will be much easier to move Ridnour out of the lineup that it would have been Mo. This was the sort of trade that looks like a bad deal from a talent perspective, but in the long run it is the right move. Mo could still blossom into Chauncey Billups, but after his performance last season it’s hard to see that happening.

Kept Charlie Villanueva: I just love to pound Hammond for not moving Charlie V in favor of a bruising, rebounding power forward. The problem is: there aren’t many of those guys around. The only game-changing bruiser to change teams this offseason was Elton Brand, and obviously the Bucks had no shot at him. Ronny Turiaf? He’s a nice 12-minute a game player, but he’s not worth the contract Golden State gave him. There was talk of a Mo-Udonis Haslem trade, but Haslem will probably start at center for the Heat this year, and is he really that good? Is Villanueva really a downgrade from a limited Joe Smith/Brian Skinner type of player? The problem will be how Villanueva and Skiles interact. I can just imagine the Skiles-Villa relationship working out similarly to how the Skiles-Eddy Curry one did. Not well.

Signed Tyronn Lue, Malik Allen and Francisco Elson: Signing Lue was somewhere between pointless and dumb, given that with Williams the Bucks already had three capable point guards (Sessions and Bell being the others) and a ton of small forwards, meaning there would be minutes in the backcourt for Bell this year. Signing a shooting guard should have been more of a priority. Allen is a “Skiles guy” who I have a feeling will start more than his share of games this season while Skiles is pissed at Villanueva.

What do these changes mean for the Bucks record this year? Here’s my early opinion based on nothing but conjecture:

Last year they won 26 games.
This year they win 3 more simply by not having Krystkowiak as head coach (they blew 17-point 3rd quarter leads to the Knicks twice! In one of those, Isiah Thomas didn’t make a single 4th quarter substitution!)
They win 3 more by having an above average coach in Skiles.
They win 2 more because Michael Redd sucked last year and shouldn’t be that bad again.
They lose 5 games because Mo Williams is better than their other point guards (they were 2-15 in games that Ramon Sessions played. Lets wait until he’s played some meaningful minutes before judging him.)
They win 3 more games because the “chemistry” and “offensive flow” is better with Ridnour than with Williams. If you believe in that sort of stuff.
They win 4 more games because Jefferson is an upgrade over Simmons.
They lose 1 more game because Mason was surprisingly good last year.
They win 1 more game because Alexander simply has to be better than Yi. He won’t get 40% of his close-to-the-basket shots blocked, right?
They win 2 more games because Bogut’s career trajectory has shown moderate improvement every year.

That puts you at 38 wins. Probably not a playoff team, but at least they should show improvement. I’m not optimistic about a playoff trip, but at least they should be quite a bit better. Best case scenario? Bogut blossoms into a 20-12 guy (he’ll have to get 12 rebounds, because nobody else can grab one) and Sessions lives up to his gaudy numbers from last year. Then 45 wins might be possible. But asking for a 19 win improvement sounds like too much.

Scott Williams has left the Milwaukee Bucks to join the Phoenix Suns after one season as a pre and post game analyst along Craig Coushon on FSN Wisconsin.  Williams will make the jump to color analyst in Phoenix, a clear promotion (and probably a nice pay boost).

Good luck to Scott, he was a welcome addition to the Bucks broadcasting team.

Sports Illustrated is predicting that the Bucks will finish the season ranked 12th in the Eastern Conference and miss the playoffs again.

12. Bucks: New GM John Hammond has made two big trades already, acquiring Richard Jefferson from the Nets (for Yi Jianlian and Bobby Simmons) and Luke Ridnour from Oklahoma City (for Williams and Desmond Mason). Jefferson, along with new coach Scott Skiles, should help improve a woeful Bucks defense. Ridnour has potential as a distributor, and he comes with a better contract, but he’s not much of a defender and he’s not a scorer like Williams. With Jefferson, Michael Redd, Andrew Bogut and Charlie Villanueva, Milwaukee apparently felt it already had enough firepower. The trick will be just how fast Skiles can implement his system, and whether there is enough bulk in the frontcourt.

On the flip side, the Cavaliers rank second in the East (the article indicates this was true even before the Williams trade).  The Pistons find themselves as sixth.  You can read the rest yourself.

Only time will tell where the Bucks end up, but here’s to hoping that it’s at least better than 12th.

That headline was too easy. And dumb.

But, sure enough, the Mo Williams to Cleveland trade has happened. Funny how when Mo was re-signed to all of that fanfare, only one year later he would be shipped out for expiring contracts. But it was the right thing to do.

