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 the end, they chose the latter.
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The fact that the Giannis Antetokounmpo market turned into a staring contest that may have come down to the Celtics’ refusal to include Hugo Gonzalez is an absurd and fitting end to sad saga from which there are essentially no winners. The Heat now have an utterly gutted roster with Bam Adebayo and Giannis, no future draft assets and no remaining young players. They improved their short term outlook, sure, but “Giannis plus random guys” just repeatedly failed in Milwaukee.
The Celtics, meanwhile, will now enter the offseason with an unclear relationship with Jaylen Brown, who they just openly tried to trade. They could look to trade him elsewhere or try to repair the relationship, but whatever the solution it probably won’t be as simple as a pure Giannis upgrade.
The Bucks probably got the best deal they could, and I was surprised by how many draft picks they managed to squeeze out of the Heat. Still, they essentially took back speculative players in the deal, with none of Kel’el Ware, Jaime Jaquez Jr. or Kasparas Jakucionis anything close to a sure-thing. Herro is allegedly the centerpiece of the deal, but he’s really just a moderately sized expiring contract that the Bucks may-or-may-not extend. Essentially, they got cryptocurrency back for Giannis — could it be valuable? Sure. Is it? Nobody knows!
Beyond losing their best player since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the real price the Bucks paid was the massive opportunity cost of waiting so long. If you had told me two years ago, after the publication of my initial Giannis trade piece, that the Heat would eventually trade for him but would not have to include Bam Adebayo? I would have laughed in your face. The fact that the Celtics did not offer more first-round picks or Hugo Gonzalez is laughable, nor is the concept that more teams didn’t want to be in the Giannis business.
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Had the Bucks simply traded Antetokounmpo at any point in the last two years rather than vainly try to mend a relationship that had already become untenable, they could have received the largest haul of assets in the history of the league by far. Instead, they got Bitcoin.
Why did the Bucks take the Heat offer over Jaylen Brown?
This is among the more interesting deals to unpack, given that we actually know precisely what the two offers were and can compare them directly. The Heat offer was Herro, Ware, Jaquez Jr. and Jakucionis plus three first-round picks, a swap and a second round pick. Those first round picks are the 13th pick tonight, Miami’s 2031 and 2033 picks and a 2030 swap. The Celtics offer was, apparently, just Jaylen Brown and two first-round picks. It’s less draft compensation, but Brown is a wildly superior player to anyone the Bucks got back from the Heat. So why did the Bucks take the Miami deal over Boston?
The debate was conveniently sorted as a question: do the Bucks want to contend this year or rebuild for the far future? Brown could help them win games immediately while the Heat package is, again, highly speculative. I find that framing somewhat misleading; yes, Milwaukee could have won some games with Brown next year, but which games? In December? Does that team make it to May? Can Jaylen Brown and … some other random dudes win the Eastern Conference? Absolutely not. From that perspective, I found the Miami offer far more realistic.
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Kevin O’Connor reported Tuesday morning that Bucks owner Jimmy Haslam was the main force behind taking the Heat deal over the Celtics package because of fears that Brown would not sign an extension and himself demand a trade. Perhaps that was the main reason, but it also may be that it simply did not make sense to pay Brown major money when the team is half a decade or more from getting back to relevancy. If you accept the thesis that Giannis was the better player in the trade with Brown (both sides did), it does not make any sense to swap the two and expect to contend with the same supporting pieces. That is just grass-is-always-greener team building.
The one icky thing about the deal that Bucks took is how far down the road those picks are. Save for the 13th pick this year, they received no picks in 2027, 2028 or 2029. That means it will be four entire years until the Bucks begin cashing in on the assets of this trade, and their immediate future is no more secure with the Damian Lillard waive-and-stretch on the books, Myles Turner eating up space and nothing else to really hang your hat on. It reminds me (I’m not kidding) of how my history professors in college described the finances of Bourbon France right before the French Revolution. Because of how far they are from getting their head above water, there is a real chance the Bucks become an all-time irrelevant franchise for an entire decade.
Could this trade cause any ripple effects?
It surely will, but I don’t believe this is enough of a disruptor immediately deter teams in the East from loading up. The Heat aren’t just beatable, they’re arguably still more beatable than Boston or New York. But beyond the immediate question of Jaylen Brown’s future, I wonder exactly how much this saga will shape NBA teams’ behavior with superstars on declining teams. The Bucks, a small market generally unable to attract high-level free agents, were so frightened of losing Giannis that they repeatedly made irresponsible decisions to try to appease him. But what did we learn about appeasement in school, kids? That’s right: don’t do it.
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The next player to hold their team hostage like this may be treated differently, and the “all-in” thesis of having a star player and needing to maximize their window may be greeted by a chilling effect from the Giannis situation. As I pointed out above, the Bucks are scheduled for about a decade of total irrelevance, a period in which their team revenue will decrease as their fans focus more on the Green Bay Packers offensive line questions.
However, one clear mathematical truth emerged from the Giannis saga, which is that we finally derived the formula for total franchise collapse: trading all your own draft picks plus unhappy superstar divided by a small market to the square root of paying for past performance equals disaster. The Bucks have written the book on how to collapse.
So was this all worth the 2021 NBA Championship?
Brian Windhorst famously said that if you win the championship, you don’t have to apologize for anything; trades, free agents, draft picks. None of it matters if you win the title. I’d like to officially file a complaint about that maxim.
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This whole situation stems from the Bucks trading the farm for Jrue Holiday, which propelled them to the 2021 NBA Championship and everyone could live happily ever after. While that move is totally defensible, the Bucks took so many additional bites at the apple after their title that they reset the clock on having to apologize. The Damian Lillard trade was desperate and arguably gifted Boston the 2024 title by diverting Holiday to them, and the Lillard/Turner waive-and-stretch is the single most insane NBA transaction in my lifetime. They certainly have to say sorry for all that.
Most fans, myself included, see an NBA team’s responsibility as getting a championship with their best player before they retire or move on. There is nothing so painful as having a great player and never achieving anything with them. Had the Celtics failed to win with Tatum and Brown before they were split up (as seems likely right now), I would have been devastated. Had the Red Sox not won the 2018 World Series with Mookie Betts before making the worst trade in sports history (still mad, will always be mad), I would cry myself to sleep nightly.
The sad reality is that the Bucks went so all-in that they became basically incapable of improving their roster after the Lillard trade. They had the 2021 run and then an incredible title defense in 2022 that saw an absurdly competitive second-round loss to Boston. But the Bucks did not properly account for how ambitious Giannis would be beyond their single championship, and panicked repeatedly to ensure he would stay in Milwaukee. That, to me, will be the legacy of this entire post-championship era.
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