Watching D.J. Augustin lay the ball up on an uncontested runout caused me to wonder: can D.J. Augustin dunk the ball? Has he ever dunked the ball? Has ever even ATTEMPTED to dunk the ball? My initial inclination was that, yes, D.J. Augustin must have dunked at some point in his NBA career. He’s short, but he’s not unbelievably short. J.J. Barea is shorter and there’s grainy pregame footage of him dunking. So the idea of Augustin dunking the ball is, at least on the surface, not entirely laughable.
Looking at the stats, however, shows us that Augustin has only attempted one dunk in his entire career, and it was a miss. Curious about the nature of this “dunk attempt” (and with my curiosity intensified by the fact that the attempt was this season), I went out and located video of the shot in question. What I saw shocked and disturbed me.
My friends, this was not a dunk attempt. It was not even close to a dunk attempt. It was a layup which was easily blocked by LeBron James, given that Augustin got maybe four inches off the ground while laying it up right into LeBron’s chest. I’m actually upset about this because it sullies Augustin’s pure shot logs with a dunk attempt that never was. I don’t know who I need to write to about this, but I’m literally thinking about writing to them, because this is totally unacceptable.
You can watch the clip for yourself. I promise it’s not a rickroll. It would be a real trick of internet sorcery to force stats.nba.com to play a Rick Astley song: https://stats.nba.com/events/?flag=1&GameID=0021800227&GameEventID=354&Season=2018-19&title=James%20BLOCK%20(1%20BLK)&sct=plot
Doesn’t that just completely infuriate you? My anger level is going from “negligible” to “simmering” to “rage” in the course of writing this description. D.J. Augustin deserves better than the heinous treatment he is receiving from the NBA.