The Bratwurst – Milwaukee Bucks Blog

Forget the no-trade of Richard Jefferson, or the injuries to Andrew Bogut, Michael Redd and Luke Ridnour — now Bango managed to ruin his knee by falling through the hoop at an All-Star Weekend event?

This is getting ridiculous! I’m almost scared to go to the game tomorrow now, lest the team try to kill me with a t-shirt again!

(Which reminds me of something I saw earlier this year — you know the t-shirts attatched to parachutes that fall from the rafters during the first quarter? Well, I saw a shirt earlier this year come loose from the parachute when it was released. It fell straight down from the rafters — what’s that, maybe 60 feet? — landing squarely onto the head of a kid who was about 10 years old in the next section over from me. He had no idea what hit him — he almost started fighting with the kid next to him because he thought he had gotten smacked in the head for no reason. To add insult to injury, the jerk sitting behind the kid picked the shirt up on a bounce and kept it.)

Okay, so no more Redd, Bogut or Bango but at least Ridnour is supposed to be coming along well from his broken thumb and by not making a trade on Thursday the Bucks have serious salary cap problems now.

Here’s the issue. The cap this year is $58.6 million, and the luxury tax level is $71.15 million. The Bucks are right at the luxury tax threshold (HoopsHype has them listed at $71.2) but there are a couple of exceptions for minimum players so they shouldn’t be a payer this year. But that’s a lot of money for a borderline-.500 team when healthy, no?

Next year, it gets ugly. Assuming Francisco Elson and Malik Allen invoke their player options, the Bucks owe a little over $65 million to 10 players. That doesn’t include Ramon Sessions, who will be a Gilbert Arenas-clause restricted free agent (which means nobody can offer him a contract starting over the midlevel exception, so the Bucks can match any deal as long as they have not yet used the exception) and Villanueva, who has a $4.6 million qualifying offer. So for the Bucks to bring back the same team next year, it will cost them about $76 million (assuming $5 mil for Sessions and $2 mil for their first round pick).

But the real problem here is that the salary cap, because of the economic state the country is in, will most likely go down next year. This Bucks roster could find themselves $8 million or more into the luxury tax — for a borderline playoff team!

Maybe Portland or Cleveland were the ones to walk away from the Jefferson for either Sczcerbiak or LaFrentz trades, but if John Hammond was the one to turn them down then it was fiscally irresponsible for him to do so.

Now, by waiting until next offseason, there really isn’t anything Hammond can do, except try to make an offseason trade to a team with significant cap room (so the Bucks can take back less salary then they sent out). So who is going to have major cap room this offseason?

Atlanta

Detroit

Oklahoma City

Memphis

The thing is that Oklahoma City, for example, isn’t going to be interested in something like “Dan Gadzuric for Damien Wilkins”. No, they will be thinking more along the lines of “You’ve got luxury tax problems, eh? How about Andrew Bogut and a sign-and-trade of Ramon Sessions for Nenad Kristic and one of the first rounders San Antonio owes us?”

This is bad. Really, really bad. Like Herb Kohl staring a $30 million operating loss next year in the face bad.

ESPN is reporting that the Bucks have a couple of deals in the works to try and dump the salary of Richard Jefferson.

The two potential deals, they report, are Jefferson to Cleveland for Wally Sczcerbiak or to Portland for Raef LaFrentz.

Both of these deals are outright salary dumps, with Sczcerbiak having an expiring $13 million contract and LaFrentz and expiring $12.7 million deal. LaFrentz is injured, and 80% of his salary is being paid for by insurance. Jefferson is owed $29.2 million over the next two years.

If the Bucks pull off one of these trades, they will drop to only $40 million committed to salary for next year, making it easy for them to afford to re-sign either or both of Ramon Sessions and Charlie Villanueva if they choose. They will also be able to withstand the potential drop in the salary cap that may be coming down the pipe next year.

