Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo era should end with Damian Lillard’s injury, and a trade can benefit all involved

Kevin Garnett and Giannis Antetokounmpo have quite a bit in common. Both were drafted without too much fanfare by small-market, midwestern organizations. Both quickly emerged as franchise centerpieces and cemented themselves as the greatest player in team history. Both challenged conventional wisdom about a power forward’s role in the NBA of their era. Garnett was such a skilled creator and versatile defender that could play point guard on offense and any position on defense. Antetokounmpo also functioned as a primary shot-creator, but did so by leveraging his size, skill and athleticism to generate unmatchable rim pressure as a driver.

Antetokounmpo is, in many ways, Garnett’s closest modern analogue. They have one other similiarity, though, that points to the major difference between them. They both, for the time being, have one championship ring. Garnett got his after getting traded to Boston 12 years into his Minnesota tenure. He likes to say that the one regret from his legendary career was not forcing a trade sooner. He’s shared that advice with modern players freely, including another of his modern acolytes, Anthony Davis. One of the enduring lessons of Garnett’s career has been just how detrimental the wrong organization can be to even the best players.

Antetokounmpo has applied a more modern spin to Garnett’s plight. He’s used the threat that he might leave to force the Milwaukee Bucks to make the kinds of moves he thinks it will take for him to win with them. When he was one year away from free agency in 2020, the Bucks traded a mountain of draft picks for Jrue Holiday hoping it would convince him to extend. It did. The move worked on all fronts. Milwaukee secured Antetokounmpo’s commitment for another few years. Antetokounmpo got his homegrown championship alongside Holiday in 2021.

Injuries were a major factor, but it was a feat they haven’t yet repeated. So in 2023, Antetokounmpo got antsy. “Winning a championship comes first. I don’t want to be 20 years on the same team and don’t win another championship,” he told The New York Times’ Tania Ganguli. By then, he had already maneuvered to get his preferred head coaching candidate, Adrian Griffin, hired to replace the fired Mike Budenholzer. The Bucks followed that hire up with a blockbuster trade acquisition of Damian Lillard. Antetokounmpo signed another extension soon after.

These moves didn’t work out quite as well. Griffin lasted 44 games before getting fired. Lillard played at an All-Star level this season, but has declined from his All-NBA peak in Portland. A year ago, they lost to the Indiana Pacers in the first round with basically everyone struggling through injuries. This year, those same Pacers have them on the brink of elimination with Lillard missing Game 1, struggling after his return from deep vein thrombosis in his calf in Games 2 and 3, and then, finally, suffering a torn Achilles tendon in Game 4. In all likelihood, that marks the end of Lillard’s prime, and with it, any hope that this particular duo had of contending together.

Those injuries can’t be discounted entirely in Milwaukee’s disappointing postseasons, but there aren’t exactly markers in here suggesting that the healthy version of this team was capable of contending either. Lillard and Antetokounmpo never developed the lethal pick-and-roll chemistry everyone expected. Even when the two of them played together this season, they posted a pretty underwhelming +4.7 net rating. If you want an idea of what a championship duo looks like, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown are +8.1, Donovan Mitchell and Evan Mobley are at +11.1, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jaylen Williams are at +13.1.

Those players obviously had stronger supporting casts than Milwaukee’s duo did, but it’s not as though the Bucks were in any sort of position to change that with or without a healthy Lillard. They don’t control their own first-round pick again until 2031. Brook Lopez is 37 and not under contract for next season. He’s declining, but the Bucks have no financial mechanism for adequately replacing him. Kyle Kuzma has been a disaster since the Bucks traded Khris Middleton, one of Antetokounmpo’s closest friends on the team, to get him. 

Milwaukee has barely cultivated any young, cheap depth. They’ve had success with minimum-salary veterans… but that’s mostly because those free agents have known that the Bucks had no young depth to challenge them with. You get Gary Trent Jr. for the minimum because you have a starting job to offer him, but you have a starting job to offer him because you have a top-heavy roster, no track record of developing the bottom of it and no assets to improve it with more expensive veteran talent.

