It would be hard to make up a more charming athlete story than that of Giannis Antetokounmpo. His life is a line connecting unlikely and poignant points: poverty as a son of Nigerian immigrants in Athens, lower-division Greek basketball as a malnourished teenager, speculative No. 15 draft pick by the Milwaukee Bucks, NBA championship, unambiguous place as one of the best players in league history. Coming from the Mediterranean to the Midwest, he tried to jog to a Bucks game in 18-degree weather, and supposedly wiped the windshield of a moving car with his wingspan. He discovered what is most beautiful about America: a "smothie." He picked up almost 50 pounds and ball skills, and won two MVP awards. He plays with an unmatchable motor and has innovated in the fields of arm extension and stride length. Perhaps the greatest transition threat ever to touch a basketball, he is pretty funny, too.
This cool basketball player who was once enraptured with blended drinks has amassed a lot of emotional goodwill in my head, and yet, in the span of a single season, he has managed to spend down most of it. Say what you will about LeBron's Decision, but at least he made one. Even James Harden is more direct when he's done with a team, whether he's doing a reverse hunger strike or delivering extemporaneous remarks to Chinese fans. Antetokounmpo has taken a somewhat routine process in his sport and turned it into a tedious and vaguely self-righteous odyssey.
The critical shift was when his Bucks co-star Damian Lillard tore his Achilles tendon during the 2025 playoffs. In that instant, Antetokounmpo could have started packing his bags, and no reasonable Milwaukee fan would have begrudged his exit. The all-in trade for Lillard didn't work as anticipated, and the pairing had just been brought to a brutal anatomical end. Antetokounmpo had already fashioned himself into a league-destroying monster and won them the 2021 title. What else could you want the guy to do? He fulfilled any fan base’s most reckless draft-night fantasies, and then some. It was an apt time for a mid-prime superstar to pack up and try to contend on another team.
The natural way out would be for Antetokounmpo to tell the Bucks he wanted to play elsewhere. Surely he had seen his peers accomplish the task. His prime has roughly coincided with the peak of the supposed "player empowerment" era, which saw lots of NBA stars wiggle out of town via trade requests of varying degrees of urgency, though movement has since cooled off after a 2023 collective bargaining agreement that has functioned, as a whole, like an ownership corrective. Incidentally, the end of that era is perhaps best illustrated by Lillard’s own failed attempt to haul himself to Miami, which landed him in Milwaukee instead. (A classic travel itinerary mishap.) But Antetokounmpo is a different tier of talent: a perennial MVP candidate, a player for whom a supermax contract is wage suppression. There were, and are, many teams hungry for his talents; all he had to do was say the word.
Right after Lillard’s injury and the Bucks’ exit from the 2025 postseason—the team's third straight first-round elimination—Antetokounmpo was asked if he thought he could win another title in Milwaukee, and he refused to comment. "I'm not going to do this," he said this past April. "I'm not going to do that. I know how it's going to translate. I don't know, man. I wish I was still playing." It was still too raw.
By May 12, 2025, he had apparently processed the situation. Shams Charania of ESPN reported that "for the first time in his career, Antetokounmpo is open-minded about exploring whether his best long-term fit is remaining in Milwaukee or playing elsewhere." Thus began several months of "exploring," which all reads pretty ridiculously now when laid out in a timeline. Here is a guy who wants nothing more than plausible deniability, as if saying "I want to be traded" were a mortal sin and not one of the more common sentiments among top employees in his line of work.
On June 10, Brian Windhorst laid out the situation on ESPN. "The Bucks are proceeding with their offseason as if Giannis is going to be with them, and there’s no significant trade talks right now," he said. "Now, he can change all that with a simple request, but that request has not happened, and it’s not clear that it’s going to happen anytime soon."
On July 1, the Bucks made a huge, costly move that signaled they were still looking to rebuild around their possibly departing superstar. The team waived Lillard, and with the resulting cap room signed Myles Turner, the sort of floor-spacing center that Antetokounmpo has thrived alongside, after Brook Lopez had aged out of the role. Antetokounmpo and Turner "valued the opportunity to partner on the court," whatever that means, per Charania.
It wasn't enough to make up his mind definitively. On July 10, while talking to the streamer IShowSpeed, Antetokounmpo said that a lot of people had tried to convince him to play in New York. The streamer asked if he would remain with the Bucks. "Probably, probably. We’ll see. We’ll see. Probably. I love Milwaukee," he said. The line delivery didn’t inspire great confidence. But on a NBA TV Summer League broadcast on July 13, Bucks president Peter Feigin was feeling good about the superstar’s status. "I think we get kind of a fun little joy in everybody else thinking they know what’s going on and what the clickbait is, but for us, we’re in a good spot," he said. "Giannis is in a good place. He’s enjoying the summer, and we’re looking forward to next season." (Feigin would leave the job six months later.)
Despite that outward serenity, things were not nearly so peaceful, as Charania would report three months later. On the week of July 28, Bucks GM Jon Horst took a one-day trip to Greece, where Antetokounmpo had had "aired his concerns about whether this team could truly achieve championship contention, and he wanted to explore whether there would be an alternative path forward for both the team and the player." In August, the Bucks took the Knicks’ call to discuss a deal, but couldn’t agree on terms.
On Aug. 31, the Bucks signed Giannis’s brother Thanasis to a one-year minimum contract, renewing a long-running, purely symbolic vow of goodwill to the Antetokounmpo family. In September, Giannis led Greece to a bronze medal at EuroBasket, and said it was "probably the greatest accomplishment I have ever accomplished as an athlete." Participating in Bucks media day from Greece via Zoom, due to COVID-19, he confirmed to reporters that he had considered options besides Milwaukee during the offseason. "Guys, every summer there’s truth. To every report. The same thing I’ve been saying my whole career—I want to be on a team that allows me, gives me a chance to win a championship."
