The Bucks' Giannis Antetokounmpo Era Is Ending Not With a Bang, But a Whimper
A possible trade-deadline breakup would end an era in Milwaukee — though the final act shouldn't overshadow a rare partnership between a small-market franchise and a generational star.
In one of those classic “NBA-agent-plants-a-story-with-a-newsbreaker” specials, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported Wednesday that Giannis Antetokounmpo “is ready for a new home ahead of the Feb. 5 trade deadline” — and that, while Giannis isn’t technically demanding a trade… it might just be time for one:
“Sources said Antetokounmpo has informed the Bucks for months that he believes the moment has come to part ways after 12-plus years together, making a trade increasingly possible.”
The news caused the Polymarket odds that Antetokounmpo would be traded, which had been sitting in the 20-25 percent range, to spike up to around 50 percent by mid-day Wednesday — making him one of the most likely players to be dealt before the deadline, trailing only Keon Ellis (77 percent) and Jonathan Kuminga (59 percent):
If the end of the Giannis-Milwaukee marriage is close at hand, this would be a sad way for it to finish indeed. The Bucks are 18-27, sitting 12th in the East, and on Wednesday they were down to an 8.5 percent chance to make the playoffs. In addition to multiple stretches of missed games earlier in the year, Giannis went down again with a calf injury last week with no timetable for a return.
Zooming out a bit, the Bucks haven’t made it out of Round 1 in the playoffs since 2022, and they’ve only made it past Round 2 twice in the whole Giannis era: 2019, when they lost the Eastern Conference final, and 2021, when they won the NBA championship.
On the one hand, any notion from that year that the next handful of seasons would belong to Giannis and the Bucks ended up being misplaced. Antetokounmpo remained a fixture in the Top 5 of MVP voting throughout — but he was not able to carry the team to deep playoff runs, between his own frequent injuries and a lack of support from his surrounding talent (even as it evolved from Jrue Holiday and Khris Middleton to Damian Lillard). Because of this, the Giannis era in Milwaukee could be viewed as a disappointment relative to what its potential appeared to be at its highest points.
On the other hand, the Bucks were mostly a deeply mediocre franchise before Antetokounmpo’s arrival with the No. 15 pick in the 2013 draft. In the 22 years leading up to the 2013-14 season, the Bucks had finished Top-10 in net rating just once (in 2000-01). The team still made the playoffs roughly half the time starting in the late 1990s — but every single one of those trips ended in Round 1, aside from making the 2001 East final.
The Giannis era was a bit of a slow burn at first, with the team missing the playoffs in two of his first three seasons and still not finishing Top-10 in net rating in any of his first five years. But once coach Mike Budenholzer arrived in 2018, the team began to really take off — leading the league in net rating in both 2018-19 and 2019-20, and never finishing any lower than eighth from 2018-19 through 2022-23. As this happened, the Bucks’ Elo rating zoomed up ever higher, reaching its highest level in franchise history — higher even than when they won the 1971 NBA title and were roughly as dominant the following season.
Winning a title in Milwaukee — something that hadn’t previously been done in 50 years (!) — is no small thing. (It was actually an incredible accomplishment, in a league where Cleveland and San Antonio were the sole teams from outside the Top 16 in metro-area population to win any of the previous 41 titles.)
For most of his 13 seasons, Giannis proved how much having a truly elite superstar can raise the ceiling for a team, taking a small-market franchise that was spinning its wheels for decades and putting it on the map as a perennial contender. To that last point, Giannis also stuck around for an uncommon amount of time — and produced an uncommon amount of value — for a player who got his start in the league’s fifth-smallest market by metro population.
Among players who made their NBA debuts since 2000 (essentially capturing all of the player-empowerment era) in cities with a metro population under 2 million in 2024, Giannis is the leader in games played (889) and, by far, Wins Above Replacement (125.5) during their initial stint with that team:
For context, Giannis has produced more WAR in his initial Milwaukee stint than LeBron James did in Cleveland and Kevin Durant in Seattle/Oklahoma City — and those players left after many fewer games in their small-market destinations than Antetokounmpo stuck around for:
While the way it seems to be ending is a bummer for Bucks fans — and for fans of smaller-market NBA teams in general — the overall Giannis story in Milwaukee has been a special one. He brought the city a championship and gave it more than a decade of future Hall-of-Fame play. Whether he gets dealt in the next week or not (Polymarket remains undecided), it’s worth remembering that many franchises never get the chance for a run like this at all — and almost none get it from a player who chose to stay long enough to turn that potential into reality, however fleeting the peak ultimately proved to be.
Filed under: NBA
It’s so sad! He did everything right after the ‘21 championship. Smiled when Bucks management did everything in their power to decimate the team with bad decision after bad decision.
The next generation is going to look at this and say “why would I ever stay with a team?”