From Cleveland’s perspective, I’m not sure why they would make that trade. Since LeBron James plays 40 minutes per game at Jefferson’s primary position, why bother adding him? Is it really logical to pay two small forwards — James and Jefferson — a combined $30 million next season when one of them is the most dominant player in the game?

Portland, though, might be a more intriguing option. They have been looking for a small forward for some time, and are apparently trying to work out a deal for Gerald Wallace as well. However, Wallace is better, younger, and paid less than Jefferson; so Charlotte is trying to make a trade that would include some of Portland’s younger players. The Bucks could do the trade on simply a 1-for-1 basis (or maybe with one other Portland player thrown in), causing less damage to the Blazer’s core roster. Jefferson also has a reputation as a solid character and would fit in the Portland clubhouse well (not a knock on Wallace, there’s nothing wrong with him either) and would be a good complement for Brandon Roy. Since LaFrentz’s contract is covered by insurance, the Bucks would likely have to chip in some cash to make up the difference between the money the Blazers are not playing LaFrentz and what they would have to pay Jefferson.

Hopefully John Hammond gets one of these trades done. The team has played pretty well without Bogut and Redd, but the writing is on the wall: if Richard Jefferson is your best player, the best you can hope for is to be a really well-coached team that is pretty competitive most nights. The team is that, at least. But there aren’t going to be many more wins this year with Jefferson or without him — certainly not enough to justify the massive (and possibly luxury tax-inflicting) contract he has. The Bucks are better off moving Jefferson and playing Joe Alexander more for the rest of the year.

Yi Jianlian and Bobby Simmons for nothing. Thanks, Larry Harris.

First of all, I want to thank all of the commentors who have given me crap for not writing much any more. Between work and having two young kids, I don’t have the time to write any more. It’s not so much the writing that is time-consuming — last year I only had one kid and was staying at home with him, so I had plenty of time to think about interesting things to write. This year, it’s totally different — I have responsibilities from about 6:30 am until 8:30 pm every day, and by then it’s all I can do to even watch a basketball game, much less think about something good to write about it. I really enjoyed producing an excellent blog last year (and the amount of writing I did was very helpful in that it kept my skills sharp for when I went back to work). I hate to be letting it go in the way I have, but I’d rather not write than just throw up some crap posts fairly regularly that are no more than glorified twitters.

Anyway, where is this team now?

Screwed in just about every way.

Lets see if I can recap:

– At full strength, this was an exciting team that had an outside shot at maybe the #5 seed and a chance to advance to the second round. Most likely, they were going to wind up with the #6 seed and could hopefully give Orlando a scare (a team which I have been completely wrong about for two years now. They are good).
– Then Michael Redd got hurt. For a well coached team, losing Redd was not a total disaster. Sure, it probably lowered the ceiling of the team from the #5 seed to the #7 (and getting blown away by Boston), but in the games Redd had missed the team had only averaged about 4 points per game less than with him. Most of his scoring could be picked up with relative ease by other players.
– Then Andrew Bogut’s injury turned out to be a stress fracture that will cost him the next two months. To be honest, I consider this diagnosis to be a positive one. I was starting to worry that his back issue might become one of those Tracy McGrady-style trick backs, where the guy is just perpetually questionable for the rest of his career. Fortunately, a stress fracture should heal.

This, however, leaves the team completely screwed. They have no chance at the playoffs with a frontcourt rotation of Gadzuric, Elson, Malik Allen and Villanueva. However, with Bogut and Redd signed to long-term contracts, just trying to dump salary doesn’t really make sense. The team would have no interest in trading away the two players who would likely garner the most interest around the league — Ramon Sessions and LR Mbah a Moute are fairly untouchable, and their contract status means they are both important to the Bucks and hard to include in other trades. Obviously, Dan Gadzuric has no trade value unless the Bucks take back something even worse in exchange.

What do the Bucks do? How do they make a big move without shafting themselves in the long run?

First of all, I would be more than willing to trade this years’ first round pick. The draft looks awful this year, and between Sessions and Moute, the Bucks have a couple of young, inexpensive players to fill out their rotation.

