The Bratwurst - Milwaukee Bucks Blog

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.