Are we any closer to getting off this merry-go-round?
The Milwaukee Bucks locker room posted a unified front on Wednesday night after a surprising 113-109 victory over the East’s top-seeded Detroit Pistons—surprising because the team had lost eight of its previous nine games; surprising because, just three minutes into the game, franchise cornerstone Giannis Antetokounmpo collapsed onto the court from a right calf strain that will likely take two to four weeks to heal. Cosmic, tragic timing.
“We’re gonna play for him. He’s gonna play for us,” Bucks guard A.J. Green said after the game. “So, people are going to say whatever—outside noise. But we know what it is inside this locker room and the relationship we got and the team we got, so we’re just gonna continue to run with that and trust it.”
Giannis Trade Advice, Duncan vs. Kobe, Ohtani vs. the Babe, the Frugal-ish Yankees, and Life After ‘First Take’ With Max Kellerman
Giannis Trade Advice, Duncan vs. Kobe, Ohtani vs. the Babe, the Frugal-ish Yankees, and Life After ‘First Take’ With Max Kellerman
Giannis Trades, Ohtani, and Life After ‘First Take’ With Max Kellerman
Life After ‘First Take’ With Max Kellerman
Giannis Trade Advice, Duncan vs. Kobe, Ohtani vs. the Babe, the Frugal-ish Yankees, and Life After ‘First Take’ With Max Kellerman
Giannis Trade Advice, Duncan vs. Kobe, Ohtani vs. the Babe, the Frugal-ish Yankees, and Life After ‘First Take’ With Max Kellerman
Giannis Trades, Ohtani, and Life After ‘First Take’ With Max Kellerman
Life After ‘First Take’ With Max Kellerman
Giannis Trade Advice, Duncan vs. Kobe, Ohtani vs. the Babe, the Frugal-ish Yankees, and Life After ‘First Take’ With Max Kellerman
Giannis Trade Advice, Duncan vs. Kobe, Ohtani vs. the Babe, the Frugal-ish Yankees, and Life After ‘First Take’ With Max Kellerman
Giannis Trades, Ohtani, and Life After ‘First Take’ With Max Kellerman
Life After ‘First Take’ With Max Kellerman
That outside noise has become so persistent in recent years that it might as well be known as the Giannis Hum. It also reached a new pitch on Wednesday, when Shams Charania reported that Antetokounmpo and his representation are engaging in conversations with Bucks ownership and the front office about his future in Milwaukee and beyond. Brian Windhorst also claimed on ESPN Radio that a trade request had already been made, in reference to both Antetokounmpo’s reported openness to playing for the Knicks, and the offseason trade discussions between Milwaukee and New York that ultimately went nowhere.
The most recent Charania report tells us nothing we haven’t already surmised, from both context clues and what Antetokounmpo himself has stated publicly. “I want to be on a team that allows me and gives me a chance to win a championship,” Antetokounmpo said at media day earlier this year. “I think it’s a disservice to basketball, just to the game, to not want it to compete in a high level, to want your season to end in April.” The past three years of first-round exits clearly weigh on Antetokounmpo’s mind.
We were as guilty as anyone of dreaming up new Giannis scenarios the second the Bucks were knocked out by the Pacers last April, and the front office no doubt fielded calls throughout the summer for his services. But the team took the opposite tack, once again committing to an all-in bid to convince Giannis to stay with questionable long-term moves, simultaneously waiving Damian Lillard (and stretching the remainder of the $103 million owed to him) and signing Myles Turner to a four-year, $107 million contract. Whether these bold moves were approved by Giannis depends on who you ask. Have these moves yielded the outcome the team was hoping for? Not at all. Alas, that’s where we stand today, back at the brink of a golden era in Bucks basketball. And once again, we will shout into the void: Are we close to the end?
“Giannis has never asked to be traded. Ever. I can’t make that more clear,” Doc Rivers told reporters on Wednesday. “I go to the source. I talk to the source every single day. He loves Milwaukee and he loves the Bucks.”
