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It wasn’t quite a Luka-for-AD-level middle of the night mind-melter, but when one of the 16 players in NBA history to win multiple Most Valuable Player trophies gets traded, it does tend to send shockwaves throughout the basketball-watching world … even if pretty much everyone had been expecting it for months (if not longer).
We awoke Tuesday in a world where Giannis Antetokounmpo is a member of the Miami Heat, where Tyler Herro headlines the package of players and picks heading over to the Milwaukee Bucks, and where plenty of interested parties on the outside looking in — most notably, the Boston Celtics — find themselves moving on to Plan B. The reverberations from this one will be felt far and wide; let’s start getting our arms around it.
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What follows is a stab at a first draft of history — a thumbnail sketch of who and what seems to have been helped and hurt by the wee-hours dealings between Miami and Milwaukee. We begin with the man himself:
WINNER: Giannis Antetokounmpo
He’d clearly (and reasonably) determined that the Bucks as constituted were not capable of mounting a credible push for deep postseason runs and decided he wanted to be somewhere else. Well, now he’s somewhere else.
Antetokounmpo woke up Tuesday with a better co-star (Bam Adebayo) than anyone that the Bucks currently had or were likely to be able to add. He joins a franchise that has gone to the NBA Finals seven times in the last 20 years and twice in the last decade, led by a front office with a track record of turning limited financial flexibility and lower-wattage prospects into supporting casts that augment stars. He does so with the ability to, in six months, sign his preferred version of a contract extension that will pay him about $70 million a year through his mid-30s (while paying no state taxes on that income).
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This trade, in and of itself, does not guarantee Antetokounmpo a return to playing meaningful basketball in May and June. But if you were looking for a change of scenery, Biscayne Bay ain’t half bad.
LOSER: Bucks Fans
There is no silver lining to losing the best player that your…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/article/giannis-antetokounmpo-trade-winners-and-losers-161625338.html
Author : Dan Devine
Publish date : 2026-06-23 16:16:00
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