Last Season:	40-42
Preview prediction:	44-38
Oddsmakers:	41-41

Michael Redd had a career year last year with the additions of T.J. Ford, Andrew Bogut, and Bobby Simmons, and the development of Mo Williams asa scorer to lessen his offensive load, paradoxically allowing him to take on more of it. Villanueva is a far better all-around offensive weapon than T.J. Ford, and with Mo Williams entering the starting lineup, the Bucks will be able to play 5-on-5 on offense, whereas last year, it was stand around and watch Redd, or T.J. taking an ill-advised jumper. I’m of the opinion that losing T.J. is addition by subtraction, and that Williams will actually be a step up from Ford, despite being his backup last year. The Bucks will get major offensive contributions from all of their regulars, presuming Dan Gadzuric gets lots of offensive rebounds and outbacks, which he should. The team has great balance.

John Hollinger agrees with the addition-by-subtraction notion, as Mo Williams led Ford by 2 points in Player Efficiency Rating last year. In fact, every analyst outside Canada and Germany seems to agree that that the Bucks did a number on the Raptors with the CV31 trade. Some of the funnier blog reactions from the summer:

• Colangelo is a genius
• Memo to Raptor Nation: Ford is a Lemon
• We’ll miss you Financial Considerations

Bill Simmons weighed in as well:

Disregard Ford's scary spinal cord problems, that he can't shoot to save his life, that he's a free agent two years earlier than Villanueva, even that he lost crunch-time minutes to Charlie Bell last season. Again, I want you to disregard everything in that sentence. From a pure basketball standpoint, since when is a young point guard worth as much as a young power forward who can rebound and shoot 3s? When has that EVER been the case? How fast did the Bucks' front office say yes to this trade? 0.79 seconds? 1.2 seconds? Did they say, "Hold on, we'll discuss this and call you back in a few hours," then hang up and start pouring champagne on one another? If somebody made this deal in my fantasy league, I would have protested it.

The bottom line is that this year's Christmastime Bucks have some promising young talent and should be interesting to watch, but will probably end up in the cellar of the very tough Central Division for the 3rd straight year.