Bucks Stock Market: Bullied by Cleveland

Strong play from the up-and-coming Cavaliers was too much for Milwaukee to handle.

The Bucks Stock Market is a fictitious market run by the GSPN crew that tracks player stock “movement” following the conclusion of every game. Here’s the spreadsheet logging the game-by-game results.

Yikes. After what felt like an eternity, the Milwaukee Bucks played a basketball game (good!), but they got blown out by a Cavs team missing key rotation pieces (bad!). To be fair, the Bucks were without Wesley Matthews due to a knee injury and Grayson Allen due to targeted harassment by the NBA. However, this is a loss that the Bucks should be upset about. It’s not because of the opponent, the Cavs are a good team, it’s the manner in which they lost. Aside from the first quarter, Milwaukee got beaten down. Some of it was self-inflicted (19 turnovers), some of it was shooting (Cavs out-shot Milwaukee by 17.1% from three), but it felt like a lot of it can be boiled down to Cleveland wanting the win more. I recognize that’s an oversimplification of the complex intricacies of the beautiful game of basketball, but drive and mindset are definitely upstream factors used for elucidating what happens on a game-to-game basis. Let’s talk movements!

Donte DiVincenzo📉

I feel like we have a large enough sample of games at this point to start questioning what Donte DiVincenzo is doing. This is a rare game where the box score tells the whole story of his performance tonight. He took the fourth-most shots on the team (11) and ended with nine points due to a scorching hot 36.4% shooting from the field including 1-5 from deep. He also managed to accrue four turnovers and just looked out of control tonight.

George Hill📉

Zero point George Hill night are disappointing. I understand that it isn’t (and shouldn’t be) his game to take a large amount shots, but the point of that is making it count when you do shoot the ball. That did not happen tonight. 0-3 from the field and only two assists just isn’t getting it done, especially when other guys aren’t getting it going either.

The Milwaukee Bucks will look to rebound from this loss on Friday, when they take on the New York Knicks at home at 9:00 pm central.