Milwaukee Bucks: Takeaways from 122-101 win over Portland Trail Blazers
Easy, peasy
A growing trend in the Bucks’ play since the start of the new year has been how they’ve able to maintain mostly mistake-free basketball on the offensive end. And that showed again Saturday night as they turned over the ball on just 10 occasions and the Blazers scored 14 points off of the Bucks’ miscues.
Over the Bucks’ now-completed road trip, they tallied 39 turnovers for an average of 9.8 turnovers per game. Granted, they did face defenses such as the Blazers and the San Antonio Spurs that largely don’t force turnovers, given that they rank 28th and dead-last in opponent turnover ratio, respectively.
Even still, the Bucks’ 10.3 turnover ratio through their six games in January ranks third in the NBA behind the Philadelphia 76ers and the Denver Nuggets. And their 2.2 assist-to-turnover ratio ranks fifth in the league this month as well.
Of course, the Bucks’ shooting struggles over the road trip were a bigger problem in their own right and it was encouraging to see them come through to the other side on it with their wins over Portland and the Sacramento Kings.
To take care of the ball as well as the Bucks have recently done and to play at the blistering pace that they have played at for all of the season to this point is a remarkable feat, and surely head coach Mike Budenholzer will be pleased with the manner his team has operated in that regard.
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The Bucks will come back home and kick off a mini-homestand Tuesday night when they host the New York Knicks for a 7pm CT tip-off at Fiserv Forum.