After a furious week of rumors and proposals, the Milwaukee Bucks are not expecting to trade Giannis Antetokounmpo, the most accomplished player in franchise history, by Thursday’s 3 p.m. ET NBA trade deadline, league sources confirmed to The Athletic.
Even though the two-time league MVP will stay on the roster for the remainder of this season, deals are expected to be explored again this offseason, when teams have far greater roster flexibility and potentially better options to entice the Bucks to trade away their superstar forward.
Antetokounmpo, 31, is averaging 28 points, 10 rebounds and 5.6 assists in 30 games this season. On Jan. 23, he suffered a right calf strain in a loss to the Denver Nuggets. After the game, he told reporters he believed the injury — a soleus strain, the same injury he suffered earlier this season — would come with a suggested absence of 4-6 weeks.
While the Bucks, who have dropped down to 12th in the Eastern Conference standings with a 20-29 record, could be compelled to ask Antetokounmpo to sit out the remainder of the season to keep him healthy, league sources tell The Athletic that Antetokounmpo still plans on playing once he has fully recovered from his right calf strain to help the Bucks make a push for the postseason.
Antetokounmpo’s future in Milwaukee has been discussed often over the last eight seasons, but he and the franchise have always found a path forward together. Only over the last week did general manager Jon Horst start considering trade offers for Antetokounmpo for the first time, as reported by The Athletic’s Sam Amick. That was largely driven by Antetokounmpo’s desire to be in a competitive situation and the Bucks’ struggles this season.
In 2021, the Bucks went on an incredible postseason run and captured the franchise’s second championship, their first since 1971, with Antetokounmpo making a comeback much earlier than expected from a frightening left knee injury and capturing the NBA Finals MVP trophy with a 50-point closeout game. The pursuit of a second championship after that breakthrough, however, has not gone the way Antetokounmpo and the Bucks have wanted.
The closest the franchise made it back to the mountaintop was a second-round exit the following year. Amid a myriad of injuries to their star players, the Bucks crashed out in the first round the following three seasons, and they now look poised to miss the postseason entirely this season. Those previous struggles, paired with this season’s lackluster play, led Antetokounmpo and the Bucks to get serious about potentially moving on from each other.
The possibility agonized Antetokounmpo, as he told The Athletic in an exclusive interview Tuesday evening.
“We always go back to the Bucks, the Bucks, the Bucks, and if I’m going to stay here, if I’m not gonna stay here,” Antetokounmpo said. “Let’s put the Bucks on the side for one second. Let’s talk about the city itself, the memories that I’ve created here. When you open my kids’ passports, it says Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I had four kids in the span of the last five years in this city. My dad is buried in this city. I’ve built a house for my mom 10 seconds away from my house. Literally, to walk to my mom’s front door, it takes me four seconds … right next door.
“On what planet, on what Earth, would somebody want to leave this?”
But, as he has said several times, he needs the opportunity to compete. This season, the Bucks are not doing that. They sit three games behind the Chicago Bulls for the final Play-In Tournament spot. Those struggles brought Antetokounmpo’s future with the team to the forefront of discussion around the NBA.
During training camp, an ESPN report brought trade discussions between the Bucks and New York Knicks to light. While Bucks head coach Doc Rivers refuted that report, Antetokounmpo admitted that the offseason is a time in which temptation can be very real for him.
Speculation about Antetokounmpo’s future in Milwaukee continued once the Bucks started to traverse this disappointing season. In early December, ESPN reported that Antetokounmpo’s agent had reached out to the Bucks about what would be best for the him moving forward. Then last week, Horst took the unprecedented step of actually considering trade offers for Antetokounmpo.
“I want to be here, but I want to be here to win, not fighting for my life to make the playoffs,” Antetokounmpo told The Athletic on Tuesday. “I’m not used to inconsistent basketball. I’ve played so many years of consistent basketball, I am not used to it anymore.”
After an 8-5 start to the season, the Bucks have struggled for the last three months, and Antetokounmpo has been unable to consistently stay on the court as he’s attempted to play through injuries. Three separate injuries forced Antetokounmpo to miss 19 of the Bucks’ 49 games this season and play another 13 games on a minutes limit in December and January.
While playing on that minutes limit, Antetokounmpo regularly critiqued the game plan of his head coach. Leading into this season, Rivers and the organization touted a vision of Antetokounmpo as a point forward, using his playmaking to get the most out of a roster built around him. That was how the Bucks played early in the season, when they got off to a fast start.
But after Antetokounmpo returned from missing eight straight December games with a right calf strain, Rivers used Antetokounmpo more as a screen-setter and roller in two-man actions, a decision that bothered the Bucks’ best player.
“I think the more I play-make, the more the ball is in my hands — and not selfishly, I’m not trying to say that when I have the ball, I’m trying to score, that’s not what I’m saying — what I’m saying is that the gravity that I’m able to create with having the ball in my hands, it kind of allows my teammates to be open and put them in spots to also be successful,” Antetokounmpo said following the Bucks’ win over the Charlotte Hornets on Jan. 2. “You can go and check, like, through my career, any game I’ve had over, like, seven or eight assists; we’ve probably won like 60 or 70 percent of those games. So, I know the more I have it in the positions that I can play-make, I can help them be in the right spots and keep on trusting.”
Critiques of the team’s tactics continued over the next month as Antetokounmpo continued to play a lesser role in the Bucks’ offensive attack. Following Milwaukee’s loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder, the 10-time All-Star told reporters that he believed his teammates were “selfish” and the team lacked chemistry as Antetokounmpo took fewer shots than normal over a two-week stretch that featured multiple blowout losses.
Sam Amick contributing reporting.
