Giannis Antetokounmpo will miss the 2026 NBA All-Star game. He hurt his calf Friday night in a loss to the Denver Nuggets. Calf injuries are serious business, linked in a few prominent cases with catastrophic Achilles tendon ruptures, and this is Antetokounmpo's second already this season. He's going to be out for a while. This will be the second consecutive All-Star game he's had to miss due to injury, and the third in four tries, although in 2023 he made a brief ceremonial appearance, scoring one gimme bucket in 20 seconds of action.
Antetokounmpo will also fall short of All-NBA honors. The threshold for qualification is 65 games, and Giannis, who has already missed 14 games this campaign, would need perfect health and attendance after the break in order to make it to 58 games, which would already be the fewest he's ever played in his 13 NBA seasons. There are no automatic contractual consequences triggered by Antetokounmpo failing to make All-NBA, but it's significant anyway: He's made one of the teams every year since 2016, and has made the first team for seven consecutive seasons. As pointed out by Dan Feldman on the Dunc'd On podcast, that's the longest active streak and the seventh longest in history. And, because Antetokounmpo was producing perhaps the best individual season of his career, he was something like a lock to extend it.
Antetokounmpo will also miss the playoffs, also for the first time since 2016. It's not clear that he's quite grasped this reality. He's hoping to return by mid-March, by which time the Bucks will be moldering in a ditch. "I'm going to work my butt off to come back," he said Friday night. "That will probably be the end of February, beginning of March. Hopefully the team will be in a place that we can at least make the play-in or make the playoffs and just take it day by day, try to get better."
The Bucks are presently 18–26, 2.5 games out of the play-in; Cleaning The Glass, which filters garbage time from its efficiency metrics, says that the Bucks have in fact outperformed their expected record, and that the team directly behind them in the standings, the Charlotte Hornets, should today have 23 wins. Milwaukee's record this season sans Antetokounmpo is a miserable 3–11, and the Bucks are a horrifying 16 points per 100 possessions worse, by net rating, with Antetokounmpo off the floor. Now the team is looking at more than a month of Giannislessness, six weeks of his many responsibilities being distributed among A.J. Green, Bobby Portis, Ryan Rollins, Myles Turner, and—God help us all—Kyle Kuzma. The Bucks aren't a solid system stuffed with good players, one of whom happens to be an all-timer; they are The Giannis Antetokounmpo Show, with rummaged spare parts, odd single-purpose tools, and a perimeter of accumulated flotsam, damning evidence of diminishing returns from years of mostly ill-begotten win-now transactions.
They can break the cycle, but it would be painful and humiliating, it would involve pulling the plug on this campaign, and it would require Antetokounmpo's consent. The 2026 trade deadline arrives on Feb. 5. You can easily imagine a panicked Milwaukee front office pursuing another hideous win-now trade, so long as the Bucks are within sniffing range of the play-in, and so long as Giannis is determined to spend the final third of this season scrambling for relevance. Last week the Bucks were being linked to Zach LaVine and Ja Morant, the kinds of players a team pursues when they cannot afford to do more than appear committed to winning. If the Bucks simply do not win between now and Feb. 5, they will hit the deadline at 18–34, a .346 win percentage; with a little help from the Hornets and the Utah Jazz, the Bucks could already be closer to a top-four pick than a playoff berth.
This is important—and I hate to ask you to engage your GM brain on a snowy football Sunday—because the Bucks are in a tense little dance with the Atlanta Hawks over positioning in the next NBA draft. The Bucks will receive the less favorable of either their own first-round draft pick or that of the horrendous New Orleans Pelicans; the other of those two picks will go to Atlanta. By sucking, the Bucks would help to ensure that whichever pick they land will be a good one. It will be painful in the extreme for Bucks fans if the Hawks take from this exchange a Pelicans pick at the very top of a very promising draft, while also finishing several spots ahead of the Bucks in the standings, and while the Bucks finish 11th in their conference, miss the play-in by a couple of games, and find themselves picking, say, 13th. This would be even more painful in the spring of 2027, when the Bucks control precisely zero draft picks. This moment in Antetokounmpo's otherwise brilliant career, when the team is lousy and resource-poor and Giannis is banged-up enough that even he cannot haul the Bucks any higher than sub-mediocrity, might conceivably be the team's last chance to have both him in his prime and a high draft pick at the same time.
Tanking sucks, of course, but this isn't really that. The Bucks are crud, and Giannis is fairly shredded, and the NBA put this crossroads where it is. The Bucks have to choose a path, without any real guarantees either way. They do have the benefit of painful experience: Grasping for immediate dividends is how they got where they are today. Now might be the time to try anything else. Or! Or, hell, Giannis could finally demand a trade. Either way, winning now is no longer on the table.