The Bucks receive Luke Ridnour and Adrian Griffin from OKC and Damon Jones from Cleveland. Heading out is Mo to the Cavs and Desmond Mason to the OK Corrals. Joe Smith also went from Cleveland to OKC.

The NBA mantra is that the team that gets the best player usually wins the trade. In that case, then Cleveland is the big winner here. But it’s a strange deal all around, and it makes some sense for the Bucks.

Mo is probably going into a very good situation for him. All of my studies of defensive statistics indicate that the quality of a point guard’s defense is dependent on the quality of his teammates to a large part. Now Mo will have defensive aces like LeBron James, Anderson Varejao, Ben Wallace and Zydrunas Ilgauskas behind him. He can continue his offensive improvement and his mistakes on defense will not be noticed as much. I’ve often said that Williams’ career has paralleled that of Chauncey Billups for the first several years. Billups was known as a no-defense gunner early in his career, and remarkably that all changed when he arrived in Detroit. We will now see if the same thing happens to Mo Williams.

My feelings about Mo’s tenure in Milwaukee are summed up pretty well with this post from my post-season review (apologies for the formatting - something happened to all of our older posts after a Wordpress upgrade).

The Bucks cut about $20 million in long term salary, and as I illustrated in April in this post (once again, sorry about the poor formatting) once Bogut signed an extension, the Bucks would need to make some sort of salary dump trade to avoid the luxury tax in 09/10. This became an even bigger problem when they added Richard Jefferson’s $15 million 10/11 contract.

Look, the Bucks lost a good player and got spare parts in return. But was this team really going anywhere with Mo running the show? As his playing time increased, he got better and better and the team got worse.

Probably 80% of an NBA teams’ record can be attributed to its three best players. A core of Redd/Bogut/Williams wasn’t working. Now it’s time to give Redd/Bogut/Jefferson a shot.

What can we say about the additions and what it means for the rest of the roster?

Luke Ridnour: Smaller than Mo, as bad defensively, injury-prone. Ridnour had a couple of good seasons for Seattle, but knee injuries have cost him chunks of the last couple of seasons. He does an okay job of managing games and has decent instincts. John Hollinger once wrote about him: “You couldn’t draw a better picture of what an average NBA point guard looks like.”

Honestly, as far as point guards go, I don’t really mind Ridnour. He should do a good job of spreading the ball around without throwing it away too much. I just hope his knees will allow him to hang on defensively. He’s paid $6.5 mil/year for two more seasons, and for 3/4 of the money due Mo Wiliams, Ridnour should offer about 3/4 of the production. He wont win any games by himself the way Mo occasionally could, but he shouldn’t cost the team any wins either.

Adrian Griffin: A Scott Skiles guy who plays solid defense at both shooting guard and small forward. Griffin is an energy guy on a par with Desmond Mason (but without the athleticism). Dont be surprised to see him as the sixth man for a long portion of the season. Skiles loves him. Griffin is also known as a quality guy.

Damon Jones: Everything I need to know about the self-proclaimed “best shooter in the NBA” I learned from an episode of MTV Cribs. How often do I get to see an NBA player show off a house that is smaller, less expensive, and not as nice as mine? And his cars — a line of Mercedes-Benz’s that I later read weren’t his. They were all loaners from a dealer with whom Jones had an endorsement contract. It was awesome to see a player clearly living within his means and with an eye toward saving his money for his future. It’s a good thing that Jones is apparently pretty fiscally responsible, because this season should be his last major NBA payday as his shooting has pretty much deserted him and he doesn’t have much in the way of other skills. Apparently he’s a fun guy to have in the locker room and if his appearance on Cribs means anything, he can serve as an example to Andrew Bogut that it’s not true that 80% of former NBA players go broke.

Ramon Sessions: Looks like the starting job is his to win now. Will that work? I’m not so sure, as Sessions has never played a single meaningful minute in his career. I hope I’m wrong about that, and I’ll be very interested to see if Larry Harris mined a steal with his final pick as Bucks GM. At the least, Sessions should be a capable backup.

Tyronn Lue: Why was he signed in the first place? The Bucks just added two guys who can play the two, meaning that Charlie Bell fits in best at point guard. What does Lue bring that the combination of Ridnour, Sessions and Bell doesn’t?

Power Forward: It would have been nice if the Bucks could have pulled off this deal with Joe Smith coming to the Bucks instead of Jones, but what are you going to do? Apparently John Hammond still believes Joe Alexander can play both forward spots. I hate that idea. Get ready for another season of Andrew Bogut spending 80% of his court time glaring at Charlie V in disgust. This deal gives the Bucks the maximum 15 players under contract so, unless Awvee Storey’s deal is not guaranteed, the Francisco Elson signing will most likely not happen.

