Giannis Antetokounmpo is at the center of the offseason storyline that just won’t die. The widespread assumption the moment Damian Lillard tore his Achilles was that the Milwaukee Bucks star would ask for a trade. It hasn’t happen. Rumors slowed down in May and into early June. They picked back up around the Finals, with his name even seemingly factoring into rumors surrounding the vacant New York Knicks head-coaching job. Then Milwaukee signed Myles Turner. Yes, Antetokounmpo was reportedly upset that Lillard was waived to get him, but he was also involved in the recruiting process. Every time the rumors seem to cool down, something heats them back up.
On Monday, ESPN’s Shams Charania did so yet again. After a pretty quiet month on the Antetokounmpo front, Charania reported that “there is nothing set in stone about whether Giannis Antetokounmpo wants to stay in Milwaukee or whether he wants to leave elsewhere.” He then added that there are teams still waiting on clarity on the Antetokounmpo front, while noting that while deals at this point in the offseason are rare, training camp is still six weeks away, and previous blockbusters involving stars like Kyrie Irving and Karl-Anthony Towns have come later in the offseason. Essentially, the message was that an Antetokounmpo trade request is still possible this offseason.
Is a Giannis trade request still possible this summer?
And, well, it’s the modern NBA. Anything is possible. This league operates less on logic than it does the whims of its key stakeholders. If Antetokounmpo decides tomorrow that he wants to be traded, he could certainly still make that request in August or September and open the 2025-26 campaign on another team. However, we should acknowledge that a trade request on this point of the calendar, while technically feasible, would be woefully impractical.
There’s a reason most major NBA trades happen in February and June. That’s when they’re designed to happen. League rules, intentionally or not, tend to cluster most major transactions into those two windows on the calendar.
June, or depending on circumstances, early July, is usually the easiest time to make a major trade. It’s when rosters are at their most flexible. That’s true in a literal sense, as roster size limits are increased to 20, but it’s also true in a functional one. Teams haven’t committed resources yet. They haven’t signed their mid-level and minimum-salary free agents. They haven’t brought back their own players on expired deals. They haven’t committed the players that they do have under contract to separate trades yet, and they’re set up to build around whatever players they actually have traded for.
Take the Houston Rockets as an example. Had Antetokounmpo made his intentions clear at the beginning of the offseason, trading for him would have been relatively straightforward. Houston had a big expiring contract in Fred VanVleet, on a massive $45 million trade exception. It had Jalen Green and Dillon Brooks as players to dangle, as they hadn’t been sent to Phoenix yet. Jabari Smith Jr. hadn’t signed an extension, and he therefore would not have been subjected to a poison pill in his new deal.
If Antetokounmpo asked for a trade tomorrow, Houston would have a far harder time constructing a package that worked financially. VanVleet cannot be traded until Oct. 6. Smith can be traded, but he counts as less outgoing salary to Houston (his current $12.3 million salary) than he would as incoming salary for Milwaukee ($22.3 million, the average salary on his new deal). Green and Brooks play for another team, and Houston likely wouldn’t want to give up Kevin Durant in a deal. Houston could construct a trade with other pieces, but doing so becomes significantly harder. The Rockets surely would have prioritized Antetokounmpo had they known he’d be available, but as they didn’t, they prioritized other business. Versions of this are true for most other pursuing teams.
A lot of that other business revolves around signing free agents. Those free agents can’t immediately be traded. The majority of them can’t be moved until Dec. 15. A handful have to wait until Jan. 15. This is why trade activity picks up so much in late January and early February leading up to the deadline. It’s the only point on the regular-season calendar at which every player in the league is legally tradable. If Antetokounmpo asked for a trade now, the 63 veteran free agents who have signed new contracts this offseason would all be ineligible for inclusion. That’s 14% of all NBA players, some of whom might interest the Bucks, others who may be needed for salary-matching purposes.
February makes more sense then, right?
Well, potentially. Teams can usually construct a deal if they work hard enough at it. But there are major hurdles to clear with any in-season blockbuster. The stricter roster-size constraint of 15 players doesn’t help. Remember, teams often need to stack several salaries to reach a max number like Antetokounmpo’s, so that means including teams that have or are willing to create spots, which usually means paying them off. There are also hard caps to consider. Again, we’ll look at Houston. The Rockets are locked below the first apron because they used the non-taxpayer mid-level exception on Dorian Finney-Smith. They only have around $1 million in room beneath that line right now, not a lot of space to work with in a deal of this magnitude. Most other teams are either already working with a hard cap of some sort or would generate one based on the parameters of this trade. So while February is easier than August, it certainly isn’t optimal.
