By Jimmy Carlton Sportswriter Published Feb 03, 2016 at 5:42 PM

At a recent Bucks practice, Johnny O’Bryant is going through a standard shooting drill with assistant coach Eric Hughes. O’Bryant has to make five midrange jumpers from each of five different spots in a semicircle around the floor – left baseline, left wing, center, right wing, right baseline.

He cruises along, missing just two total shots from the first four spots, before needing seven attempts to make his required five baskets from the right baseline. Overall, he takes 29 shots to make the 25, which is 86 percent, which is very good but also fairly normal for an NBA player who’s shooting unguarded in practice. And, as most fans know, if there’s one thing JOB can do – some might argue the only thing – it is hit midrange jumpers.

But O’Bryant isn’t content and he continues to put up shots from that mildly problematic spot on the right baseline. Soon, another assistant, Joe Prunty, wanders over and, unbeknownst to the second-year forward, starts throwing balls high up in the air from underneath the basket while O’Bryant is shooting, trying to break his concentration. O’Bryant, undeterred, swishes the next four in a row, as Prunty lauds him, "looking good, Johnny, keep it going!" Afterward, Prunty asks him if he noticed the distraction and O’Bryant, at first puzzled and then laughing, says he had no idea.

Despite this brief moment of blissful ignorance, Johnny O’Bryant is keenly self-aware. The 2014 second-round pick, who’s averaged 3.5 field-goal attempts per game as a pro, knows there’s likely no game in which he’ll get to take 15 shots, let alone 25, like he does in practice drills. He knows what he must do, and must not do, to get his 14 or so minutes. He believes he’s improving, even if it’s statistically fractional in most categories. And he also seems to understand the feeling some fans have toward him, though he doesn’t particularly care about that.

"I think for the most part I've definitely gotten better," O’Bryant says. "Just playing my role, you know. Overall, I just keep getting better little by little. To some people that comes as a surprise, but to me I know what I'm capable of."

What he’s capable of remains to be seen. Will the hustling hard-worker with the 3.3 points and 2.9 rebounds per game only ever be the eighth man in an NBA rotation? Can the 22-year-old who’s more than doubled his player efficiency rating from utterly inefficient (3.8 last year) to a bit more competent (7.9 this season) actually become a difference-maker in the league? League-average PER is 15.0, of course, so JOB is still a long way from really making a difference.

Head coach Jason Kidd says O’Bryant has improved while embracing his role, stepping up and helping the Bucks in several, less-obvious ways.

"I think when you look at his game, it's just gotten better and better each time he’s taken the floor, each game or each practice, his uptick," Kidd says. "He just is a true professional. Sometimes, he doesn't play in the first half but he gives us something big in the second half.

"As a defender, a ball mover, he sets screens. He’s just a guy that does all the little things, and that's what we need at times."

While his coaches see growth potential and are pleased with how he fits with the Bucks, doing the little things hasn’t much helped JOB’s perception among his critics, especially on Twitter.

For his part, O’Bryant attributes most of his struggles to "bad timing" with unlucky injuries and a turbulent rookie season.

He was drafted 36th, five picks after fellow Milwaukee second-rounder Damien Inglis, who’s only played eight NBA games and is currently in the D-League. In just his second preseason game last year, O’Bryant sprained the MCL in his right knee, carried off by teammates and sidelined for more than two months. When he returned in mid-December, he was immediately "thrown into the fire," as he says, due to other injuries, and then started 10 straight games as he worked himself back into shape.

Besides a 12-point, four-rebound performance against the Hawks, O’Bryant didn’t do a lot and, over the final three months of the regular season, his playing time was erratic – sometimes as many as 14 minutes, but 22 games where he didn’t play at all.

"Last year was just a whirlwind for me," he says.

After the season, the Cleveland, Miss., native dedicated himself to serious physical preparation at a training center in Florida. "I had a great summer, came back in great shape," he says, "and I think I was ready to have a big summer league." But before the Bucks’ first exhibition in Las Vegas, O’Bryant suffered another injury setback – this time a pulled hamstring. Still, he played in the preseason and has appeared in all but five games in the current campaign.

He’s scored in double figures twice and had a high-water performance of 11 points and nine rebounds in 34 minutes on Dec. 11 against the Nuggets. He hasn’t taken more than seven shots in a game and nearly half of all his field goals have been from midrange distance, where he’s shooting 43.4 percent. From 16 to 24 feet, specifically, O’Bryant is making an impressive 48.3 percent.

But it probably will never be about scoring for the 6-foot-9, 257-pounder who averaged 14.5 points over his final two seasons at LSU. The niche he’s carved out with the Bucks is as a high-energy, dirty-work guy, one who battles defensively in the low post, crashes the offensive glass and can step out and reliably knock down an open midrange jumper (or even a 3-pointer, as he made the only one he’s taken so far this season, from the left corner on Dec. 9).

"I think energy, definitely, and just being solid," O’Bryant says of what he brings on the court. "Don't take bad shots, guard 3 (small forward) through 5 (center), just try to be a solid basketball player and make a difference."

And, occasionally, tear it up it in Bucks Lip Sync Battle.

The quietly charismatic O’Bryant knows his NBA role and identity, certainly. But that doesn’t mean the "true professional" is satisfied with it. So he’ll continue to spend summers running, lifting, playing one-on-one and honing his individual offensive game, trying to become more than that.

"It’s funny because I was just telling somebody, you spend all summer working on your corner 3s and your face-up game and shooting off the dribble," he says with a smile, "and then, you know, just to go get offensive rebounds.

"But whatever the team needs you to do, you do it."

Jimmy Carlton Sportswriter

Born in Milwaukee but a product of Shorewood High School (go ‘Hounds!) and Northwestern University (go ‘Cats!), Jimmy never knew the schoolboy bliss of cheering for a winning football, basketball or baseball team. So he ditched being a fan in order to cover sports professionally - occasionally objectively, always passionately. He's lived in Chicago, New York and Dallas, but now resides again in his beloved Brew City and is an ardent attacker of the notorious Milwaukee Inferiority Complex.

After interning at print publications like Birds and Blooms (official motto: "America's #1 backyard birding and gardening magazine!"), Sports Illustrated (unofficial motto: "Subscribe and save up to 90% off the cover price!") and The Dallas Morning News (a newspaper!), Jimmy worked for web outlets like CBSSports.com, where he was a Packers beat reporter, and FOX Sports Wisconsin, where he managed digital content. He's a proponent and frequent user of em dashes, parenthetical asides, descriptive appositives and, really, anything that makes his sentences longer and more needlessly complex.

Jimmy appreciates references to late '90s Brewers and Bucks players and is the curator of the unofficial John Jaha Hall of Fame. He also enjoys running, biking and soccer, but isn't too annoying about them. He writes about sports - both mainstream and unconventional - and non-sports, including history, music, food, art and even golf (just kidding!), and welcomes reader suggestions for off-the-beaten-path story ideas.