Leaning against the Milwaukee Bucks backdrop at the Cousins Center on Tuesday afternoon, 33-year-old Caron Butler was asked if the new-look Milwaukee Bucks were ready to open the season on Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden against the New York Knicks.

It was going to be Butler’s 12th opening night in the NBA, and he smiled, "Ready or not, here we come."

Together for just a month, which included seven preseason games and mismatched lineups and practice sessions due to injury, there is so much left for this team to discover about itself. A 90-83 loss to the Knicks doesn’t answer anything.

Neither will tonight’s road game at Boston, or Saturday’s home opener against Toronto.

This is especially true on the defensive end, where Drew’s initial plan of his post players showing hard off a pick-and-roll and then getting back into position was scrapped a few weeks into camp following individual meetings with his players.

Part of it was also centered around the fact that Zaza Pachulia’s Achilles is still healing, Ersan Ilyasova has just resume practicing after an ankle injury and Ekpe Udoh is still weeks away from returning after knee surgery.

As a result, Khris Middleton and Butler have found themselves trading blows with bigger players in the post.

"Going small, it does somewhat force us to change our coverages; and, with conversations with each guy individually," Drew said about the schematic change. "This is a player’s league, and I’ve got to go with what works best for the makeup of this team, and we’ve looked – we’ve looked at different coverages – and I’ve made the decision that maybe a different pick and roll coverage may be best for this team.

"What we’ve done is really taken out the guess work. We’ll just do it a certain way and let’s get good at that."

But with changing the lesson plan halfway through camp, it threw a wrench in the learning curve. The players had begun studying new calls and terminology anyway under a new head coach, and while they have been working on it in practice and in the final preseason games, nothing can quite compare to the real thing.

"It’s still a work in progress," Butler said. "Obviously you don’t know where you’re at until the real things happens. Right now, we’re just drilling and drilling so guys know the rotation but once you’re live out there, playing against an opponent, that’s when you know where you’re at. Then you watch film, study, and you get better."

What Drew doesn’t want to have happen is having opposing guards break loose with ease, get to the rim and force Larry Sanders and John Henson to have to block shots. With Pachulia still limited and Udoh out, the Bucks can’t afford to have their two best (and healthy) big men plagued with early foul trouble.

"They can erase a lot of defensive mistakes," Drew said. "If you screw up out on the perimeter and they drive it to the basket, you’ve got two fly swatters back there. But, I don’t like to really look at it as far as having a margin for error. We don’t want to put those guys in a position where they can pick up a foul.

He continued: "It’s nice to have that behind you, but we want to treat – particularly our perimeter defense – we want to treat it as if there’s no help back there. If we defend in that mindset I think we’ll do a much more efficient job in trying to keep the basketball in front of us or containing the basketball. It’s nice to have guys like that behind you to erase mistakes, but again, we don’t want to put those guys in that position."

This all new for Drew and the Bucks – and most likely will be for several months – which is why, at least defensively, it will take some time to find cohesion.

"We will continue to add and subtract and look at things and what works best for us," Drew said. "Right now, I’m in a good place where we are defensively. My concern, not from a scheme of things, but more so from our ability to recognize when a shot goes up, seeing where our floor balance is, can we get back and take away easy transition baskets. That’s something we’re going to have to continue to harp on with these guys every single day. From a scheme standpoint, I’m pretty confident where we are. The guys are comfortable as well with some of the things we have changed and I think it fits our personnel better. We’ll get a better gauge once we start playing.

"We’re definitely going to need some real game situation where we’re playing against other teams’ best so we can really see where we are."