That’s where the Bucks are now. They’re old. They’re capped out. They’re devoid of tradable assets. At best, they can kick the can do the road, maybe offer their 2031 first-rounder and swap rights on their 2032 pick alongside Kuzma and another contract to bring in a perimeter defender or a third scorer. If they’re really aggressive, maybe they could even try to flip Lillard’s contract for one that’s more detrimental in the long term but at least attached to a potentially healthy player for next season. Paul George, anyone? Would Bradly Beal waive his no-trade clause for Milwaukee? These aren’t exactly appealing options.

More likely, this is just where the Bucks are: a middle-of-the-road team without much roster flexibility, waiting to get passed by the Eastern Conference’s up-and-comers. Indiana and New York did it a year ago. Detroit basically got there this year. Forget about catching Boston or Cleveland. That was hardly worth discussion a week ago and is now off the table entirely without Lillard. Do the Bucks even have a plan for staying ahead of Orlando?

The answer to that question can’t be “having Antetokounmpo.” He’s said himself that he wants to win another championship more than he wants to spend his whole career in one place. He’s spent 12 years in Milwaukee now, the same amount of time Garnett spent in Minnesota. They took different routes to getting there, but they wound up in the same place: playing for teams that didn’t deserve them. After a dozen years, Garnett finally had enough and moved on. It’s time for Antetokounmpo to do the same. It’s time for him to force his trade.

Of course, as Garnett said, he wishes he’d done it earlier. The moment a trade becomes necessary is rarely the moment a trade actually happens. There’s understandable resistance here. The Bucks had Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and then waited 40 years for their next MVP. Small-market teams understand intuitively how rare it is for them to get players like this. The Bucks aren’t the Lakers. It might take decades for them to get their next Giannis.

All things being equal, Antetokounmpo would probably prefer to keep winning in Milwaukee. He’s spent his whole professional career and American life there. His family is there. There’s something special about a star of his caliber spending an entire career with a single fan base. Think of the reverence Dirk Nowitzki inspires in Dallas. Think of the hatred those same fans have spewed toward Nico Harrison for depriving them of the chance to maintain the same relationship with Luka Dončić. No general manager wants to make that sort of trade, but as Dončić’s return to Dallas proved, few players are ever all that eager to be a part of one either. The Bucks aren’t making it until they’re forced to. 

Antetokounmpo was never going to force them to until he knew he had no other way of winning a second championship. That’s what makes the Lillard injury such an accelerant here. With him on the court, Giannis might have been able to talk himself into tweaks. A trade here, a free-agent signing there, maybe a bit more luck in the health department and boom, right back in the mix. But the writing is on the wall now. Antetokounmpo has basically been shown what post-Lillard life in Milwaukee will look like in this series. He has 135 points in the first four games of the Indiana series. His highest-scoring teammate, Gary Trent Jr., doesn’t even half of that at 61. Spending any more time on a roster this depleted would be a waste of his talents.

Garnett knows a thing or two about waste. It’s why he so publicly regrets staying in Minnesota for as long as he did. Superstars never get those years back. Every lost season is a lost chance to show what you’re capable of, to build a legacy that will outlast you, to get that last ring that might vault you to a new level historically. Once that window closes, it’s closed for good. 

Antetokounmpo is 30, and while he remains among the very best players in the world today, he’s not built to stay there for too much longer. That’s the reality for bigger players who are heavily reliant on athleticism. Antetokounmpo has taken steps to mitigate the detrimental effects of aging. His improvement as a mid-range scorer this season has been encouraging. But he is not LeBron James. He is not age-proof, and even at his best, his game had meaningful flaws. Those flaws are going to get magnified with time. The time to win, therefore, is when his strengths remain so overwhelming that he is equipped to overcome them. That time is now.