Hammond cannot possibly intend to go into the season with only four big men on the roster. I hope that another deal is in the works and he isn’t thinking that Joe Alexander and Adrian Griffin can fill in up front. That just wont work.

Your 2007-08 Milwaukee Bucks:

Luke Ridnour, Ramon Sessions, Tyronn Lue
Michael Redd, Adrian Griffin, Charlie Bell, Damon Jones
Richard Jefferson, Joe Alexander, LR Mbah a Moute, Awvee Storey
Charlie Villanueva, Malik Allen
Andrew Bogut, Dan Gadzuric

Is that good? I guess it is if Bogut blossoms into a 22/11 guy (which might happen — as I love to point out, this season he will be the same age that Patrick Ewing was as a rookie). But I don’t really think I should reserve second round playoff tickets just yet.

UPDATE: It’s official

On Monday, when I saw the story being reported by the News-Herald of Northern Ohio that the Cavs, Bucks and Seattle OKC Nobodys were working on a trade centering around Mo Williams going to the Cavs, I almost wrote a post saying that I thought the story was totally bogus.

There were several things in that report that didn’t sound right to me. Why would the Bucks send Mo to a division rival? Since Cleveland just extended the contract of Daniel Gibson, why would they want to add another short point guard (as a newly re-signed player, Gibson cannot be traded immediately). It always bugs me when trade rumors are published but are attributed to nothing but anonymous “NBA sources” and don’t mention any concrete trade scenarios beyond speculation. That’s just lazy reporting.

The more I read that story, there was something in it that made me think it had been given to the reporter by someone either from the Bucks’ or Mo Williams’ camp to encourage a deal. It says that Mo is 6′2″.

Everybody who follows the Bucks knows he is listed at 6′1″ and plays smaller than that. He is listed as 6′1″ on the Bucks website. The only way a reporter gets that wrong is if someone tells him the wrong height and he just runs with it. Why would someone want Williams to be 6′2″ instead of 6′1″? Because they don’t want him to appear smaller — and, by implication, worse defensively — than Daniel Gibson.

Now, though, the Journal-Sentinel is on the story, with Charles Gardner saying that the Bucks are interested in getting back Luke Ridnour in the deal. Now it sounds like someone is doing some real reporting.

One thing about Ridnour — he isn’t nearly the offensive threat that Mo is, but defensively he positively makes Mo look like Gary Payton (the Seattle Payton, not the Milwaukee version). Ridnour is listed at 6′1″, 167 and was the starting point guard on a Seattle team a couple of years ago that was the worst defensive team of all time. However, the biggest problem with Mo and the Bucks is that Mo is basically “too good” offensively to fit in. Ridnour, for better or worse, fits the bill as a distributor who would help the offense flow. Ridnour, after all, was also the starting point guard on the surprising 52-win 04/05 Sonics.

Ridnour also only has two years remaining on his contract, so he would give the Bucks flexibility to see just how good Ramon Sessions really is — Ridnour will be fine off the bench if Sessions is good and adequate as a starter if Sessions isn’t.

So what would each team want from a trade in order to make it work?

Cleveland is gunning for a championship shot this year or next. They are well into luxury tax land this season, but have a little cap room next year and will drop well under the cap should LeBron leave after next season. By adding Mo they would probably build around him should LeBron leave. They also need a general talent upgrade in every other spot besides small forward.

Seattle wants to save money and clear a frontcourt logjam to eventually move Kevin Durant to a forward position.

The Bucks are trying to remake their long-term salary structure on the fly, remake the roster into a more complementary group, and picking up some rebounding would be nice.

Here’s the best trade I could come up with:

Cleveland gets Mo Williams and Chris Wilcox.

Seattle gets Wally Szczerbiak (I just spelled that correctly from memory. Amazing).

Milwaukee gets Luke Ridnour and DJ White.

The OKC Runaways would save about $7 million next season, and would free up room for both Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant. This would also solidify their shot at the #1 pick in next years’ draft, as their team would be awful this season. But it is well known that they are in a long-term rebuilding plan, and with several high picks and about $40 million in cap room in 2010, they are biding their time.

Cleveland would add two ostensibly talented players, one of which (Wilcox) has an expiring contract. I’ve never thought much of Wilcox’ game — he’s the 6′10″ version of Mo Williams. He scores just well enough to be a good looking offensive player but not enough to really carry a team, and he’s lousy defensively to boot. But Cleveland made the finals with a power forward tandem of Drew Gooden and Anderson Varejao, so a Wilcox-Varejao combo might work just fine. Cleveland will be $30 million under the cap after next season (if LeBron leaves) so Mo’s salary wouldn’t be a problem.

