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Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press
Next year’s biggest NBA mystery is over. On Tuesday morning, two-time reigning MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo announced that he plans to sign a five-year supermax extension with the Milwaukee Bucks.
The announcement comes less than a week before the Dec. 21 deadline and takes off the biggest free agent in next summer’s class. After a great offseason adding point guard Jrue Holiday, the Bucks now have Antetokounmpo on board for the next half decade.
Such important news impacts the entire league, and there are many angles of the announcement to unpack.
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Morry Gash / Associated Press
The Bucks’ offseason was controversial. After making a highly successful trade for Jrue Holiday, the team appeared to have a deal for Sacramento Kings guard Bogdan Bogdanovic, who then backfired under a strange set of circumstances detailed by Jake Fischer of B / R.
Aside from being a short-term setback for the Bucks’ on-court improvement, it was a matter of concern whether the front office did enough this crucial offseason to convince Antetokoummpo to waive free agency and commit the next one. half a decade of his life to the franchise.
That uncertainty lasted until training ground. All of Antetokounmpo’s teammates gave him pens for his 26th birthday, and in his first media availability last week, he tried to downplay questions about his future that would linger all season if he didn’t give an answer on Monday.
In the end, the Bucks did enough to convince him to stay, or maybe he always was going to and the holiday trade was just a bonus. We will never know. Either way, the other players on the team will not play this season under a cloud of scrutiny.
More importantly, Bucks fans can breathe a little easier. They don’t have to go through this season having to read constant speculation about their superstar’s future or consider the possibility that this bizarre season, likely played without fans in the stands at Fiserv Forum, will be the last in Milwaukee before the start of a long reconstruction.
That’s it out the window for now.
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Wilfredo Lee / Associated Press
Every few years, there’s a free agent who really changes the NBA landscape, the kind of players teams spend several years preparing to go after, making sure their caps sheets are clear to make a pitch. Think Kawhi Leonard last summer, Kevin Durant in 2016, or LeBron James in 2010.
That’s the promise of a 26-year-old Antetokounmpo.
Miami Heat president Pat Riley signed James and Chris Bosh in the summer of 2010, kicking off the last decade of an unprecedented superstar movement. After a trip to the Finals, in which they defeated the Bucks in five games in the second round of the playoffs, they seemed ready to be among the favorites if Antetokounmpo opted to leave Milwaukee.
Antetokounmpo is a gym rat, which is the foundation of the culture that Riley and head coach Erik Spoelstra have built in Miami and what attracted Jimmy Butler last summer. It would have been easy to imagine Antetokounmpo fitting in perfectly.
Even after they signed fourth-year All-Star center Bam Adebayo, who shares an agent with Antetokounmpo, with a maximum rookie extension of five years last month, reducing his space in the 2021 salary cap, the Heat stood out. a lot about the Giannis draw.
There goes that plan.
Fortunately, the Heat are in a great position to compete for the next several years with two All-Stars in Butler and Adebayo and promising shooters Duncan Robinson and Tyler Herro. They are not forming another super team with Giannis, but they will be fine.
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Morry Gash / Associated Press
Giannis’s highest-profile 2021 suitor was the Toronto Raptors, who hoped to build on his close relationship with team president and teammate Nigeran Masai Ujiri, along with a playoff-ready young core that includes Pascal Siakam, Fred VanVleet. and OG Anunoby.
Last week, a documentary series called Open Gym, about the NBA’s Disney World bubble, aired on Canadian television and for some reason included a segment detailing Ujiri’s attempt to move up enough in the 2013 draft to take on Antetokounmpo, whom he had researched extensively. until then.
The message behind including this scene was clear to anyone who saw it, including, perhaps, Antetokounmpo himself: we wanted you back when most other teams didn’t believe in you.
Unfortunately for Ujiri, he wasn’t able to make that move seven years ago, and the Bucks selected and developed Antetokounmpo, who rewarded them for that initial belief with Tuesday’s long-term commitment.