If this all feels a little he-said-she-said to you, you’re not alone. This entire saga has been built on the intrigue of insinuation, of what has been said and what hasn’t about where Giannis wants to be. We aren’t dealing with rumors as much as euphemisms. It seems like we’re all waiting for that final moment when the Bucks say the words that Antetokounmpo can’t.
Perhaps it’s all just an effort to assuage the Bucks faithful, but the team’s insistence of Antetokounmpo’s loyalty to the team and the city also feels like stating the obvious to combat another equally obvious notion. Giannis wishing for a better situation at this stage in his career doesn’t preclude him from simultaneously loving the city, the team, and its fans. Of course he does! He’s experienced the full spectrum of NBA experience in Milwaukee, from uncertain beginnings to the very pinnacle of the sport, inspiring millions. He is the most essential player in franchise history, and his narrative is inextricable from the Bucks’. But the entire structure of professional sports reveals a multitiered web of competing business interests and interpersonal dynamics that either miraculously align toward success or splinter off, making it nearly impossible not to take business decisions personally, and vice versa.
It’s something Giannis has been mulling for a while, and something he gave voice to last February, after the Luka Doncic trade that had the entire league questioning reality. “When a player believes that he can go to a different team and he believes he can have a chance to win a championship, we cannot crucify the person and say that he’s not loyal and he didn’t do the right thing and he let everybody down,” Antetokounmpo told reporters then. “Because history has shown you, you have to do what is best for you and your family. You have to do what’s best, most important to win.”
That goes for both Giannis and the Bucks, the latter of which will have to navigate between doing right by a franchise icon and doing what’s best for its own future. That will require casting a wide net in fielding offers—effectively doing the anti-Nico. And that takes time! Despite the feeling of momentum pushing the Bucks toward an in-season ultimatum, it could take until the offseason for a deal to get done. Antetokounmpo’s estimated return to play will come after December 15, the date NBA teams are allowed to trade players who were signed during the offseason. Whether the Bucks decide to hold Giannis out for longer than the reported two to four weeks could tell us a lot about how seriously the team is entertaining the notion of dealing him before February’s trade deadline.
The cast of possible suitors is more or less the same as it was over the summer: The Knicks and Rockets still have plenty of reason to go all in. The Spurs have what it takes to put together a compelling offer. The Lakers have to be in the mix because … well, you know. Ditto for the Thunder. The most intriguing newcomer to any impending Giannis sweepstakes might be the Atlanta Hawks, who are charting a new course in Trae Young’s absence, and happen to have possession of the most valuable pick in the NBA: the more favorable 2026 pick between the New Orleans Pelicans and the Milwaukee Bucks, which is relevant to this thought exercise for obvious reasons. The Pelicans are the owners of the worst record in the league, which means that the pick currently has a 52.1 percent chance of landing in the top four in one of the best draft classes in recent memory.
With the Bucks sitting at 10-13, facing the harsh reality of having to forge ahead for upward of a month without their raison d’être, Giannis stands to lose another year of his prime on a fringe playoff team and the opportunity to build upon his legacy as one of basketball’s greatest players.
Antetokounmpo was in the midst of his most efficient scoring season, by far, upping an already preposterous standard. But his prolonged absence puts him at risk of not meeting the criteria for end-of-season awards eligibility. Giannis has been a first-team All-NBA player for the past seven seasons. There are only 14 players all time who have surpassed that figure.
The Hum will only intensify in the coming days and weeks, because the Bucks as a team do not have the means to silence it. And that’s exactly the feedback loop on which this Giannis doom cycle that we’re all in subsists: moments of doubt amplify the precarity of the Bucks’ position, then rumors and wishcasting spread like bacteria, reemphasizing the precarity of the Bucks’ position, which in turn seed clouds of doubt.
Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of Giannis’s time with the Bucks.
Danny Chau
Chau writes about the NBA and gustatory pleasures, among other things. He is the host of ‘Shift Meal.’ He is based in Toronto.