The best option is to try and trade for one of the superstar players who has an expiring contract after next year. Players like Bosh and Stoudemire have recently been rumored to be on the block, and should the Bucks be able to get one of them, they could be poised to make a 1-year run next year.

The deals?

1: Richard Jefferson, Charlie Villanueva, Luke Ridnour and Damon Jones for Amare Stoudemire and Jason Richardson. Phoenix would save $5 million on this deal, as Jones’ contract expires and Villanueva could be renounced after the season. Charlie V’s per-40 minute numbers compare pretty favorably with Stoudemire’s this season, and the trade would allow the Bucks to audition Alexander and Moute for the starting small forward position next year. It would also solidify Ramon Sessions as the point guard of the future. A starting lineup next year of Sessions/Redd/Moute/Stoudemire/Bogut with Richardson off the bench would be a nice group. It would likely only be a one-year run, though, as Stoudemire would be a free agent after the season, and with Redd, Richardson and Bogut owed $43 million in 2010/11, it’s unlikely Herb Kohl would be able to pay what it would take to keep him.

However, Stoudemire is pretty much known as a pain in the ass. What about Chris Bosh?

2: Bosh and Kapono for Jefferson, Alexander, Jones and a first round pick. It’s tough to come up with a reasonable deal with Toronto, since should they actually decide to deal Bosh, the Bucks don’t really have what they want. They wouldn’t need Jefferson and wouldn’t get much cap relief on the deal, and Joe Alexander and the likely-#15 pick in the draft isn’t a fair return for a perennial all-star. But if Bosh is going to walk after next year, maybe they would be willing. Not likely, though.

3: Jefferson and Jones for Shawn Marion. If Miami is serious about building around Michael Beasley, maybe they would be willing to turn Marion into a true small forward. This would kill Miami’s cap room after the season and would do nothing for the Bucks after this year, but would make a huge difference in the Bucks’ cap situation for the next two years and would clear up the small forward position as well. Marion is a prima-donna head case, but would probably put up huge numbers for the Bucks as he plays for his next contract with someone else. Losing Marion next year would make it easier to resign Ramon Sessions (and pick up Richard Hendrix out of the D-League. There I go again.)

Three deals that wont happen. But that just illustrates the quandry the Bucks find themselves in right now — they are built to win now, but have an incredibly low ceiling with Bogut and Redd hurt.

Remember in my season preview I made a remark about how the Bucks were sunk if they lost Andrew Bogut for a long time? Well, looks like I was right.

While Bogut’s overall production has been a little disappointing this season, at least he has been a rebounding beast. With 20, 17 and 17 boards in the three games before the injury, Bogut was averaging a rather stellar 0.347 rebounds per minute — the 6th best rate in the league among players averaging over 20 mpg. Of course, the cynic says that Bogut had better rebound like that since he’s the only rebounder the team has. That is a good point.

In the three games he has missed (all losses) the Bucks have been outrebounded by 24. That was a major problem in the loss to Cleveland, which was able to use the triumvirate of Zydrunas Ilgauskas, Ben Wallace and Anderson Varejao to simply hammer the Bucks on the boards all night. That game was a hard-fought effort until the Bucks simply ran out of gas (to the best team in the league — 5 straight double digit wins).

It worried me when John Hammond did nothing to bolster the front line behind Bogut, but it is true that dominant rebounders are not all that easy to come by. So what can the Bucks do?

Play Dan Gadzuric until he fouls out every night. It may make you shudder to hear this, but Danny G is a much better player than Francisco Elson. Why would Gadzuric only get enough minutes to pick up a total of two fouls in the last three games?

Free Charlie V! Face it, he is a lousy defender, but he scores in bunches and actually rebounds very well (0.32 per minute). The Bucks need him on the floor. Mbah a Moute is a very effective player, but why have him playing power forward on a regular basis where he gives up 3-7 inches to every opponent?