But he still wanted to keep his hands clean. Asked on Oct. 28 about an ESPN report that the Knicks were his preference, Antetokounmpo told reporter Stefan Bondy he hadn’t seen the article. "I try to stay away from all that rumors—and what you call it?—speculation, trades and all this, it doesn't concern me one bit."
In November, Antetokounmpo picked up a calf injury. The team lost another game upon his return, making it seven straight losses, their worst streak since his rookie year. On Dec. 3, Charania ejected his latest gob of news: "Giannis Antetokounmpo and his agent, Alex Saratsis, are having conversations with the Milwaukee Bucks about the two-time NBA MVP's future—and discussing whether his best fit is staying or a move elsewhere." The next day, continuing a surely enervating ritual, Bucks head coach Doc Rivers denied that there had been a trade request.
By Dec. 7, Antetokounmpo was talking about elements of a room in a way that was difficult to reconcile with the Charania report. "There are people who see a door, who want to hurry up and escape through that door," he told Chris Haynes. "I see a wall and I want to run through the wall and make things work." A couple weeks later, he ratcheted up the absurdity of the situation by claiming, incredibly, that his agent was speaking to the Bucks about a potential trade, but only out of the agent’s own volition. From Eric Nehm of The Athletic:
"If my agent is talking to the Bucks about it, he is his own person," Antetokounmpo said. "He can have any conversation he wants about it. At the end of the day, I don’t work for my agent; my agent works for me. And there’s going to be conversations that are going to be made between him and the Bucks, and him and his other players, and him and other teams and other GMs, executives around the league.
"It’s something that you can’t control. But at the end of the day, I personally have not had the conversation with the Bucks."
On Dec. 27, the Bucks beat the Bulls, which Antetokounmpo hilariously punctuated with a windmill dunk in the meaningless final seconds, pissing off the home team and triggering a shoving match at half court. But the dunk was a form of leadership, you see. "I've been 13 years in the league," Antetokounmpo said in the locker room, per ESPN. "If we keep on losing, brother, probably half of the team is not going to be here ... And if [a windmill dunk] is what has to happen for everybody to wake up and understand we're fighting for our lives and we got to get our hands dirty, so be it."
When asked if he belonged to that half of the team that is "not going to be here," Antetokounmpo bristled. "I'm here. I'm here. I'm here," he said. "Don't ask me that question. I'm here. It's disrespectful towards myself and my teammates. I wear that jersey every single day. It's disrespectful towards the organization, my coaching staff, myself and all the people that work hard for me to come out here and say, 'I don't want to be here.' I'm here. I'm putting on the jersey.”
Then there was this remarkable Jan. 8 exchange with Sam Amick of The Athletic:
But you’re planning on being here through the end of the season, correct?
My plan is to be here for the rest of my career. If they don’t want me …
OK, but you’re the one in charge (of this situation). Let’s be real.
I’m not the one in charge. I am an employee.
No, you’re not. I’m not letting you get away with that.
Later in the conversation, he described his core ethos, pausing after each word, according to Amick: "There will never be a chance, and there will never be a moment that I will come out and say I want a trade. That’s not … in … my … nature. OK?"
The past month has seen this excruciating process more directly affect the trajectory of the team. On Jan. 14, as the Bucks were getting booed during a blowout loss to Minnesota at home, Antetokounmpo booed back at the crowd. On Jan. 22, after a flurry of blowout losses, he blasted his team for "selfish" play. The next day on The Pat McAfee Show, Charania said that the star's "wandering eye" and "intense conversations" about the future were causing "high levels and degrees of uncertainty within that organization."
A right calf strain on Jan. 23 sidelined Antetokounmpo, expected to keep him on the bench for four to six weeks. Five days later, he was "ready for a new home ahead of the Feb. 5 trade deadline," according to Charania. The chatty superstar still had one more pregame monologue left in him, delivered to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Jim Owczarski. Many topics were covered, but it was mostly an ode to the city of Milwaukee and how it allowed him to become a husband, a father, and his true self.
"I play because I bleed green. I play because I know what I've built here," Antetokounmpo said. "For me, it's a huge puzzle. It's a huge Lego piece that I've built and I don't like people taking out pieces from it. I want to keep on building as much as I can." Asked what input he had into trade talks, he said, "Zero."
"I have great respect, love and likeness for Jon [Horst] and the ownership and that will never be different. Won’t change," Antetokounmpo said. "But at the end of the day"—according to Owczarski, he paused for eight seconds—"you gotta look."
On the day of the trade deadline, Charania reported that the Bucks were not making a move after all. This exhausting charade would be pushed to the upcoming offseason, when other teams would have more to offer. The Bucks this season are 15-15 with Antetokounmpo, and 8-15 without him. They sit at 12th in the East, and will likely peak at the play-in; he is still on the bench.
The NBA has yet to see one of its handful of contemporary European superstars make a trade request. Perhaps this has something to do with the club-based development model in European basketball, which embeds players in a workplace in their formative years, or at least that’s what former player Bostjan Nachbar recently said to Ric Bucher on a podcast. Perhaps it's just a personality trait specific to Antetokounmpo, where he finds an explicit trade request distasteful or villainous. Whatever the case, he couldn't stomach the one sentence that would have allowed both parties to move on.
What he did, however, after a drawn-out saga, full of uncertainty and narrative sweeteners, was announce a partnership with a hideous prediction market—precisely the sort of venture that could have directly profited from his prolonged waffling. After all that work to climb onto some dubious moral high ground, here was the big announcement: corny, a little pathetic, and surely lucrative. Maybe Giannis Antetokounmpo has fully assimilated into American culture after all.
