Gone Too Soon A Bucks Fan Have An Accident When He Was Coming Back From The Cel

Are the Boston Celtics the NBA’s most balanced team? We break down the best and worst from the holiday slate, including Luka Doncic’s MVP candidacy, the sputtering Milwaukee Bucks, and more.

The NBA’s Christmas Day slate wasn’t exactly jam-packed with riveting action, but there were plenty of ripple effects to emerge from the marquee games. To break down the holiday slate, The Ringer paneled five NBA writers to examine the biggest takeaways from each Christmas clash, presented below in chronological order.

Zach Kram: We didn’t learn much about the Milwaukee Bucks in their Christmas Day loss in New York. There’s no shame in losing one game, especially when the Bucks had already defeated the Knicks three times this season. The Knicks were due for a win. And more broadly, this matchup fit the pattern of so many Bucks games since they swapped out Jrue Holiday for Damian Lillard. The Bucks scored a lot (122 points) thanks to Giannis Antetokounmpo and Lillard (64 combined points on 45 shot attempts), but they couldn’t stop their opponent in transition (23 fast break points for the Knicks) or slow down the best guard on the other team (Jalen Brunson scored 38, bringing his season average to 36 points per game against the Bucks).

The bigger-picture question for Milwaukee is who fits best as the fifth man in closing lineups, alongside the four shoo-ins of Giannis, Dame, Brook Lopez, and Khris Middleton. Starter Malik Beasley probably isn’t the answer: He played only 19 minutes on Christmas and didn’t score a single point, and his limitations as a perimeter defender are readily apparent. Bobby Portis is the Bucks’ sixth man, but coach Adrian Griffin has been reluctant to play the super-big Giannis-Lopez-Portis combination this season. (They’ve all shared the court for only 14 total minutes, per PBP Stats.) Pat Connaughton’s a theoretical fit, but inconsistent. Jae Crowder is injured and 33 years old.

The wild cards are the two youngsters in Milwaukee’s rotation, MarJon Beauchamp and Andre Jackson Jr. The latter has received much more run of late, including 14 minutes on Christmas to Beauchamp’s six. That doesn’t mean Jackson is ready for prime time just yet: The rookie wing was a second-round pick just last summer, after all, and he’s never scored more than 10 points in an NBA game. Like the rest of his teammates, he didn’t give Brunson any trouble on Monday. Yet Jackson’s size and athleticism mean that he might just be the Bucks’ best internal solution to this roster predicament. They have another couple of months to determine whether Jackson—or one of his teammates—is a viable fit next to the big four, or else they’ll need to figure out how to make an upgrade via the trade market despite a paucity of picks they can still include in deals.