Bucks Offense Goes Silent

By tross
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Updated: January 30, 2016

The Milwaukee Bucks sandwiched a road trip to Memphis around two home games this week. Unfortunately for the Bucks they left their offense at home in a 103-83 loss on Thursday night to the Memphis Grizzlies. The Bucks held a four point lead at the end of the first quarter but the remaining three quarters were all Memphis as the Bucks had a long and wide range of issues.

At the top of the problem list was pace and tempo. Memphis is an older more veteran team. That means they are not eager to run and they can slow down and play half-court offense because it is easier on their legs. The Bucks should have wanted to up the tempo and make the Grizzles get up and down the floor. The Bucks were never able to make this game be played at their tempo largely evidenced by them only scoring 83 points in the game and the Bucks were only able to score over 21 points in one of the four quarters in this game.

Another issue beyond pace resulting in lower scoring for the Bucks were their 14 turnovers. Many of those were clustered together in the second and third quarter when the Bucks were outscored by a combined 18 points. The turnovers not only took scoring chances away from the Bucks but they also provided the Grizzles with easy scoring opportunities.

Outside of the turnovers and pace issues, the Bucks simply could not put the ball in the basket. The Bucks shot 29 of 79 on the night for a shooting percentage of 36.7%. While this percentage is certainly bad it is made even worse by the fact that many of these misfires were from zero to three feet away from the basket. This was a team wide issue largely because of the aggressiveness of the Memphis defense.

The reasons of other problems have been well documented. The Bucks allowed the Grizzlies to shoot nine of 19 on three pointers in the second half. The three pointers were hit through the same means as they have been over the last four games. Opponents rotate the ball from the strong side to the weak side and the Bucks defense does not recover in time. This has been a common problem for four games now and until the Bucks figure out a way to stop it this will continue to be a problem because the book on this issue is out and look for opponents to continue adding chapters to it till the Bucks figure something out.

The injuries continue to deplete the Bucks bench and that is resulting in the Bucks being significantly outscored by the opponents. On Thursday night the numbers for that particular stat read. Memphis 49 Milwaukee 23. In order for this stat to be corrected the Bucks need to get the more productive portion of their bench healthy because right now it a big disadvantage.

The Bucks will briefly return home to face the Miami Heat on Friday night before beginning a west coast road trip next week.