The on-court fit for the D.J. Augustin signing almost a year later for the Milwaukee Bucks
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that a player who was traded after fewer than 40 games with the team he signed for in the offseason didn’t fit in very well with his new team. In just 37 games with the Bucks, Augustin averaged 6.1 points per game, his lowest since the start of the 2015-16 season when he was with the Oklahoma City Thunder before being traded.
If there was one thing I can give Augustin credit for in his short time with the Bucks, it’s that he had a bounce-back season from behind the 3-point line. After having a down year from three in his final year with the Magic, the 33-year-old shot a tidy 38 percent from three, and he took a ton of them, with over 67 percent of his shots being 3-pointers.
There were two big issues, though. The first one was something that anyone could have seen coming, and it was that Augustin was not a good defender. At 5’11” with a 6’3″ wingspan, Augustin was in stark contrast to the 6’4″ Hill with a 6’9″ wingspan, or Holiday at 6’3″. Per Cleaning the Glass, the Bucks were 2.1 points per 100 possessions worse on defense with Augustin on the floor.
Augustin was never expected to be a great defender or even a good one. But it was an especially poor fit when you consider what the Bucks were trying to do in the regular season last year with experimenting on defense. Augustin would benefit from specific defensive coverages that can help hide his deficiencies. However, he was asked to do more than he could very often, and it would have made for an even worse fit come playoff time when he most likely would have been unplayable on defense.
The other issue was that he couldn’t hit shots from anywhere other than behind the 3-point line. While Augustin’s overall 2-point percentage was bad enough at 34.9 percent (the lowest of any Buck who played at least 10 games), the most staggering number was that he shot 37.5 percent on shots less than five feet from the basket, according to NBA.com/stats. In comparison, Augustin shot nearly 50 percent on those shots in 2019-20, and Hill shot 67.9 percent the same season, per Second Spectrum. It just wasn’t a good time for Augustin in Milwaukee.