The China Game's have confirmed things.

[midranger]

[quote="icat2000"
Bogut had no problems dealing with Biedrins when he played Russia at the Olympics.

Biedrins was not on the Russian national team nor has he ever competed in the Olympics. He's from Latvia, not Russia. Kirilinko is another tall, skinny, blond eastern european dude with spiked hair. Are you confusing him with Biedrins?[/quote]


This points to why (channeling epi) objective manners of evaluation are often much better than a viewer's eyes or memory.

[REDDzone]

This points to why (channeling epi) objective manners of evaluation are often much better than a viewer's eyes or memory.

"I'll trust my own eyes, thank you!"

[paulpressey25]

He could be wrong or I could be wrong, but I felt Bogut's man defense the other night was solid, that he helped quite well when required and that he came up with a couple of nice stops.

What Ty does isn't perfect. Just another piece of the puzzle.

The reason I highlight it here is because we're all hoping Bogut can rid himself of those stinker games whether they are 4/9 or 8/5 or whatever and where one or two guys he's matched up against swat his shots away and then he goes into a shell for the night. The ones that hold him back from being an 18/12/3 all star center.

I'm not Bogut bashing, but on the other hand every guy on this team no longer has any excuses for their play. We've cast out the selfish players and the crappy coaches. If Bogut wants to be the man this year (and we need him to do so to have any type of success) he's got to fight through the Anthony Randolph's, Brandan Wright's and Andris Biedrins of the world and take it to them.

[paul]

Agreed PP but taking one preseason game in isolation is a bit of a stretch. Let's hope it doesn't happen often but he's going to have some off nights offensively, he's no offensive juganaut and even they have bad nights. If I recall correctly Bogut held the best big man in the game, Duncan, to single figures in a game last season where Duncan just looked completely lost. I'm not making some grand point with that just highlighting that everyone has off nights, the key will be how few Bogut can limit them to.
What I did like is that even though he had a bit of a stinker offensively he looked very active, hustled well and (imo) was solid on D and the boards, so still made a contribution.

[BDUB_30]

theirs no way you can say bogut had a bad defensive game during the 2nd china game ..

i counted 4 charges taken ....ball dont lie ?


his offensive game was beyond terrible it made me rethink if we should even be using him on the lowbox , it made me think of john hammond saying during one of our preason games how terrible andrew is when he tries to " dribble down his defender " ..it made me question why are we centering our offense around a guy that our gm was openly critical about ..


it is what it is , but officially put me in the camp of not willing to wait past this season on project bogut ...i kind of thought we were moving on past the 4 point efforts ...he did play very well in the second half of the season last year .. enough for any fair objective opionon to say the potential is there ..but the time is now for him ..if were doing this 20 pts one night ..4 the next , and their is no outside factors ( not getting touches ) ..then its really time to use bogut in a more reserved role ... he had an insane amount of touches in the second china game ... he was sloppy with the ball .. on the 2nd play of the game he missed an oop from jefferson.....wide open ..set the tone for his entire night imo .

personaly i think hes over emotional and im starting to question if he doesnt lose focus due to his over emotional ass ...im not saying ive lost patience ..but im STARTING to see what others have been saying all along ..he needs to put the critics to rest and hes not gonna do that playing like he did in his last outing .

[stellation]

With all due respect to Ty's work pp25, I don't really recall Biedrens actually scoring those baskets on Bogut.

[BDUB_30]

With all due respect to Ty's work pp25, I don't really recall Biedrens actually scoring those baskets on Bogut.

he didnt , i watched the games closely ...biedrens didnt get much off on bogut at all ..

[icat2000]

[quote="icat2000"
Bogut had no problems dealing with Biedrins when he played Russia at the Olympics.

Biedrins was not on the Russian national team nor has he ever competed in the Olympics. He's from Latvia, not Russia. Kirilinko is another tall, skinny, blond eastern european dude with spiked hair. Are you confusing him with Biedrins?

My bad.

Still the point remains that there are more things that happen in a game that are not picked up by raw stats.

