Tracking the larger sentiments of Bucks fans week by week.
Rotation, rotation, rotation. It is all anyone can talk about! With the Milwaukee Bucks taking a little bit of a bloody nose this past weekend in a pair of losses to the Orlando Magic and Cleveland Cavaliers, my mind has begun drifting away from the plain box score watching that informs much of my vaunted analysis and onto the strategic plane. And I’m not the only one if the subject of Van’s Tuesday Tracker a week ago is anything to go off of.
The most fascinating part of an interesting Bucks team has turned out to be how its revamped roster does or does not fit together. If you’d told me before the trade deadline that Taurean Prince would be the team’s night in, night out starting two guard I’d have been shocked. Yet the starting lineup with him, Dame, Kuzma, Giannis, and Brook has advanced numbers of a 115.5 offensive rating, 108.8 defensive rating, and +6.7 net (in nine games and 131 minutes played). It is the still the smallest sample of the three main starting groups Doc Rivers has relied upon this season (the season began with Gary Trent Jr. as the two guard and morphed into an Andre Jackson Jr. experiment for a bit), but that is the best defensive rating of the three lineups and the second best offense. Is that a function of results again relatively worse competition, small sample size theater, or something worth putting actual weight on? That’s what keeps me coming back: you could make a case either way and sound reasonably coherent while doing so.
That only scratches the starting five, too. Looming in the middle distance is the return of Bobby Portis. He will assuredly hijack all of Jericho Sims’ 15.6 bench big minutes, but has the arrival of Kyle Kuzma altered how much time on the court there is to go around? Portis will reasonably expect to get his old rotation spot back and perhaps then some with the playoffs looming; is he right to believe that is in the cards and should that be Doc Rivers’ plan? Balancing expectations there could be yet another late-season hurdle for a team that has had to deal with quite a few of them this season.
And, finally, if Taurean “NBA Starting Shooting Guard” Prince is here to stay, where does that leave those critical bench guard minute allocations? Kevin Porter Jr. has made his case as a possible Dame-free lineup ball-handler and creator, AJ Green can space the floor and defend up a bit, and there’s the wild card of Ryan Rollins who has dropped out of the rotation, but could be a worthwhile gamble if there’s scant non-Dame minutes to go around.
So I humbly come to you, Brew Hoop readership and commentariat, to help me read the tea leaves. I want to take the temperature on a bunch of rotational questions and also get a feel for where sentiments lie now that we’re a month removed from the trade deadline and but a handful of weeks away from the NBA Playoffs.
To the polls!
PS—the question about playoff success and winning a title do inhabit a similar theme, but please indulge me just this once.
As always, this poll will be open until midnight Central on Friday, and we’ll post the results later that day. Thanks for voting!