Bucks Stock Market: The Bucks blow it big time at home against the Pistons

Truly awful play from Milwaukee led to Detroit snapping the Bucks' 16-win streak vs the Pistons.

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.

Around halftime, Monday night’s Bucks/Pistons game seemed destined to go the way every Bucks/Pistons game of the Mike Budenholzer era had gone: Milwaukee pulling away to an easy win. That is not what happened, as the Bucks gave up the slight lead they built early in the second half and looked largely disinterested and straight-up terrible outside of Jrue Holiday. This game sucked, plain and simple, and it’ll be seriously disappointing if we don’t see some damn fire from this team on Wednesday night after this trash performance.

Rohan and I will be live on Playback for that game against the Raptors, by the way, so be sure you’re in the Gyro Group discord if you’d like to find out with us — all Substack subscribers can get in by emailing gyrosteppod@gmail.com or reaching out to me on Twitter with a screenshot of their Substack subscription, Apple, or Spotify 5-star rating.

Giannis Antetokounmpo 📉

Giannis’ box score stats look awesome, and he was quite good for stretches of this game, but his effort level on both ends in the second half was simply unacceptable. Pistons made shots over Giannis consistently like he wasn’t even there, and before taking over the offense late in the fourth he was barely present on the scoreboard after halftime. Giannis doesn’t have to be at a 10/10 level every night, but this was a highly disappointing effort from the superstar known for the opposite.

Khris Middleton 📉

I don’t want to lay into Khris too much, as he missed the last game due to personal reasons and was questionable coming in — we don’t yet know what’s going on behind the scenes. Suffice it to say he was sloppy and a non-factor on both ends.

Grayson Allen 📉📉

The double downstock is rare, but it’s deserved in this case. Grayson Allen has been doing mostly nothing for the last month, and the excuse of struggling to fit in with so many weapons around him doesn’t really hold up in a game that saw Milwaukee dying for more shot-making all night long. Grayson was 2/11 with 5 points, making this 13 out of his last 14 games shooting below 50% from the field, and 9 of the last 14 where he’s scored in single digits. Over those 14 games, going all the way back to December 2, Grayson is averaging 8.6 points per game on 33.6% field goal shooting and 31.5% three-point shooting.

For the last month, Grayson has not produced like a starter. I’m not sure how much longer he can remain with the first five if he continues to play like this — it’s hard to watch, and taking a toll on how the Bucks start games. From the beginning of the season until December 1, Milwaukee was second in the NBA in first quarter scoring with 29.6 points per quarter. Since December 2, the start of his slump, the Bucks are managing just 26.6 points per first quarter, which is 23rd in the league over that stretch.

Pat Connaughton 📉

It seemed like Pat had broken his shooting slump in Milwaukee’s last game, but then he came out and shot 1/4 from deep and 1/5 overall. Connaughton also wasn’t strong enough on some of his closeouts, which is very unlike him, and didn’t help as the Pistons got red-hot from deep.

George Hill 📉

George Hill continued to contribute in lots of small ways, but he was a nonfactor scoring the ball when the Bucks couldn’t afford it. Hill made none of his five three-point attempts, and only one total make in the loss.

As previously mentioned, Milwaukee is back in action on Wednesday night against the Toronto Raptors at 7 pm. I sure hope we get a better game to watch on Playback than the one Bucks fans were subjected to tonight.