The Milwaukee Bucks Young Stars Aren’t Good At Defending The Perimeter

The Milwaukee Bucks failed at both preventing teams from shooting threes and holding them to even average percentages from beyond the arc.

There are two important parts of three-point defense in the NBA. The first is volume defense. Allowing teams to take a lot of threes is bad, because they’re more efficient than other shots.

The second aspect is actual defense of shooters. Allowing guys to make a lot of their threes often goes hand in hand with the volume of threes attempted, but individual players can be good at defending the arc even if their team isn’t, or vice versa.

Unfortunately, the Milwaukee Bucks were bad at both of those things. The Bucks allowed more attempted threes per game than all but three teams (Kings, Rockets, Grizzlies) and they let opponents shoot 35.3 percent from beyond the arc against them.

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The second mark is league-average, but many of Milwaukee’s defenders are worse than that at defending the perimeter.

Only two of the seven Bucks to defend at least 100 threes last year held opponents below their average three-point percentage: Jerryd Bayless and Khris Middleton.

The Buck most likely to defend a three-point shot during a game was not Bayless or Middleton, though. Middleton saw 362 of them, which places him fifth in the NBA.

It’s not good to give up threes, but Milwaukee shouldn’t mind players taking them against Middleton all too much. He held opponents to 30.7 percent from beyond the arc, which is the 13th-best rate among players to defend at least 200 threes.

Middleton held opponents to 4.9 percent worse than their normal percentages, which was ninth among all qualifying defenders last season. He’s one of the best perimeter defenders in the NBA.

Jabari Parker is not, and other teams know it. Players took an astonishing 372 three-point shots while being defended by Parker. Only three players in the NBA defended more threes, and none of them were power forwards.

108 players defended at least 200 three-point shots last season. 100 of them were better at it than Jabari, who allowed shooters to make 4.8 percent more of their threes than normal.

The only defender to allow more made threes than Jabari was James Harden, and he saw 86 more attempts compared to just 21 more made threes. Teams scored 453 points against the Bucks coming off of three-point shots made against Jabari Parker, which made up 5.4 percent of the total points scored against Milwaukee.

That’s a pretty sizable percentage to come against one player, on one shot type. Jabari wasn’t alone in allowing a lot of points to splash in from beyond the arc, although he was the worst among the Bucks.

Giannis Antetokounmpo was also pretty bad at defending the perimeter. He allowed defenders to make 3.8 percent more of their threes than normal against him, and he also gave up a ton of threes.

Teams made 128 threes against Giannis last season. Combining those with the ones scored against Jabari adds up to 837 points scored against just the two of them on three-point looks.

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That’s nearly 10 percent (9.89, to be exact) of the points scored against the Bucks last season. As much as making more threes is and should be a focus of the Milwaukee Bucks this summer, defending the three-point line better next year needs to be emphasized too.

That starts with Giannis and Jabari improving their perimeter defense. Those two allowed 279 of opponents’ 765 made three-point shots against the Bucks.

Not having Chris Copeland around will help too. Copeland was one of the worst three-point defenders in the NBA last season, allowing opponents to make nearly 60 percent of their threes.

Cope isn’t the reason the Bucks ranked so poorly in three-point defense though–he wasn’t around long enough to really impact the numbers.

Next: NBA Free Agency: Examining The Point Guard Options

Jabari and Giannis are great at a lot of things, but they’ll need to improve on defending three-point shooters to prevent Milwaukee from getting torched for the duration of another season.