Bucks Stock Market: Nikola Jokic was too much to handle
Milwaukee suffered their worst home-loss of the season and second-worst loss overall on Sunday.
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.
For the second time in five days, the Milwaukee Bucks got blown out with all of Giannis Antetokounmpo, Khris Middleton, and Jrue Holiday active and starting. This is the continuation of a trend that has been happening all month long: the Bucks are losing to teams they should be beating. I know that the Nuggets aren’t a “bad” team, but they are a team that is missing two of their three best players (though their best is in the conversation for best in the world). To be fair, it doesn’t help that Denver was a scorching-hot from distance, knocking down a season-high tying 23 threes on 43 attempt (53.5%) while the Bucks were 10-30 from beyond the arc (33.3%).
Nikola Jokic also just destroyed the Bucks defense. Though loading up against the reigning MVP led to him only scoring 18 points, he had 15 assists as he finding every hole imaginable and setting teammates up for good shots. Hard to beat a team that had everything going for them. Let’s talk movements.
Khris Middleton📉
In a game where the Buck only score 100 points, they needed more than the nine points that Khris Middleton provided tonight. The worst part of it is that he only took EIGHT shots. The team was clearly struggling to keep up with Denver’s scoring, which is why it is disappointing to see Khris Middleton not be a guy to step up in those moments.
Mike Budenholzer📉
What was the thinking here? “Oh yeah, let’s throw Wes Matthews on Nikola Jokic and help one pass away from one of the greatest passers in NBA history while the team is shooting lights-out from deep.” I recognize that Milwaukee doesn’t have a ton of options (would be nice to have another big man on the roster!), but I just did not understand what they thought when devising the game plan for Jokic. They started with Bobby on him, which is a tough matchup because Portis isn’t the biggest dude. Then they went to doubling from one pass away, and then they went to Giannis guarding him for a few possessions, and then back to doubling one pass away. Oh, and they also threw a zone defense which had more holes than an archeological dig site in it against Jokic, which went terribly. Maybe double with Bobby as one of the guys instead of Wes, or let Giannis carry the defensive burden and run more sets from Khris and Jrue to handle the offense? In any case, what they tried absolutely did not work.
The Bucks will look to rebound from this loss on Tuesday, February 1st when they head on the road to take on the Washington Wizards at 6:00 pm central. Ti and I will be hosting a Playback room for that game! The link will be in our Discord, which you can gain access to by tweeting at Ti or I with your five-star rating on Apple/Spotify OR proof of subscription to this Substack!