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Oakland, June 2015. The Warriors finally break through, Steph Curry is the engine of it, and the Bay Area loses its mind in a way it had been waiting four decades to lose it. People were crying in bars. Strangers were hugging on BART. Nobody at that parade was thinking about an expiration date, they were just thinking about how good it felt to finally have this.
Eleven years later, Steph is still here. Still in the same uniform he won that first one in, still the engine, still hunting ring number five. The same number as Kobe Bryant, Magic Johnson, and Tim Duncan. Sit with that for a second, because that sentence isn’t supposed to include a guy who just turned 38 and still has a real argument for another one.
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Now think about how geeked Bucks fans were in 2021. Giannis drops 50 in Game 6, hoists the trophy, and Milwaukee gets its first title in 50 years. Grown men were openly sobbing in the streets. That city felt like it had arrived, like this was the beginning of a run, not the peak of one.
Five years later, with that single championship still the only one on the shelf, Giannis is a Miami Heat player. That’s the entire gap between euphoria and an exit. Every parade feels like it’ll last forever. Almost none of them do. Giannis isn’t in Miami because he stopped being great. He’s in Miami because organizations can fail great players, even the ones who already delivered them a parade.
The deal that got him there is enormous. The Bucks sent Antetokounmpo and Bobby Portis to Miami for Tyler Herro, Kel’el Ware, Jaime Jaquez Jr., Kasparas Jakucionis, three first-round picks, a pick swap, and a second-rounder. That’s a franchise hitting the eject button and hoping the parachute opens before the ground does. And it didn’t happen overnight. The Bucks finally accepted their fate only after a 32-win season, a league investigation, and missing the play-in tournament entirely. Rather than mortgage what little future they had left trying to convince Giannis to stay, they pivoted toward maximizing the return. He was a two-time MVP with a championship already on his résumé, and it still took total organizational…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/giannis-bucks-divorce-makes-curry-052926954.html
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Publish date : 2026-06-30 05:29:00
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