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Tony Gutierrez / Associated Press
Also on the list of potential suitors were the Dallas Mavericks, armed with cap space and a likely future 21-year-old MVP in Luka Doncic.
The Mavs organization has a lot of experience in marketing and promoting international players thanks to Dirk Nowitzki’s 21-year Hall of Fame career, and Doncic and Kristaps Porzingis are the next evolution. The prospect of teaming up with those two for an all-European Big Three might have been attractive to Antetokounmpo, and a pair of him and Doncic would have dominated the NBA for the next decade.
Now Dallas will have to settle for having alone one Generational talent that has not yet entered its prime.
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Petros Giannakouris / Associated Press
The main reason it finally made sense for Antetokounmpo to sign: Not many 26-year-olds have a chance to secure a quarter of a billion dollars.
We can talk all we want about whether the Bucks have enough to win or whether another team could make a better case for why it should spend its best years with them. But that’s a lot of money to have in front of you on a piece of paper, especially considering Antetokounmpo’s backstory.
Antetokounmpo’s journey from poverty in Greece to generational NBA stardom has been well documented in various documentaries and podcasts, and soon a book and Disney biopic.
Now Antetokounmpo and his girlfriend have a young son. He has three brothers, two of whom are in the NBA and the third is on the way. None of them will have to worry about money again, and neither will their family in Greece.
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Max Becherer / Associated Press
Now that they can’t spend an entire season speculating about where Antetokounmpo will go in a year, what will the mainstream NBA media do? How soon will it be pointed out that you can still apply for a trade, even though everything we know about it indicates that it is not connected that way?
Who is next in the spotlight? Will it be Karl-Anthony Towns, or will the speech jump to Donovan Mitchell, whose ink is not yet dry in the maximum five-year rookie stretch he signed with the Utah Jazz?
Trae Young signed with Klutch Sports this year. If the Atlanta Hawks don’t make the playoffs, will you want to get out soon? When does the clock start for Zion Williamson with the New Orleans Pelicans?
This is the NBA coverage cycle now. The transactions, both current and hypothetical, generate more interest than the product on the floor. Every year, a star or two is thought or known to be unhappy in their current situation, and that story threatens to swallow the entire season.
By signing this extension with the Bucks, Antetokounmpo took a step to break that cycle.
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Richard Shotwell / Associated Press
More importantly, the fact that Antetokounmpo made a commitment a year earlier to stay with the Bucks long-term is undeniably good for the NBA’s health.
It has become the accepted pattern of events that superstars in small markets will eventually freak out and leave, either by commercial request or in free agency, to join other stars in more glamorous markets.
Damian Lillard broke the trend last year when he signed a four-year, $ 196 million extension to stay in Portland. But Lillard hasn’t been an MVP twice. Antetokounmpo staying in Milwaukee is as if Kevin Durant has stayed with the Oklahoma City Thunder instead of going to an already dominant Golden State Warriors team in 2016.
Players having agency over where they play is a good thing. But for fans of all but a handful of teams, it may seem inevitable that if they get lucky and land a generational talent in the draft, it’s only a matter of time until they leave. It’s best for the league when there’s a reason to care about more than just a few teams, put a Milwaukee team on national television, and get that city’s fans investing.
When you think of Reggie Miller, the only team you think of is the Indiana Pacers. The same goes for John Stockton in Utah. Even though those Hall of Famers never won titles, they came close multiple times and ultimately have an unbeatable legacy in those cities.
Antetokounmpo went to the Heat or the Mavericks wouldn’t have guaranteed him a title. And if he had won one with one of those teams, fans would have seen him as a gun for hire, just like Durant at Golden State.
With both Lillard and Antetokounmpo making these long-term commitments to the teams that wrote them, perhaps a precedent is set that superstars in unglamorous markets don’t create. to have to force his exit eventually.
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