The Bucks get rid of Mo’s contract and a point guard who should fit the roster better. DJ White has a chance to be a Carl Landry-type of player — an undersized bench guy who gives 15 energetic, effective minutes a night. In the long run, the Bucks would save about $20 million on this deal.

How would this trade affect the Bucks? I don’t think they will win more with Ridnour than they would with Mo. But they wouldn’t lose more, and they would have much more roster flexibility going forward.

I started watching the USA-China game when it was 35-32, so all I saw was a US romp, but I was most interested to see if it looks like Yi would look any more authoritative on the court than he did on the Bradley Center floor last season.

Nope.

Aside from a nice follow dunk, Yi was pretty bad. And according to ESPN.com’s Chris sheridan, I missed the worst of Yi’s game. 4-13 shooting, 3 rebounds, two turnovers. Nine points. Non-factor.

Sheridan’s description:

Remember that rookie wall he hit back in February? Back before the Milwaukee Bucks got rid of him?

He’s still hitting it.

But the best line of all, from Sheridan’s artice, was from Michael Redd, when asked who got the better end of the Yi-Richard Jefferson trade:

We did, oh we did, we did, we did, we did. We’re happy, no question.”

Sounds about right.

In their drive to corner the market on Dutch players, rumor has it that the Bucks are close to signing center Francisco Elson.

Elson kind of reminds me of Royal Ivey — he is so poor offensively that people assume that he must be a great defender in order to stick around in the league. He’s a bad shooter and a deceptively poor rebounder (he has averaged over 10 rebounds per 40 minutes once in his career), but he’s fairly quick around the basket and can block some shots. He was able to parlay some modest success with Denver into a 2 year/$6 million contract with San Antonio in 2006 but couldn’t fill the bill as Tim Duncan’s backup, and the Spurs shipped him to Seattle midseason last year.

The highlight of his career came with Denver during the 2004 playoffs against Minnesota. He was part of a goon squad defensive unit for the Nuggets that was in charge of roughing up Kevin Garnett. Elson got into several confrontations with Garnett, at one point throwing him into the seats. After one scrap in which Elson complained of a cheap shot by Garnett, Elson got into some trouble for saying, “You don’t do that. That’s gay on his part. I told him that he was gay, too, for touching me in my private parts.”

Elson later offered an apology to the gay and lesbian community, but it was left to Garnett to administer the final verbal beat-down, saying, “I don’t even know half those guys’ (on the Denver bench) names.”

I like to think I know a little about the NBA, but I had never heard of Francisco Elson before that incident. Because of it, though, he still has a reputation as a defensive enforcer. A 7 foot, 235-pound enforcer. He’s 20 pounds lighter than Jake Voskuhl.

The bottom line is that nobody should get too excited about this signing. Elson isn’t going to help much, but then again he is probably the best player currently available as a backup center. I was going to make a joke about how Dan Gadzuric had better use some of his $500,000 monthly paychecks to buy some new suits since he’s going to be inactive a lot more now, but Danny G’s nunbers were actually superior to Elson’s last year in almost every way.

He would put the Bucks roster at the max of 15, assuming that Awvee Storey’s contract is guaranteed. That means that once the Elson signing is official, then your 2007-08 Milwuakee Bucks look like:

Mo Williams, Tyronn Lue, Ramon Sessions
Michael Redd, Charlie Bell
Richard Jefferson, Desmond Mason, Joe Alexander, LR Mbah a Moute, Awvee Storey
Charlie Villanueva, Malik Allen
Andrew Bogut, Francisco Elson, Dan Gadzuric

I can’t bring myself to envision Joe Alexander as anything but a small forward. And I can’t help but think that John Hammond is trying to make a trade for a power forward that can rebound.

Man, I haven’t posted for a long, long time. Sorry. Having another baby will do that to you. Not to mention the fact that the Bucks haven’t done anything of note recently, either.

But now there is news …. the schedules are here!

Could the NBA have tried any harder to bury this team early?

Some highlights:
The Bucks start with 12 of the first 18 on the road. In an absolutely remarkable coincidence that couldn’t possibly have been set up by the league, the Bucks open the season on October 28 at Chicago. The next night they play at Oklahoma City in the first home game for the Sonics Whatevers.

After the first 18, the Bucks have three home games and then what is essentially a seven game road trip (three games on the West Coast, do some laundry and play one game at home, then three games on the East Coast). So out of the first 28 games, the Bucks get 10 at home.

There is payback, of course, at the end of the schedule. The Bucks finish the schedule with 11 of the final 17 at home, which includes homestands of six and four games each.

If this team gets through mid-December intact then they should be in good shape.