Go big. Ramon Sessions may be the Bucks most effective point guard, but when you have the chance a lineup of Gadzuric-Villanueva-Moute-Redd-Jefferson may work for a brief stretch. If that team has a hard time getting the ball upcourt (likely) then Sessions will have to come back in, but a big lineup might create some mismatches — and if it doesn’t then it gets Jefferson (38 mpg) a little rest.

Will it work? I don’t know. But Scott Skiles needs to do something to keep the boards clear while Bogut is on the shelf.

Ed Note: I wrote this post Thursday morning, for some reason it didn’t post until I looked for it on Friday.

In 1996 I happened to be in Birmingham, Alabama and went to a Birmingham Barons game. That team was the White Sox’ AA affiliate, so I had heard of one of their players, who was clearly the best player on the field at all times: Mike Cameron. So besides having one player who should become a star but was several years away from reaching his potential and one or two other guys who may have had a chance (like Lyle Mouton), the team was filled with players who were pretty much marking time until they had to find real jobs. Nobodys, basically.

Sort of like the Oklahoma City Thunder. Only the fans have to pay a lot more than $2.50 to see them play.

The bright side first: The Bucks now have 1/5 the number of double digit wins that they managed last season. The starting lineup looked excellent, and the Redd/Jefferson combo managed to completely remove Kevin Durant from the game (his foul trouble had something to do with it too).

The problem: the bench just sucked.

With the Bulls, Scott Skiles was blessed with a deep, athletic team that could bring scorers like Ben Gordon off the bench. This season, though, it seems we will see a bench composed of defenders who hope for a 0-0 tie while they are in the game. It remains to be seen how well that will work against good teams.

Also, Richard Jefferson made an interesting point in a postgame interview on FOX, saying that the Bulls were a bad team for them to play in the opener because most of Skiles’ former Bulls players know the Bucks’ offense and defense better than the Bucks do.

Now that the preseason has concluded, we can step back and take an honest look at where this Bucks team stands going into the season. Quite honestly, this preseason leaves me very nervous about whether or not the team has really improved.

The 1-7 preseason record is not a problem. In the preseason, obviously your best players don’t play a whole lot, and the teams’ performance will suffer. However, you want your best players to play well when they are in the game. I analyzed all of the box scores for the eight preseason games and calculated IPM’s for every player. I also calculated the team IPM score in order to objectively judge the quality of their offensive and defensive efforts. Obviously, the team IPM score is subject to the personnel on the floor, so players like TJ Cummings and Kevin Kruger had some influence. However, I think it is still something worthwhile to look at, since the numbers will indicate to a certain extent just how well the Bucks’ roster is complementary to Scott Skiles’ system.

IPM, in case you are not familiar with it, is my self-created player evaluation model. It attempts to summarize a players’ all-around contribution to his team and is boiled down to a single number, which stands for Impacts Per Minute. Think of an IPM of 1.0 meaning that the player makes positive contributions to his team equivalent to 1 point per minute on the floor. A player with an IPM over 1.0 is a superstar, above 0.9 is all-star level, above 0.8 is an above-average starter, above 0.7 is an okay starter, and above 0.6 is a decent short-minute player. Below 0.6 and you have problems. Team IPM sums up the whole teams’ offensive statistics and the statistics of the teams’ opponents to give an offensive and defensive score which, when subtracted from each other, gives a differential that correlates very closely to a teams’ actual record. A team with identical offensive and defensive IPM’s would have a differential of zero, and would be expected to be a .500 team. Team IPM’s typically range between 3.0 and 4.0 (higher is better for offense and worse for defense). More description of IPM is available here, last years’ player rankings are available here, and last years’ full-team power rankings are here.

The numbers for the preseason analysis, both for individual players and the teams, is available here.

On to my preseason analysis:

The Team: Yikes, what a display of god-awful offense. 40% shooting and 89 points per game will not get it done. The team suffered from a sort of mass shooting slump with only four players making over 40% of their shots (fortunately three of them were Bogut, Redd and Villanueva), so it’s not all that surprising that the offense was brutal.

