Milwaukee Bucks Game Preview: Feb. 1 at Utah Jazz
By Ti Windisch
Major Key For Milwaukee: Don’t Play Utah’s Game
The Utah Jazz play basketball at iceberg speed. Utah is last in the NBA in pace, and although the Bucks aren’t exactly speedsters nobody plays quite as slow as the Jazz. That slow pace combined with Utah’s stout defense means the scores are often low when the Jazz play.
Utah has held the opposition to under 90 points a whopping 17 times this season. The Bucks, for the sake of comparison, have done that three times. The Jazz love grinding their opponents down and preventing them from scoring enough to overcome Utah’s 14th-ranked offensive attack.
The Bucks will have to find ways to get past Gobert and score on Wednesday if they want any chance of winning. When Utah keeps the score low, wins tend to follow. The Jazz are 14-3 in games where they allow less than 90 points.
To make scoring totals even more important, the Bucks tend to struggle mightily when they don’t score a ton. Milwaukee is 0-4 when the team scores under 90 points, 3-12 when the team scores less than 100 points and somehow 8-23 when the team scores under 110 points.
The Bucks stink when they can’t score a ton of points. The Jazz are great when their matchup doesn’t score a ton of points. A low scoring total would only be good for one team on Wednesday, and it’s not Milwaukee.