The biggest lessons from the Giannis Antetokounmpo trade saga

588 days ago, right at the beginning of the 2024 NBA season, I called for the Bucks to trade Giannis Antetokounmpo to avert disaster. I was admittedly early to the party, and was thus called many names: “mad man,” “idiot,” “Celtics writer”; I was even refuted in a point-by-point counterargument by a Bucks blogger the same day. To quote from the initial piece:

“When struggling through the doldrums of being alive, we may naively believe that, because things are so bad right now, they can only get better. We may think we have hit ‘rock bottom,’ and that our situation must improve because there is no lower point imaginable. But we are wrong.”

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And as much as I’d like to say I saw “the jagged gravel that is waiting for them at the end of this impossibly deep hole they are free-falling down,” I did not expect it to get this bad. The sentiment that the Bucks needed to trade Giannis to save their franchise metastasized into a two-year circus of confusion and stupidity that saw Milwaukee repeatedly take out new mortgages on a house that was built on a fault line. From a Khris Middleton extension to Doc Rivers’ hiring-and-firing to a lunatic Myles Turner contract, the Bucks repeatedly refused to accept reality. Antetokounmpo, meanwhile, repeatedly refused to force their hand.

Giannis and the Bucks held the NBA world hostage for almost two years, and by the end I was ready for them to just flip a coin and get it over with. But a saga that had nothing but questions at least finally deserves some answers, and so we’re going to spend the next bajillion words answering as many questions as we can. Hopefully, through self-reflection, we can avoid something like this ever happening again.

So who got the best deal?

To call the eventual trade the result of the “Giannis Sweepstakes” adopts an overly laudatory tone for what was essentially two teams, the Boston Celtics and the Miami Heat, presenting the Bucks with two options: attempt to compete with Jaylen Brown and receive minimal draft compensation, or accept far more draft picks, Tyler Herro and several younger pieces from the Heat. In…

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Publish date : 2026-06-25 12:00:00

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