Milwaukee Bucks: Staying the course with Thon Maker

The early returns for Thon Maker haven’t been exactly promising over two weeks into his second season with the Milwaukee Bucks.

At this time in the season, overreactions are overflowing for the young campaign and the Milwaukee Bucks are no strangers to that.

Every nugget of info or run of form comes with the caveat of small sample size and we’re seeing how shortened training camps and preseasons have affected the fitness and chemistry for teams around the league this season more than ever.

But even some trends or weak links are hard to ignore, as we saw Wednesday night before the Bucks took on the Charlotte Hornets when head coach Jason Kidd opted to insert John Henson in place of second-year player Thon Maker at the starting center spot.

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The move paid dividends as Henson proved to be incredibly useful in the team’s 126-121 loss to the Hornets as he has been for the year so far. With that said, as much as the change spoke about Henson, it said the same for Maker’s underwhelming start to the season.

So far this year, Maker’s presence on the floor has been a stark contrast to his surprisingly impactful rookie campaign last season.

He currently holds a -15.7 net rating in his 137 minutes played and his off court rating is the highest for any player on the team at +5.9 points per 100 possessions, per NBA.com/stats.

The team’s early slate of opponents haven’t done any favors for Maker as he’s struggled with the physicality of the likes of Jusuf Nurkic, Dwight Howard and Steven Adams.

The lone bright spot so far for the Sudanese-born Maker has been his serviceable three-point shooting, which stands at 35 percent on 2.5 three-point attempts per game.

Suffice to say, Maker’s early season form hasn’t sat well with all Bucks fans and the timing of Greg Monroe‘s injury has left the Bucks with limited options at the 5-spot with Maker’s struggles. While it’s fair to be discouraged by what we’ve seen of Maker eight games into the season, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, in all honesty.

So much of the discussion centered around Maker in regards to his strengths is the sheer amount of energy and movement he brings at every step and turn on both ends of the floor.

That’s why it came as a genuine shock to see how just the sight of Maker’s shadow struck fear into both Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan in the team’s playoff series against the Toronto Raptors last season.

Whether that directly created a certain set of expectations isn’t much of a question at this point, but it certainly left many fans very optimistic on Maker’s chances for his sophomore season. However, the disparity between Maker’s performance in the playoffs versus what we’ve seen of him so far this year shouldn’t distract Bucks fans from the long view of his potential as a player.

Maker’s development has and will continue to be a long-term project and while it may have looked like his development accelerated past initial expectations, it will take many minutes for him to craft a viable skill-set that the Bucks can depend on a nightly basis.

When the time comes where we can comfortably assess that the impact Maker brings once he hits the court isn’t solely based in his physical tools and occasional three-point shooting, that’ll be when we’re dealing with the next stage in his development.

For now, we can only wait to see whether Maker’s move to the bench will be a permanent one, but it may do him better to find his footing going against second units instead of being thrown into the fire as he was to start the year.

Next: Herd ramp up preparations with preseason loss to Windy City Bulls

Again, we only have a handful of games to work with at this point and while the downs are tough to watch now, there’s plenty of time for things to turn around for Maker over the course of the season.

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