And Bogut didn't have a horrible defensive game. He rebounded, blocked a couple of shots, drew some charges and was active on defense. Is that horrible? No.

[old skool]

While I have not seen any of the 2008-09 Bucks, I don't understand how anyone can say that this team is so far ahead of last year's squad.

The Bucks are 1-5 in the preseason. Nothing to get too thrilled about.

The 2007-08 Bucks looked pretty good to start last year. Yi looked like a steal and clearly looked better than CV at PF. The team looked to be recovering from the injuries of the prior year. Krystkowiak had the team playing with energy - and as a result the Bucks were 7-4 early in the season.

That they played so poorly from that point on only underscores how dangerous it is to try to draw conclusions early in the year, much less midway through the preseason. If nothing else, last season showed us that you can't assess a team's progress on such a small sample of games.

I'll bet that at this time year ago, few people expected Bulls coach Scott sKiles to be fired before the All-Star break and headed to a 20-something win Bucks team.

I don't see how two games on the other side of the planet can "confirm" anything.

oLd sKool

[fam3381]

While I have not seen any of the 2008-09 Bucks, I don't understand how anyone can say that this team is so far ahead of last year's squad.

Last year set a low standard, but I agree that we haven't seen much...my optimism is built mostly on liking Skiles and feeling like there's more talent on the roster this year.

Still, there was pretty good effort at the beginning of last season as well, and two games against a Warrior team that will probably be lucky to be middle-of-the-pack isn't much to go on. Hopefully we see a bit more cohesiveness in the last few preseason games.

[emunney]

The Warriors absolutely annihilated us twice last year, though. Even without BD and Monta, it's encouraging that it seems we at least aren't outclassed athletically across the board like we were last year. I'm hesitant to draw that conclusion based on preseason games, but it's true that they didn't approach running us out of the gym in either game.

[GrandAdmiralDan]

I also don't mind the idea of Allen starting at the PF and only playing maybe 12 mpg with CV/M & M and Alexander getting the rest of the minutes.

I just don't see how there enough minutes to do something like that.

Ridnour/Sessions cover the 48 minutes at PG. I think Bell will play more than this, but for the sake of examining this let's say that Redd plays 36 minutes and Bell plays 12 minutes at SG. Bogut gets 35 minutes at center. Let's even say that there are 2 minutes in a game where the other lineup allows us to go small at center and use Villanueva. Elson gets the other 11 minutes. Villanueva only plays 28 minutes in this hypothetical, so that's 26 minutes at PF. Jefferson plays 36 minutes at SF.
That leaves 12 minutes at SF and 22 minutes at PF.

Malik Allen takes 12 of those so then you'd have 22 minutes remaining between SF and PF for Alexander and Mbah A Moute.

But then we'd have an 11 man rotation (I think we need to strive for a 9 man rotation, but a 10 man without Allen is bad enough already, much less 11) and really would be giving less minutes to Bell and Villanueva especially, and also Mbah A Moute and Alexander just to be able to play Malik Allen 12 minutes as the starting PF.

Giving it more thought, starting Mbah A Moute would be preferable to starting Alexander, since Mbah A Moute seems significantly further ahead defensively. He could play the first 6 minutes of the 1st and 3rd quarters and go completely all out defensively causing as much havoc as possible. Then at the 6 minute mark, he goes out to rest and Villanueva comes in to revitalize the offense, especially since Redd, Jefferson, and Bogut will need to get some rest. The only problem is that Villanueva can realistically only get 30 minutes this way, but I think that would be an acceptable tradeoff, strategically.

[GrandAdmiralDan]

People seem to forget how well CV played in his first 14 games with the Bucks two years ago. He then hurt his shoulder and never that year (and I suspect last year) fully recovered. Another offseason for the shoulder to get in shape and now we see a CV who is as he first played with the Bucks. He seems to be a good guy. I hope he stay healthy this year and produces as we have seen he can. His defense (based upon one game I've seen) still seems too hesitant, but a more instinctive Bogut and Jefferson makes that somewhat unimportant.

Your overall point on Villanueva in regards to the start of the 06-07 season I agree with to a large extent, but it wasn't 14 games (if it was than I suppose it would be somewhat more surprising that people would forget about it).