The defense, on the other hand showed only moderate improvement from last year. They allowed 103 points per game and 48.5% shooting – pathetic numbers and it’s only because the defense was unbelievably bad last year that this would actually represent an improvement. The Bucks were only outrebounded by their opponents by a slim margin (39.9 per game vs. 40.15) and forced more turnovers than their opponents (16.71 vs. 18.58). Some of the defensive weakness can probably be attributed to Andrew Bogut only playing 5 games, but that underscores this teams’ biggest problem: since there is no banger big man behind Bogut, if he misses more than a handful of games this season, this team is sunk.

The Bucks’ offense managed an incredibly meager 3.26 IPM. Some of which can be attributed to the new offensive system being implemented, so many new players being integrated into the offense, and the best players being on cruise control during the meaningless games; but it is still a sign of a lack of team depth. After all, the teams the Bucks were playing weren’t putting out their best players or max effort either. Last season, a 3.26 offensive IPM would have been the worst in the league by a lot.

Defensively, the Bucks had an IPM of 3.85, which represented a small improvement from last years’ 3.99, but still isn’t amazingly good. The team simply isn’t athletic enough to do much statistical defensive damage. As I said before, they need Bogut on the floor and need to get rebounding help from someone other than Bogut and Gadzuric.

With the Bucks’ best players on the floor in the regular season I would expect both of their IPM numbers to improve, but they show how far the team has to go. The teams’ preseason IPM differential of -0.59 (3.26 minus 3.85) would have translated to about a 20 win team last season, placing them just ahead of the Grizzlies as the leagues worst. Last season the Bucks had the #23 offense (3.61 IPM) and #28 defense (3.99 IPM). A defensive IPM of 3.85 would have ranked #21 in the league. Should the Bucks have the same offense as last year and the same defense as they did in the preseason the differential of -0.24 would equate to a 32-50 regular season.

You would expect the teams’ numbers to improve on both ends of the floor in the regular season, but the numbers really show just how far this team has to go.

One bright spot is that in the two games the team played that had much more intensity and effort than a typical preseason game – the two in China – the Bucks actually outperformed Golden State in both. By IPM the Bucks won the first game by a 3.46-3.40 IPM score and game 2 by 3.81-3.67. By my observation, these games were played pretty hard and show that there is some room for improvement once the regular season begins. Perhaps a team capable of playing .500 ball is in place. Perhaps.

The players (reviewed in order from best to worst):

1- Charlie Villanueva (0.911 IPM): It was a big preseason for Charlie V, as everybody wanted to know how well he will fit in as a defense-allergic power forward for Scott Skiles. If he keeps filling it up the way he did in the preseason, he will do just fine. Villanueva averaged 26 points per 40 minutes on 49% shooting. Maybe going 0 for 8 from 3 point range will encourage him to finally give up that shot. His rebounding will have to come up from the 8.6 per 40 minutes he managed in the preseason.

In his two years with the Bucks, Villanueva has done a disconcertingly poor job of getting blocks and steals, which I always attributed to his injured shoulder not being healthy. In his first 101 games with the Bucks he had only managed 105 blocks and steals combined, for a thoroughly awful ratio of 1.03 per game. In the preseason, however, he averaged a much healthier 2.40 blocks and steals per 40 minutes, which likely reflects both improved health and commitment at the defensive end. Villanueva’s best game came in the second game against Golden State, when his numbers in 26 minutes of action would have prorated out for 40 minutes of work to 40 points, 12 rebounds, 4 blocks + steals and (just to prove this is still Charlie V we are talking about) 1 assist.

Villanueva certainly has the talent to put up a 0.9 IPM season, but whether or not he can play enough defense to make him a net-positive contributor is an open question. However, there is a lot of good stuff to see from his numbers in the preseason. If he scores 22 and grabs 8 boards all year but allows 18/7 at the other end, that’s still a positive contribution.

