The Milwaukee Bucks’ 2024 draft decision is looking worse by the week, and Kyshawn George is the reason why.
George, who Milwaukee apparently had on its board, is off to a blistering start to his third season and is making the Bucks’ choice to pass on him feel like a major miss. Instead of landing the player who’s now flashing real breakout potential, Milwaukee used that pick on guard AJ Johnson - and the gap between the two keeps getting harder to ignore.
What makes this sting even more is that the Bucks weren’t blind to George. On a previous episode of The Old Man and the Three podcast, George said Milwaukee gave him strong feedback after an individual workout and that he believed the Bucks were his floor in the draft. They passed anyway, and George went one pick later.
So far, that decision has aged badly. George is averaging 17.3 points, 4.9 assists, 4.3 rebounds, and 1.1 blocks per game while shooting 51.5 percent from the floor. He’s been producing at a high level for a Wizards team that has a boatload of talent, and he’s doing it with the kind of momentum that makes every missed evaluation look even louder in hindsight.
The Bucks could have at least made the George miss easier to swallow if they had gone a different direction. A player like Ryan Dunn or Terrence Shannon Jr. would have fit the logic of taking a more seasoned college prospect, someone who might have been closer to helping a contending team right away. George had only one year of college under his belt and was always going to need time.
Instead, Milwaukee swung for one of the rawest players in the draft. Johnson was always going to be a long-term project, not an immediate rotation answer. And the situation got even messier when he didn’t even finish a full season in Milwaukee, eventually landing in Washington in the trade that brought Kyle Kuzma to the Bucks.
Since then, Johnson’s career has been anything but settled. After stops with Milwaukee and Washington, he’s been traded to Dallas and Memphis and could be out of New Orleans at any moment. That’s a lot of movement in just three seasons.
There’s no way to know whether George would have become this same player in Milwaukee. And there’s fair reason to wonder how much confidence anyone should have in Doc Rivers developing a young prospect.
But that doesn’t make the miss easier to live with. Right now, the Bucks are watching the player they passed on light it up in Washington, and with losses piling up lately, the regret only cuts deeper.
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