The Milwaukee Bucks have won ten out of 14 games under their new coach Joe Prunty. However, the light game plan also helped. What has changed with the successor of Jason Kidd and how is Jabari Parker doing after his second cruciate ligament rupture?
In Milwaukee many fans were relieved when Jason Kidd got his papers after more than three years as head coach of the Bucks. The Hall-of-Famer was dismissed somewhat surprisingly, probably also due to external pressure and differences with the front office. It was also a sign that Wisconsin was looking to save the season and that they were planning to do some things in Wisconsin this season. The people in charge seem to think the team is capable of a deep play-off run.
At the moment, former assistant Joe Prunty is sitting on the bridge and his record of 10-4 is quite respectable. But appearances are a little deceptive. Only against the Sixers (excluding Joel Embiid) and the Raptors were victories won against potential playoff teams; against Minnesota, Miami, Denver and New Orleans, however, it was defeated.
Of course, the Bucks can’t do anything for the game plan – even the supposedly weak opponents have to be defeated in the NBA and they did it seriously. A defensive rating of 101.6 is the best rating after Utah since Prunty was in charge. Under Coach Kidd, the Bucks were still on a disastrous 25. Place situated.
But it is also worth taking a second look at the statistics for the improved defense. One point of criticism for Kidd was that the aggressive defense against the Pick’ n’ Roll could be overplayed too easily and the opponents got so many easy finals at the ring. Prunty did a minimal work on it, as Khris Middleton admitted to ESPN shortly before the All-Star Break:”We still have the same principles in defense, only his coaching style is a bit different.”
This is also underlined by the figures. No team has left since 22. January (the enthronement of Prunty) more attempts in the Restricted Area (32.2 FGA per game), so it doesn’t help that the bucks are defending them mediocre. The Bucks scored 134 points against a creative team like Denver and Nikola Jokic, because the Serbian cut them like a surgeon and mercilessly exploited all weaknesses in the scheme.
Why the Bucks have such an outstanding defensive rating under Prunty can be partly explained by the opponent’s threesome. 31.6 percent of their distance throws hit Milwaukees in the past 14 games, which means second place in the entire league.
This may be due to good closeouts on the one hand, but also to the fact that the opponent simply doesn’t hit his triples – these values are traditionally subject to considerable diversification. According to nba. com, 13 out of an average of 31.6 three players per game that Milwaukee allows are completely free. The opponents only sink 30.8 percent of them, which makes the Bucks the happiest team in the league after Indiana.
But you can’t rely on that, of course. Against the nuggets, which hit astronomical 60 per cent from outside, 12 attempts were’ wide open’, nine of them went through the reuse.
However, Milwaukee is also struggling with some personal problems. Center John Henson dropped out of several games, and the guard rotation has narrowed after the injuries of Rookie of the Year Malcolm Brogdon and Matthew Dellavedova. Prunty, for example, had to have the 40-year-old Jason Terry play more often than he would like to, even though the jet is still capable of hitting its threesome at the biblical age – as in the OT victory in Toronto, when Terry marked 14 points and made some important layouts in the fourth quarter and the extra time.
It is also necessary to reintegrate Jabari Parker. After its second rupture of the cruciate ligament, the forward is used for about 20 minutes per game, but already shows promising approaches. In eight games so far, the Forward has put up 9.1 points and 3.6 rebounds with odds of 46.8 percent from the field.
Even more important, however, is that he can relieve Giannis Antetokounmpo a little bit. The Greek recently admitted that he has played too many minutes in recent years and the coach is now trying to reduce the time spent by his most important players. The MVP candidate was already missing some games because of knee problems.
Giannis has 37.2 minutes per game in the field over the season, more than any other player in the league, and even the last strong Eric Bledsoe and Khris Middleton had to pull out for many minutes. That’s why Prunty is working on his rotation and replaces the Greeks with Parker in the middle of the first and third quarter for longer breaks. He has different strengths than the All-Star, but he can at least maintain the scoring, also because he is mostly on the field together with Bledsoe and Middleton.
But can this go well in the long run? Will Parker accept the role of Sixth Man for the rest of the season? The No. 2 pick from the Draft 2014 will be Restricted Free Agent in the summer, so there is a lot of money at stake for him. According to Zach Lowe (ESPN), in October 2017, when he was still injured, Parker declined a $54 million three-year contract. This suggests that Parker sees himself as a franchise player who wants to be paid accordingly. But whether the dried up market will make a deal for him in 2018 is another question.
Parker is still covering his role as a banker, but does he do so when the playoffs are coming up and he still has to give the noble reservations? The ideal position for Parker on the fourth is blocked with Antetokounmpo, for a Small Forward his jump throw is probably too shaky (career: 34.2 percent threesome) not to endanger the Spacing of the Bucks. The ideal combination is probably not yet found here.
However, Prunty doesn’t really have much room for experimentation any more. The race for the seeds in the east is incredibly close and fiercely contested, as the Greek freak knows:”We have nothing left to give away. The last few games of the season are incredibly important to us. We need another series.”
The Bucks will certainly squint after the home advantage. The gap to Washington is only 1.5 games in sixth place, which can be scaled down to 1.5 games at night on Wednesday, when the Bucks are performing in the main city (from 2 a. m. live on DAZN). Due to the many matches against bad teams there are now mainly better opponents waiting, so there will be only few presents from the “tank battalion” of the league. It takes more performances like the impressive appearance of the Bucks at the Air Canade Centre, the best home team of the league (Toronto).
“The playoffs will start in seven weeks, the time of relaxation is over, we have to reach our top form now,” says Henson,”and this should decide whether Prunty has a long-term future as the Kidd successor in Milwauke.