It was the first 7 games, and half of the 8th. He then missed nearly a month and when he came back (despite having good production in his 2nd, 3rd, and 4th game back) he never seemed the same, like you said.

[GrandAdmiralDan]

While I have not seen any of the 2008-09 Bucks, I don't understand how anyone can say that this team is so far ahead of last year's squad.

The Bucks are 1-5 in the preseason. Nothing to get too thrilled about.

The 2007-08 Bucks looked pretty good to start last year. Yi looked like a steal and clearly looked better than CV at PF. The team looked to be recovering from the injuries of the prior year. Krystkowiak had the team playing with energy - and as a result the Bucks were 7-4 early in the season.

That they played so poorly from that point on only underscores how dangerous it is to try to draw conclusions early in the year, much less midway through the preseason. If nothing else, last season showed us that you can't assess a team's progress on such a small sample of games.

I'll bet that at this time year ago, few people expected Bulls coach Scott sKiles to be fired before the All-Star break and headed to a 20-something win Bucks team.

I don't see how two games on the other side of the planet can "confirm" anything.

oLd sKool

Good points, old skool.

But I think there are some significant factors with Yi and with LK that cannot be overlooked.

Part of Yi's problem was running into the ultimate rookie wall as a result of being so heavily used by China.

But the team started to go downhill even before Yi did, particularly due to them losing faith in LK and tuning out what they had previously been buying into for training camp and those first 11 games.

LK brought the right tone, right attitude, etc. and despite not having a track record as a coach in the NBA. Our team bought into that. LK continued to be the kind of coach this team needed in practice and in preparation for games, but it started to become apparent that during the games themselves, he seemed to freeze up a bit and not enforce his vision like he would in practice, not to mention not seeming to know how to effectively manage a game during the game itself (rotations and substitution patterns in particular). So then players just stopped believing in him, and the downward spiral started, with other dysfunctional organizational factors compounding the situation.

Some of those factors have since been altered (at least temporarily) and the same issues that existed with LK just won't exist with Skiles. Perhaps something else will go wrong, but it won't be what went wrong with LK, since Skiles has the things that LK lacked that became problematic.

So if we get off to a good start this year, I do not think people have to be cautious based on last year's start. If we had another inexperienced coach, among other things, than I would have agreed.

[Sigra]

LK brought the right tone, right attitude, etc. and despite not having a track record as a coach in the NBA. Our team bought into that. LK continued to be the kind of coach this team needed in practice and in preparation for games, but it started to become apparent that during the games themselves, he seemed to freeze up a bit and not enforce his vision like he would in practice, not to mention not seeming to know how to effectively manage a game during the game itself (rotations and substitution patterns in particular). So then players just stopped believing in him, and the downward spiral started, with other dysfunctional organizational factors compounding the situation.

+1

[LUKE23]

In my ideal rotation, Lue and Allen do not even see the floor. I'm not a fan of either Elson or Allen, but we need somebody at backup C, and Elson is a better rebounder/defender, and in general is just a tougher and more physical player than Allen. Allen is a finesse PF that can't rebound, at least CV, while being a poor defender, can rebound and can score inside.

Here is my rotation:

PG: Ridnour/Sessions
SG: Redd/Bell
SF: Jefferson/Alexander
PF: Villanueva/LRMAM
C: Bogut/Elson

as far as a minute breakdown, something like this:

PG: Ridnour (30)/Sessions (12)/Bell (6)
SG: Redd (35)/Bell (13)
SF: Jefferson (35)/Alexander (10)/LRMAM (3)
PF: Villanueva (30)/LRMAM (10)/Alexander (8)
C: Bogut (36)/Elson (12)

And yes, I know that that is not how the minutes will exactly breakdown because not everyone will play every game, so save it. Just a general breakdown. Ideally, I'd like a 9 man rotation, but given LRMAM's contributions so far and the fact that we have to play one of Allen/Elson off the bench, I don't see 9 being plausible. If they do go 9, that likely means LRMAM is not in the rotation off the bat.