As last week’s trade deadline grew closer it became increasingly clear that Giannis Antetokounmpo was not going to get moved. It was a smart move by the Bucks. They’ll have more, and probably better, offers to mull over this summer when most teams will have an extra draft pick in 2033 to trade.
Some teams, like the Miami Heat, will have two more trade-eligible draft picks than they had at the deadline. The Warriors have paths to as many as five. This is to say nothing of some of the most asset-rich teams that weren’t ready to do business now but might be after a potential first-round flameout.
And this is all assuming that a trade is inevitable, which most believe it is, but we’ll get to that.
For now, the Bucks still appear to be holding out hope that Giannis, who has spent the last few months trying to toe the line between getting traded without asking to be traded, will eventually walk into Jon Horst’s office and put an actual signature on this self-righteous loyalty talk he started spewing on social media shortly after the deadline passed.
This is very simple. If Giannis really feels this way, he can very easily put his money where his mouth is. He’s eligible to sign a four-year, $275 million extension with the Bucks next October. All he has to do is come out and publicly declare his full intention to do so and this will all be over.
But he never did that. And there’s is no indication that he’s going to do that. This whole charade has been a mission to get traded — or at least to seriously pursue the possibility — while retaining his coveted good-guy card, and when the former didn’t happen he immediately audibled to playing the latter.
For starters, this is a pretty thinly veiled dig at guys like Kevin Durant and LeBron James. It’s one thing for the Twitter gangsters to be firing off shots at some of greatest players of all time, effectively reducing their kind to musical-team mercenaries unworthy of true legendary status — but when a fellow great player, an actual peer, starts positioning himself as above all that, as though he occupies some higher place in history as a one-team man, he better at least back it up.
Had Giannis put that post out before the trade deadline, that would’ve meant something. Doing so after is a phony act, and it’s only serving to give the Bucks just enough false hope to go out and do something stupid. Haven’t they already gone into enough debt? They fired Adrian Griffin after a 30-13 start to the season. They’re financing Myles Turner’s $100 million deal by paying Damian Lillard another $113 million to play for someone else. They could very well end up with a high lottery pick this summer, and there are already reports that they might look to trade that, too. Pretty soon the Bucks are going to have sold everything short of their soul for a guy who was, who is, probably going to leave anyway.
Because here’s the deal: Giannis says he wants to win, and by that he means contend for a championship, and the Bucks don’t have a realistic path to doing that in the foreseeable future. So something has to give. Either Giannis backs up all this legends-stay-true talk by putting pen to paper, even if it costs him a realistic chance at a second title in his prime, or he drops the hometown-hero complex and cuts the cord.
Nobody is saying the latter is easy to do. There are people all over this world right now staying in relationships they don’t have the heart to end. Giannis is obviously a great person and player. Milwaukee means a lot to him and his family. It’s easy to say you shouldn’t care about what other people think, but everybody does. Nobody wants to be regarded as the bad guy, at least not by people they genuinely care about.
And there is such a thing as being honestly torn. When was the last time you made a life-altering decision with total clarity? Without any fear of regret? Without going back and forth in your head over and over? Giannis has told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “What I want deep down in my heart is I want to be a Milwaukee Buck for the rest of my career, and win here.” There’s no doubt he means that.
But it’s those last three words that are the hangup. If he really meant all these things he’s saying about loyalty, he wouldn’t feel the need to add that caveat onto the end of his statement. He would just saying I want to be a Milwaukee Buck for the rest of my career. Period. In which case this wouldn’t be a story.
But he won’t say that, and so it is a story. A story, mind you, that reportedly drove north of $20 million in bets on a prediction platform called Kalshi. Giannis was revelaed to be a shareholder a day after the trade deadline.
While nobody is suggesting Giannis did anything intentionally dirty in terms of drumming up bets for Kalshi by playing both sides of a trade rumor, the potential for doing so certainly exists. At the very least, we should all be able to agree that it’s a bad look. Which is strange for a guy who has been so intent on looking good.
And that’s the irony of it all. Giannis is trying to do the right thing, whatever he ultimately deems that to be, but he has gone about it in the complete wrong way. You don’t get to comb through dating apps and then when nothing materializes promptly take your seat upon the high horse of monogamous virtue.
To be fair, we’re all hypocrites. Every one of us has said one thing and done another. Probably this week. That is what you call being a human being. Even in this case, we’re criticizing Giannis for not wanting to demand a trade when we kill guys like James Harden for … demanding trades.
The older I get the more I realize there are two sides to every story. Giannis has his side, and I have no doubt it is all well intentioned. But at some point, playing both sides of the fence isn’t helping anyone. It’s not helping a Bucks front office that is being fed just enough hope to keep going in debt, and it’s not keeping a clearly good guy from looking increasingly bad.
If Giannis means what he says about legends being the attractors and not the chasers, then put his name on it. Tell everyone the trade rumors are over. You intend to sign the extension. That would end this all. But if he keeps firing out “I’m not leaving!” tweets only to, ultimately, leave, that legacy he is trying so hard to protect might end up tarnished beyond repair.
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