Of course, Skiles has been making implications to the media that he doesn’t intend to start Villanueva because of his defense, instead preferring some nonexistent better player. That’s funny, I must have missed where the Bucks traded for Tim Duncan in the last few weeks. Skiles does have a habit of doing that sort of thing, such as starting Chris Duhon over Ben Gordon for two years, but I can’t imagine anyone thinking that Malik Allen is that much better than Villanueva.

2- Luke Ridnour (0.911 IPM): Ever since coming to the Bucks, opinion about Ridnour has been somewhere between “he’s great” and “he sucks”. The answer is right in the middle – he’s average. Ridnour takes exceptionally good care of the ball and doesn’t shoot or defend all that well. Basically, he’s better than half of the other starting point guards in the league – which means that if he’s your worst starter that is good and if he is your second best player that is bad. Ridnour had a very good preseason, managing a 3:1 assist/turnover ratio and grabbing 9 steals in 6 games (28 mpg). He shot poorly, only 38.9%, which makes his sterling IPM even more impressive. He also managed to grab 4.26 rebounds per 40 minutes, over 1 more than Richard Jefferson (more on that later).

Ridnour overachieved in the preseason and will drop off but should still be a solid addition to the club. Expect his A:TO ratio to stay about the same, his shooting to improve a bit and his rebounding to slide. It’s a good thing he played so well and sealed his name as the starting point guard, because nobody else at that position stepped up.

There is no way that Ridnour will carry a 0.9 IPM through the regular season, but a 0.8 is not out of the question.

3- Matt Freije (0.864 IPM): Yes, Matt Freije was the Bucks’ 3rd best player this season. He did it through shameless gunning – 23 points per 40 minutes on 39% shooting, only 1.3 assists per 40. He did manage 2.62 blocks+steals per 40 against the sub-par preseason competition. He had a good preseason, but the problem is that everyone knows that he is not an NBA-caliber athlete. He could probably make a good living in Spain or Turkey, but his primary skill – scoring – isn’t really in demand from 12th-man types. The thing that is most vexing about Freije stacking up so well among the Bucks is that it doesn’t say much about the rest of the team – the better players on the squad should put up much better per-minute numbers than someone like Matt Freije.

4- Michael Redd (0.7243 IPM): The numbers are subpar, but I don’t see anything to worry about here. Redd has no reason not to coast through the preseason, especially after spending the summer on the Olympic team instead of resting. Redd shot 47.5% from the field and made 9 of 20 three pointers, so it appears he is good to go from a scoring standpoint. He also averaged 4 boards and 4 assists per 40 minutes against 2 turnovers. The only thing missing from Redd’s game was the seven free throws per game he usually averages – he shot 18 in 6 games – but there is no reason for him to try and seek contact in a preseason game. Redd should be back to his usual 0.9 IPM once the real games start.

5- Andrew Bogut (0.643 IPM): It was a pretty disappointing preseason from a numbers perspective for Bogut, as his regular season IPM was close to 0.9 last year. I’m sure Bogut, like Redd, was cruising a little after a rough Olympics, and he has apparently been trying to beat some nagging injuries. Considering Bogut wasn’t really playing as tough as he would in the season, it’s still impressive that he managed to block 6 shots and get 4 steals in 5 games (29 mpg) and average almost 11 rebounds per 40 minutes. Bogut didn’t shoot particularly well (47%) and was awful from the foul line (53%) so that’s some reason for mild concern, but he also shot poorly early last season.

Of bigger concern is that he means so much to the team’s success at the defensive end that they will be totally sunk if he misses any time this year. The three preseason games he missed saw the Bucks’ 4th, 6th, and 7th worst defensive showings and the only other Bucks to average over 9 rebounds per 40 minutes were Matt Freije, Dan Gadzuric and Malik Allen. There just aren’t enough tough big guys on this team. It scares me that John Hammond tried to build a win-now team (by adding Jefferson) but didn’t add any toughness up front.

