Milwaukee Bucks: What Does Kendall Marshall Add?

According to a report, the Milwaukee Bucks are going to claim point guard Kendall Marshall off waivers from the Los Angeles Lakers, giving them another point guard with holdovers Brandon Knight and Nate Wolters and recently signed Jerryd Bayless

The Lakers plan was to waive Marshall’s non-guaranteed $915,243 minimum contract for 2014-15 before signing him back at the same rate.

But the Bucks have gotten in the way, according to ESPN’s Marc Stein:

What does Marshall bring to the Bucks? For starters, he will become the only true point guard on their roster. Knight had a solid season, leading Milwaukee in scoring at 17.9 points per game, and he was also their leading assist man at 4.9 per game.

Wolters started 31 games before being sidelined the final 13 games with a broken hand, averaging 7.2 points and 3.2 assists—along with just one turnovers—in 22.6 minutes a game.

Bayless, who split last season between the Memphis Grizzlies and Boston Celtics, averaged 9.3 points and 2.7 assists in 72 games, 19 of them starting assignments, averaging 23.4 minutes.

Marshall, meanwhile, signed with the Lakers last December after being traded by the Phoenix Suns late in training camp to the Washington Wizards, who subsequently waived him.

Pressed into service at the point in Los Angeles, Marshall started 45 of his 54 games for the Lakers, averaging eight points and 8.8 assists per game in 29 minutes a night.

Knight, Wolters and Bayless combined—albeit with different teams—averaged a combined 10.8 assists.

Despite only playing about two-thirds of the season, Marshall was 10th in the NBA with 477 assists and was second only to Chris Paul of the Los Angeles Clippers with an assist rate of 44.3 percent.

Knight had an assist rate of 26.6 percent, Wolters checked in at 23.3 percent and Bayless posted a mark of 18.5 percent.

Knight, Wolters and Bayless are much more cut from the combo guard cloth. Knight looks to score. Wolters is still adapting his game to the NBA after being a scoring machine at South Dakota State, where he 18.5 points and 5.3 assists in his four-year career.

Bayless had a career-best 30.7 assist percentage in 2011-12 with the Toronto Raptors, but he only played in 31 games.

What Marshall doesn’t bring, however, is much offense besides creating for others. He converted only 53.6 percent of his attempts at the rim and was just a 30.8 percent shooter from three to 10 feet.

He did hit 39.9 percent of his 3-point attempts, but struggles when he’s run off the 3-point line and has to go inside. His mid-range shooting was just 40 percent from 10 to 16 feet and 31.3 percent from 16 feet out to inside the 3-point stripe.

The other thing Marshall brings is an alarming tendency to give the ball away. He committed 150 turnovers for the Lakers, a 25.6 percent turnover rate, with 117 of those giveaways coming on bad passes; i.e., trying to thread passes into places where they should not have been thrown.

And even within the context of a Laker team that was awful defensively, Marshall was particularly bad. According to NBA.com/stats, Marshall put up a defensive rating of 109 points per 100 possessions.

Turnovers and the prevention of them is where Wolters excelled as a rookie, posting a turnover rate of 11.7 percent. But he was also an awful defender, posting a 111.8 defensive rating.

The bottom line is that Kendall Marshall isn’t a dial-moving transaction for the Bucks, but he does bring a pass-first mentality to the point guard position that the other guards on the current roster don’t seem to match.