Following a disappointing end to their road trip, the Milwaukee Bucks face the Minnesota Timberwolves tonight at Fiserv. For whatever reason, the first game back from a road trip can be rough for the home team, so the Bucks must be ready to go. They played very well for most of the December 22 matchup, but a 25-8 third-quarter run by Minny powered the Wolves to the win. With key injuries and suspensions to the visitors tonight, this is a major chance for the Bucks to avenge that loss and show they can beat a depleted team.<\/p>\n
The Bucks have just concluded their four-game swing out west, during which they beat the Kings and Lakers but lost to the Warriors and Nuggets. Despite the losses, Milwaukee still had the league\u2019s 12th-best net rating during that span, so there\u2019s still some reason for optimism. As we know, the team remains really good offensively with Giannis on the court (+10.8), and really bad with him off (-10.4). They need a better plan for the non-Giannis minutes that doesn\u2019t just involve letting certain guys play iso-ball; granted, we all knew that, given the way this team was set up, the non-GA minutes would be rough to some degree.<\/p>\n
The Wolves have been playing awesome basketball of late, winning six of their last eight games. Most recently, they split a baseball series with Cleveland and beat the Wemby-led Spurs by one point following an Anthony Edwards game-winner. The Wolves own the NBA\u2019s sixth-best net rating over the same period mentioned above, along with the second-best effective field goal percentage\u2014they\u2019re in some sort of rhythm. Luckily for the Bucks, that rhythm may be broken by the absences of Anthony Edwards and Rudy Gobert tonight; Edwards is injured, while Gobert has been suspended due to the number of flagrant fouls he\u2019s accrued over the course of the season.<\/p>\n
For the Bucks, Taurean Prince (neck) is out, while Myles Turner (illness) is questionable.<\/p>\n
As mentioned, the Wolves will be without Rudy Gobert (suspension) and Anthony Edwards (foot). TJ Shannon (foot) will also be out of action.<\/p>\n
With Edwards out, the Wolves are going to need scoring from a different source\u2014Julius Randle seems a prime candidate. Look for Randle to come out aggressive and try to get Giannis in foul trouble, which would then allow him to attack smaller\/weaker defenders. Giannis and Julius have had some gritty matchups going back to his Knicks days, and I\u2019d expect no different tonight.<\/p>\n
FanDuel Sports Network Wisconsin at 7:00 p.m. CST.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Following a disappointing end to their road trip, the Milwaukee Bucks face the Minnesota Timberwolves tonight at Fiserv.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":534196,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3782],"tags":[7,1660,307,152,3954,6,308],"class_list":{"0":"post-534195","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-minnesota-timberwolves","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-bucks-game-previews","10":"tag-minnesota","11":"tag-minnesota-timberwolves","12":"tag-minnesotatimberwolves","13":"tag-nba","14":"tag-timberwolves"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/115888816450486265","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=534195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534195\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/534196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=534195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=534195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=534195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}