On the bright side, and I’ve brought this up many, many times: Andrew Bogut is the same age this year that Patrick Ewing was his rookie year. This means that Bogut’s physical maturation at the most physical position in the game means that his career trend of modest improvement should continue. If he can average 11 boards per 40 without trying very hard in the preseason then he should be able to do that easily in the regular season. Bogut should average 18 points, 11 boards and 2 blocks this year and make the all-star team (admittedly that has something to do with there being no other good centers after Dwight Howard in the East).

6- Dan Gadzuric (0.620 IPM): I know, can you believe it? Dan Gadzuric was the Bucks’ sixth best player in the preseason? Maybe that doesn’t say much about the rest of the roster, but Danny G just pretty much did what Danny G always does – if there’s nothing to do but rebound and throw his body around then he’s pretty good for short bursts. It’s when he tries to score that things get screwed up. Last season I advocated playing him alongside Bogut many times, and hopefully Skiles sees the value of that this season. Gadzuric averaged 11 boards per 40 in the preseason, and by getting the Bucks’ two best rebounders on the floor at the same time occasionally is about the only way this team will out rebound anyone this year. To Dan’s credit he didn’t turn the ball over or foul much this preseason, averaging about 2 of each per 40 minutes.

7- Charlie Bell (0.615 IPM): Bell only played 2 preseason games and got a total of 40 minutes, so he has a really small sample size to work with here. His numbers in those two games looked a lot like last years, right down to the 6 of 17 shooting.

8- Ramon Sessions (0.596 IPM): Let’s put those “Sessions is a future star” stories on hold for a bit. After a dominant season last year, Sessions spent this preseason showing why he was a low second-round pick in the first place – he can’t shoot and he’s not much of an athlete.

Sessions shot 29.6% from the field in the preseason, and that’s while only going 0 for 2 from 3-point range. There’s a big difference between potentially playing for a starting job this season and lighting it up in 15 games that didn’t matter last year, and Sessions seemed to feel the heat. In 154 minutes of preseason action, Sessions only managed 4 steals and no blocks, an indication that his athleticism is suspect. He was also a turnover machine, averaging 5.45 per 40 minutes (although some of that can be attributed to the And1 nature of preseason games). However, he wasn’t exactly an assist machine either, only averaging 7.5 per 40 minutes.

The preseason raises some legitimate questions as to how good Ramon Sessions will be in meaningful NBA games. Hopefully he can maximize his talents – he’s a guard with a gift for breaking down defenses and getting to the foul line, and he’s big enough to at least be a solid if unspectacular defender – enough to prove to be a capable backup. But if not, then maybe the Tyronn Lue signing wasn’t that bad an idea after all.

9- Richard Jefferson (0.590 IPM): Uh Oh.

This is what John Hammond wanted when he added an extra $15 million in long term salary to take on Jefferson’s contract? 38% shooting and a whopping 3.17 rebounds per 40 minutes? Yikes. Just, yikes.

Yeah, Jefferson was awful in the preseason. Most of the lame numbers aren’t too alarming to be worried about yet (poor shooting early isn’t a big deal for someone who is likely to slash to the hoop more in the regular season) but I wonder about the 2.12 blocks + steals per 40 minutes. It means he was sticking his hands in less often than players like Charlie V and Matt Freije, and it makes one wonder just how committed he is to his all-around game, having spent the last couple of seasons as primarily a scorer.

But the real problem is the putrid rebounding. Much was made before Jefferson came to the Bucks about his declining rebound rate over the past several years, from over 7 per 40 minutes early in his career to about 4 last season. The optimists tried to explain that Jefferson had concentrated on scoring more because that’s what his team needed, but it’s starting to look like maybe he’s just not as good a rebounder since a major ankle injury a few years ago.

There are always explanations for poor numbers in the preseason, and I’m sure there are plenty of reasons to justify RJ’s preseason being only moderately better than Bobby Simmons’ 0.564 IPM last season. But the rebounding is a major concern for me because it has been clear all along that the Bucks would need him to help out in that department in a major way this season, and he should have been spending his preseason minutes concentrating on that part of the game.

