A song and dance that has gone on for years finally seems to be reaching a tipping point as Shams Charania of ESPN reported that Giannis Antetokounmpo is “ready for a new home” either ahead of the trade deadline or in the offseason, and that the Bucks are finally “starting to listen”.
Giannis and the Bucks can spin this however they want to save face, but for all intents and purposes, this is a trade request, and the Bucks will now actively shop him. As he’s sidelined with a calf injury, there’s a very good chance that the greatest Buck of all time has played his last game for the only NBA franchise he has ever called home.
Now, I wouldn’t expect the Nuggets to get involved in the Giannis sweepstakes, but this trade is going to have ripple effects around the entire league, and if he goes to the Western Conference, it could certainly shift the balance of power and make Denver’s path to a title significantly harder to traverse.
Beyond that, this whole saga has been a great reminder for Nuggets fans to take a look at their own superstar, Nikola Jokic, who has had a pretty similar NBA career to Giannis but has handled himself in a very different way.
Nuggets blessed with selfless superstar in Jokic
Giannis led Milwaukee to a title in 2021, but since then, it has been all downhill for the Bucks. As the team got older and more expensive, they started to lose key players, and they got desperate to keep Giannis happy at all costs.
In the process, they gutted their roster and ran out of assets, leaving a hopeless mess of a team around Antetokounmpo that makes no sense and has no chance of competing. Giannis, for his part, seems loyal, and perhaps if things were better, he’d be happy staying, but that ship has sailed.
It’s unfair to blame Giannis, but he clearly applied pressure to the organization, has required favors like signing his brothers to the team, has been lukewarm about signing an extension, and has put out wishy-washy comments through the media that only serve to cause distractions and create speculation and rumors.
The situation has become completely toxic, and a trade became a sort of sad inevitability for both sides. Litigating how we got here is a fool’s errand at this point, but there’s a good lesson in here about the way everything went down compared to what has played out in Denver.
Jokic has never complained, never opined on roster moves, or anything else organizationally. All he’s done is show up, done his job, kept quiet, and trusted the front office and coaching staff. There were some sketchy moments after the championship run in 2023, and Jokic would’ve had every right to make things uncomfortable.
But instead, he trusted the franchise, sat back, gave his all on the court, and waited for things to work themselves out. Now, the roster is more stacked than ever around the Joker, and the team is set up to contend for years to come. He’s likely to sign another supermax extension this offseason and should happily play out the rest of his career in Denver. Nuggets fans should be thanking their lucky stars.