Filed under: Bucks
After exceeding expectations last season, the Milwaukee Bucks have struggled to live up to them this year. It just hasn’t been the right mix of personnel in Milwaukee, and to make matters worse seemingly everyone has been hurt. Yet the biggest problem might have been that expectations were simply too high to begin with.
The Bucks won 46 games last season — a 12-game improvement over the year before — and earned the No. 6 seed in the Eastern Conference playoffs. This season they’re on pace for 32 wins, a 14-game drop. Wednesday, they came into Washington and were run off the court by the Wizards, who had lost their previous eight games.
“They kicked our ass up and down the floor,” Andrew Bogut said. “You have those games in the NBA sometimes.”
Sure, those games happen — especially in the second game of a back-to-back on the road. But as the All-Star break approaches, the Bucks don’t have much margin for error if they want to sneak into the final playoff spot in the East. They currently sit 2.5 games behind the Pacers.
“We feel like at the beginning of the season we had high expectations, we thought we were a playoff team,” said John Salmons, who started his second game since returning from injury. “Losing games like this knowing that we got to make a playoff push, it’s a bad loss for us.”
The obvious scapegoat is injuries. The Bucks have been hit hard.
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Editor’s Note: A lifelong student of the game, Charley Rosen has played, coached and written about basketball for over half a century. With 15 books about basketball and a longtime column at 