That’s true for him, but it’s true for his next team as well. Teams want to trade for a 30-year-old Giannis, not the 33-year-old version. They’ll pay significantly more for the privilege, and there’s quite a bit of incentive for them to do so. The Thunder are just going to get better as they age into their primes. Victor Wembanyama is coming. It’s never easy to win a championship. It’s going to get harder in the years to come.

The sooner the Bucks move, the easier it will be for them to capitalize on the plethora of asset-rich younger teams eager to make their jump. The obvious example here are the Rockets. Houston has a No. 2 seed built mostly around youth as well as arguably the best collection of future draft picks any team has ever had. Which bad team do you want to short: the Suns? The Mavericks? The Nets? Houston holds picks from all three of them.

The Nets figure to factor prominently into these proceedings as well. Controlling four unprotected Knicks picks deep into the future is a pretty tempting proposition. Their own pick this year will be in the lottery, and if they jump into the top-four, then all the better. Cooper Flagg for Giannis Antetokounmpo seems, on paper, like a pretty reasonable present-for-future swap: would you rather have five years of guaranteed All-NBA play, or 15 years with that potential but less certainty? That’s going to depend on context, but the Bucks in this scenario likely prefer the latter. Dylan Harper or Ace Bailey aren’t quite as tantalizing, but they’d be plausible centerpieces here.

Don’t rule out the Warriors. Nothing drives star trades more than star relationships. Antetokounmpo and Stephen Curry have long expressed admiration for one another, and Curry’s off-ball style is much less dependent on direct interaction with a co-star than Lillard’s pick-and-roll game is. Golden State would simply be pairing the player in the NBA with the most rim gravity with the player in the NBA with the most 3-point gravity. Good luck stopping that. Milwaukee could probably have anything Golden State has short of Curry to make a deal like this. Picks. Youth. Draymond Green. Jimmy Butler. Anything rerouted to a third team for further assets. Whatever.

Those are the obvious suitors. There will be others. Antetokounmpo is, conservatively, one of the 30 best players in NBA history. How many chances do you get to trade for a player like that when he’s still in his prime? Most of the league would call. The Bucks would never get “fair” value in that they would never get anything back they could reasonably expect to match what Antetokounmpo has given them, but they could at least kickstart a rebuild that’s definitely needed here with Lillard’s injury so emphatically closing even the slimmest possibility of immediate contention.

If Antetokounmpo were satisfied just losing in the first round every year, well, Bucks fans would probably be comfortable letting him. He could end this at the drop of a hat by saying, in no uncertain terms, that he will retire as a Buck regardless of Milwaukee’s basketball circumstances. Until that happens, the Bucks will be forced to live with the pressure that comes with trying to cater to a star eager to win championships right now. That they don’t have a plausible chance of doing so puts them in quite a bit of danger. Would trading the 2031 and 2032 picks for more win-now help to replace Lillard when it’s apparent nothing can actually help them win now really be a good idea? Is that not just what Phoenix has been doing for the past year?

Life after Antetokounmpo wouldn’t be easy, but the substantial package the Bucks could get for him could at least set up a somewhat promising new era of basketball in Milwaukee. It probably wouldn’t be as successful as the Antetokounmpo era ultimately was, but it would almost certainly be better than pretending that this era is salvageable. It’s over. The Bucks spent a half-decade contending for titles with Antetokounmpo. The cost of doing so was significant, but worthwhile given the results. But that’s a price they’re ultimately paying now, and there isn’t a realistic lender out there capable of keeping them afloat for another few years given just how much pick debt they’re still in and how few veteran assets they have remaining.

This isn’t going to be easy for anyone involved. It wasn’t for Garnett. But he’s living proof that it’s better for all parties involved to just rip off the band-aid. The Bucks may not be the 2007 Timberwolves, but they’re not close to the 2008 Celtics, either, and if Antetokounmpo really wants to chase that second championship, he needs to find his version of that Boston team as soon as possible.

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