Jefferson should improve significantly once the real games start, but if he doesn’t, we are going to be wondering how John Hammond couldn’t have gotten a pick back from New Jersey in return for taking on RJ’s brutal contract.

10- Francisco Elson (0.5645 IPM): Elson was brought in to be Bogut’s 10 mpg backup this season, and judging from his preseason, John Hammond may as well have kept looking. It’s not that Elson did anything bad, he just didn’t really do anything at all.

11- LR Mbah a Moute (0.560 IPM): Scott Skiles gave Moute the most minutes in the preseason of anyone by far, and Moute proved that he was as advertised: hustles on defense, has no clue on offense. Moute had a couple of incredibly bad outings (highlighted by a 1-12 shooting night in game 2) but acquitted himself well in the last two preseason games (0.87 IPM in them).

Mbah a Moute’s preseason looked a lot like Richard Jefferson’s except that he didn’t create quite as many shots and got over double the rebounds (averaging 7.57 per 40 minutes). He should be a decent spot player, but I fear a little Royal Ivey-ish – no matter how good he is defensively, he might not be good enough offensively to make up for it.

12- Malik Allen (0.552 IPM): He’s a “Skiles guy” and will be Charlie Villanueva’s primary backup. It’s a good thing that he averaged 9.62 rebounds per 40 minutes, because between that and consistently being in about the right spots on defense are the only things he brings to the table.

13- Joe Alexander (0.534 IPM): There’s not much here that screams “future star”. Alexander had two nice games in the preseason (playing a big part in the win against Golden State and a 17 minute, 0.97 IPM night against Chicago where despite shooting 2 of 9 he stuffed the box score with 7 rebounds, three assists, a steal and a block) but was otherwise really awful.

The book on Alexander is that he is supposed to be very athletic but raw, a product of having not played much high-level basketball to this point in his career. That’s all well and good, but the last person I heard that about was Jamal Crawford, and he’s turned out to be just good enough to kill your team. Not having much experience at a young age has to limit your ceiling as a player somewhat.

That said, Alexander did play much better as the preseason went along and put up some huge rebounding numbers in the last couple of games. He is a rookie and the jury must stay out on him for at least a year, but I really hate to see him being one of the least productive players on the team – especially in games that don’t mean anything and where he should be able to go out and hone his skills against guys who are about to get cut.

14- Tyronn Lue (0.495 IPM): Lue didn’t play all that much and didn’t do anything of note when he did. He played 75 minutes and managed three rebounds, no blocks and no steals while shooting 35%. He did, at least, have a 2:1 assist to turnover ratio. I’d still rather have another backup power forward than him.

15- Adrian Griffin (0.300 IPM): He only played in the first two preseason games and was a non-factor in them, totaling as many turnovers as shots (three). But the most discouraging thing? That Griffin, a shooting guard, averaged almost double the rebounds per 40 minutes of Richard Jefferson (6.22 vs. 3.17).

The bottom line here: It’s probably not all that unusual for players with secure roster sports to post poor preseason statistics, but the way it seemed to infiltrate the entire team worries me. It wouldn’t bother me as much if there was also a massive improvement in the defensive statistics, as that would tell me that the wavering effort level of the opposition renders preseason stats useless. But that didn’t happen – statistically, the Bucks played like a 2-6 team this preseason (and they should have been 2-6 – not only did they lose the second game on a lucky shot, I believe that Golden State actually didn’t get the ball inbounded in 5 seconds on the game winning play, nor did they get the shot off in time. But it made better theater the way it worked out).

There is no way this team is the 20 win team they looked like in the preseason, but I worry about how much upside there really is for this roster. Before training camp started I predicted 38 wins this year, and I stand by that. It seems to me that the best case scenario for this team is about 43 wins and the worst case (except for a barrage of injuries that renders them noncompetitive) is about 32 wins (the “this preseason’s defense and last years’ offense” that I alluded to at the beginning of the post).

So that’s my call: 38 wins. I don’t think that gets a playoff berth, but I’m still not a believer in what Indiana is up to – I think the Bucks escape the cellar in the Central Division.