No, the ideal timing, should Antetokounmpo actually decide he wants to move, would be the portion of the transaction cycle he just skipped. The best time to make a trade request is May or June, with the execution of such a deal possibly waiting until July depending on terms. That’s when teams are usually best equipped to make major trades. As Antetokounmpo will be entering the final year of his contract ahead of the 2026-27 season, he’ll also conveniently be able to dictate his preferred destination next summer. Nobody is trading for Antetokounmpo if they know he’s just going to walk as a free agent a year later. In fact, if Antetokounmpo has a preferred destination in mind already, this might have been his strategy all along. The longer he waits, the less his new team might have to give up. In fact, it’s possible that there are teams who are not currently positioned to trade for Antetokounmpo but could be in a year.
The obvious example of such a team would be the Lakers. Right now, Los Angeles only has one tradable first-round pick. That’s in 2031. But next summer, that number jumps to three: their 2026, 2031 and 2033 selections. That makes a trade a bit more plausible, especially with a signed-and-traded Austin Reaves in the mix as well. While the Lakers could trade Reaves now, the Bucks would be getting him with no long-term assurances. He’s virtually unextendable at his low present salary, so Milwaukee would likely prefer to be able to negotiate a sign-and-trade first. This obviously wouldn’t represent a fair return in a trade for Antetokounmpo, but on an expiring contract, he’d have far more leverage to scare off other teams. The closer a player is to free agency, the easier it is for him to get where he wants to go. If that’s a team with relatively limited assets to work with, like the Lakers or Knicks, timing becomes essential.
That’s what’s so strange about this constant will he, won’t he pull. A trade request from Antetokounmpo is entirely plausible. His best teammate is currently Turner. Milwaukee controls none of its own first-round picks until 2031. It has $22 million in dead money on its books that came from waiving Lillard for the next five years. If Antetokounmpo’s goal is to win a second championship as he has so often stated, changing teams is probably going to be necessary.
But the timing of this reporting continues to be strange. It is never harder to make a major move than it is during the period between July’s free-agency bonanza and the beginning of the season. If someone wants to move, it usually makes sense to force the issue before that or just wait until a year passes to try again in the following summer.
So why are we still hearing about all of this in August?
It’s probably a combination of factors. The simplest is wishful thinking. Most of the league wants the chance to eventually trade for Antetokounmpo. A handful of teams would like that process to come sooner rather than later, both because, well, you want Giannis on your team as often as possible, but also to potentially crowd out those scary big-market suitors. The Lakers are still a year away from factoring into this. The Knicks can’t trade the recently-extended Mikal Bridges until the end of January.
So those teams may be signaling things to reporters in the hopes that it destabilizes the Bucks quickly enough to compel an earlier trade. Those teams know a trade request probably isn’t coming in August. They would however love to create enough drama in Milwaukee to create another slow start. The worse the Bucks are early on, the likelier an early season request becomes.
This could also be coming from the Antetokounmpo camp. If his goal is to win in Milwaukee first and foremost, he might want the Bucks to shop around their limited remaining draft capital (a first-round pick in either 2031 or 2032 along with first-round swap rights in the other year) for win-now talent. The Bucks might be hesitant to do so in fear of such a trade not making them contenders, and then being without those picks as they navigate a post-Antetokounmpo rebuild. As the Lakers are living with LeBron James, a superstar’s timeline doesn’t always align with a front office’s plan for prudent roster-building.
We don’t know for certain. All we do know is that basically every team in the league wants Giannis Antetokounmpo. As he is ineligible to sign a contract extension this season, these rumors will persist in some fashion until he is either traded or signs an extension. As a trade right now would be impractical, that means you should assume that the Antetokounmpo rumors will linger at least until February and probably into next summer. Antetokounmpo himself could end them with a single statement. If he tells the world he plans to re-sign with the Bucks and retire in Milwaukee, that just about ends the speculation. But he hasn’t done that yet, nor does he seem, according to all of this reporting, particularly inclined to do so. He is monitoring Milwaukee’s moves. He’ll likely see what this roster is capable of early in the season. And he’ll probably make up his mind about what comes next from there.
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