Over the first three games of the season for the Milwaukee Bucks, starting center Brook Lopez has averaged 26.2 minutes per contest. This is exactly why some fans ended up questioning why the former All-Star ended up playing less than 17 minutes in Wednesday’s brutal loss to the Toronto Raptors.
The game ended up being a blowout in favor of the home team, but the rest of Milwaukee’s starters still logged significantly more minutes than Lopez did on the evening. In fact, even the minutes-capped Khris Middleton played more than Lopez did against Toronto.
Milwaukee Bucks Coach Explains Brook Lopez Benching
Middleton checked back in the game after less than two minutes into the second half. He replaced Lopez in the lineup, who for his part, did not return to the game until less than nine minutes into the final period.
As it turns out, however, this had nothing to do with Lopez’s play on the evening. According to head coach Adrian Griffin, he merely wanted to give Middleton more playing time:
“I thought Khris was done, but he wasn’t,” Griffin said, via Bucks beat reporter Eric Nehm of The Athletic. “So when I found out he wasn’t, I put Khris in and then tried to go small. That’s all it was. Brook didn’t do anything wrong, but I thought initially Khris was done with his minutes, but he had a few more, so I wanted to throw him back in there.”
Middleton’s playing time appears to be capped at 17 minutes per game as he continues to recover from offseason knee surgery. That was the amount of minutes he played against the Miami Heat on Monday, and he logged the same minutes in Wednesday’s loss.
It would be interesting to find out why Griffin didn’t realize the fact that Middleton had more minutes available than he did. You would think that the head coach should have had a better grasp on all this during the game, or at least one of his assistants should have reminded him earlier.
Either way, this is yet another lesson to be learned by the rookie coach and his staff.
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1 Comment
Not a big deal at all.
However, the team has issues right now that can be easily fixed, though they aren’t as bad as the histrionic post by Bucks Muse 8 minutes ago, suggesting “we’re in trouble”. (and I would tell Bucks Muse that the rebounding rank is meaningless, as rebounds are a function of the other team’s shooting percentage; the Bucks currently rank dead last in defensive FG%, which of course means that all those balls going into the bucket are not going to result in an available rebound). However, the Bucks ARE giving up a very high amount of OREBs so far and it has hurt them a lot in second chance points.
Beasley needs to be immediately removed from the starting line up. Oddly enough, he’s had great shooting games in the two losses and had horrible games in the two wins. He doesn’t rebound. He doesn’t get assists. He plays NO defense (the effort has been there with he and Dame, but it’s really hard to imagine a worse defensive guard duo in the league right now, and Giannis and Brook can’t cover up when they get blown by so often).
Dame has looked awful, even on offense, and I never liked him with Portland and thought he was all style and no substance. I hope he proves me wrong, but you can’t rely on him to repeat the game one performance often this season. They should be cruising to some of these victories, and it’s deeply troubling that they beat the good teams and got blown out by a pair of mediocre teams that won’t get past the first round of the play offs.
Marjon is the most likely candidate to help prevent all the penetration that Dame and Malik are giving up. AJJ should also start getting the back up PG minutes and move ahead of Cam Payne in the rotation. Beas will be fine off the bench along with Bobby for some points when the Big 3 are resting. It’s also likely that they’ve logged more minutes with AJJ in practice and the unit will run more smoothly. Maybe Marjon covers up Dame’s utter inability to defend and also starts to blossom on offense. The second unit looks much better than the first, particularly in sharing the ball and getting good shots. Giannis, Brook, Dame, and KM to a slight degree are all playing one on one hero ball and the god like Dame is even missing his wide open looks (Bucks are nearly dead last in assists at 28th and that was absolutely NOT a feature of Bud led teams, who often ranked in the top 5 in assists).
Bud got jobbed. Giannis missed 60% of the playoffs. He’s a MUCH better technician and offensive coach than Adrian, who maybe should have gotten the assistant’s job to fix the D (though that’s terrible too right now).
They’re playing like they think they can just show up and blow everyone out of the gym. It’s a work in progress at best, and I feel like it’s not going to work. KM may be washed up. Bobby seems to have lost the ability to shoot. Dame looks terrible.