Quotes, Notes, and Links: Milwaukee Bucks 98 Atlanta Hawks 90

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Highlights

Larry Drew:

"It was just a total collapse on the defensive end, I thought. We didn’t play with the energy, we didn’t play with the juice, we didn’t play with the intensity that, having been in that situation before, we’ve done in the past."

At what point does bad defenders playing bad defense stop being blamed on an absence of energy, intensity, or, god help me, "juice"?

Larry Drew:

"It was not a good display of shot selection, which we talk about over and over, especially on the road. We settled."

I've been sympathetic to both Drew and his predecessor for the lack of depth both have been given but it's hard to remain fair on that score when neither uses all the options available to hold players' minutes accountable to their on-court actions on both ends of the floor. If Zaza Pachulia or Marvin Williams or Mo Evans or Jeff Teague came into the fourth quarter of a game because someone took a bad shot or shots or because someone couldn't stay in front of a 34-year-old little person or keep track of the whereabouts of Garrett Temple, or if the team ran one m&*^*$#u@#*&g play for its best player to try and stop a run then this sort of fourth quarter collapse would be less familiar, less easily explicable.

Al Horford:

"It’s a lesson still being learned, I feel like. I guess when it gets to a point where it hurts you and really bothers you, then you do something about it. I don’t know that we’re there as a team yet."

Joe Johnson:

"With everybody back, it seems that the flow is a little different. We just had no chemistry throughout the whole game."

Yes, it was Al Horford's 17 points on 9 shots and 5 assists that disrupted the team's chemistry. Or maybe the 5 rebounds* that Marvin Williams grabbed in less than 13 minutes. Let's not let the magnitude of Josh Smith's poor play in the fourth quarter take away from the near-total ineptitude of iso-Joe or his Crawfordesque off-the-ball defense.

*That would 4 more rebounds than flow diagnostician Joe Johnson managed to find in 33 minutes of play.

Zaza Pachulia:

"I believe we didn’t play smart the last couple minutes of the fourth quarter, I’d say the whole fourth quarter. We let them make a run and let them do what they wanted."

Al Horford on Atlanta's fourth quarter offense:

"We just became stagnant on offense."

Earl Boykins on his team's fourth quarter offense:

"That's foreign territory to us. We looked like a hell of an offensive team."

The Bucks are the second-worst offensive team in the league. They barely average a point per possession. In their two wins against the Hawks, they've averaged over 114 points per 100 possessions.

Jeremy Schmidt on Garrett Temple's debut with the Bucks:

Garrett Temple only arrived in Milwaukee yesterday, but picked up everything he needed to by game time. And the stuff he didn’t know about, he was fed by his teammates throughout the game. Temple said he practiced mainly at point guard in his lone practice with the team, but he saw action exclusively at the two and three on Wednesday night. He looked like a natural fit.

He finished with just eight points, but made three of five shots, grabbed three rebounds and handed out three assists while not committing a turnover. He made a particularly key pass to Delfino in the fourth quarter. With the Hawks in a zone and the ball swung to him on the right side, he skipped his pass across the court to a waiting Delfino outside the arc. Delfino finished the play by making the three and the Bucks were up five with 2:29 to go. Plays like that haven’t always been made for the Bucks this season.

It's as if there's freely available talent out there if a team were to broaden its search beyond...

1. Guys who have played for the team previously.
2. Guys who played high school basketball in Georgia.
3. Or, guys who are the nephew of someone famous.