While the rest of the NBA's elite have distinguished themselves in a series of showcase games this month, Giannis Antetokounmpo has spent his December in a prison of his own making. The fourth-best player in the NBA has reached a dead end with the Milwaukee Bucks, yet neither he nor the team have yet shown themselves willing to accept reality, leading to a series of strange and frustrating developments.
The Bucks got filleted by the Indiana Pacers in the first round of last spring's playoffs and said goodbye to the newly torn-up Damian Lillard, losing along with him any possibility of team-building flexibility. They somehow managed to wriggle around enough to sign Myles Turner away from those Pacers, though the team was clearly drawing dead once again in the East, even with the Pacers and Boston Celtics maimed by, respectively, Jayson Tatum's and Tyrese Haliburton's Achilles tears. This past May, Shams Charania reported on Antetokounmpo having developed a bit of a wandering eye, writing in his characteristically cryptic style that "for the first time in his career, Antetokounmpo is open-minded about exploring whether his best long-term fit is remaining in Milwaukee or playing elsewhere."
Right before the season began, Charania advanced that reporting when he broke the news—defining "broke" and "news" very loosely here—that Antetokounmpo kinda-sorta wanted to play for the New York Knicks. Again, that news was hedged and vague: Charania went only as far as reporting that Antetokounmpo had told Milwaukee management that he really wanted to win a championship, and that the Greek star's agent was fielding "rampant interest" in his client and conducting due diligence. "Several teams were discussed internally," Charania wrote, "but one emerged as the only place Antetokounmpo wanted to play outside of Milwaukee: the New York Knicks."
Here we have a case where Charania's obscurant stylings tell the story more than the actual substance of what he's writing. It seems Antetokounmpo was torn between his desire to win championships and his loyalty to Milwaukee, or, perhaps more accurately, his fear of Bucks fans and NBA media turning on him if he were to force his way out. The half-measure Antetokounmpo reportedly agreed to was to give an obviously doomed Bucks roster—a group that anyone who has watched the NBA over the past few years could have told him was likelier to miss the postseason altogether than to win a playoff series—a chance to win him over. Antetokounmpo began the season playing at an MVP level, and yet his team was awful, a reality he could no longer ignore after he got hurt and his teammates lost all four games they played without him.
That led to a Dec. 3 Charania report that seemed, in tentative, conditional terms, to set the stage for Antetokounmpo's departure: His agent was "having conversations with the Milwaukee Bucks about the two-time NBA MVP's future—and discussing whether his best fit is staying or a move elsewhere." Though the subtext of the report's crabbed language was that Antetokounmpo knew his time in Milwaukee should end, he still wasn't ready to do what would need to be done, i.e. an actual explicit trade demand, to effect that end. That same night, Antetokounmpo played against the Pistons and almost immediately left the game with a scary-looking calf strain.
Any reasonable observer trying to think through what an Antetokounmpo trade could look like in the aftermath of that report would have reached the uncomfortable conclusion that there are no obvious mutually beneficial trades out there. For one, the market is different now than it was a few years ago, with several teams facing horrible medium- and long-term futures because they bet too big on the wrong players at the wrong time. San Antonio and Houston, seemingly primed for huge trades thanks to their stockpiles of young players and premium draft picks, are both frisky enough without Antetokounmpo not to need him at what he'd cost, or at least confident enough that their young cores can develop into contenders naturally.
The specter of Oklahoma City has also affected things, setting an almost impossible bar for any team looking to win this year. Why part with the rest of the decade's supply of building blocks only to render this season's title pursuit marginally less quixotic? Atlanta makes the most sense, though Milwaukee would have to want the polarizing Trae Young in return, and also, Antetokounmpo's hypothetical fit with Jalen Johnson is super weird. The somewhat reliable Jake Fischer reported on Dec. 16 that in fact the Bucks were active in the trade marker—but as buyers, rather than sellers, despite not having any currency anyone wants.
This all leads us to Thursday, when Antetokounmpo talked to reporters for the first time since the calf strain. What he said made as little sense as any Charania report. "If my agent is talking to the Bucks about it, he is his own person," Antetokounmpo said. "He can have any conversation he wants about it. At the end of the day, I don't work for my agent; my agent works for me. And there's going to be conversations that are going to be made between him and the Bucks, and him and his other players, and him and other teams and other GMs, executives around the league." Again, one needs to read between the lines to make sense of this; it's draggier than it needs to be, but not difficult.
Antetokounmpo clearly does not want to be the one to initiate something he knows needs to happen. Instead he is keeping everyone involved stuck in this paranoid limbo where they have to pretend either to believe Kyle Kuzma can turn the woeful Bucks around or that Antetokounmpo is totally cool wasting the remainder of his prime on a rotten team. His eventual, probably inevitable departure will cause everyone pain, but he's already brought Milwaukee a title, and deep down all but the most hardened Bucks fanatic knows this sinking ship can't be brought into port. The only thing that will lead to legitimate, lasting resentment is for Antetokounmpo to go on waffling like this. It's time, man.
Recommended