Has Giannis played his last game as a Buck?
Reading the signals
Last week, someone very well placed in the business told me something alarming about Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Giannis is generally seen as a good guy, a thoughtful guy, one of the truly nice and kind people in the NBA sphere. He has had one team and one agent since he was drafted as a teenager in 2013.
So it was alarming to hear a story of real drama, that Giannis was close to firing his longtime agent Alex Saratsis over his failure to get Giannis traded from the Bucks.
This is a very tricky topic, for a number of reasons. One of them is that both the Bucks and Giannis have been keeping up appearances. Even after he left Friday’s game with an injury he expects to keep him out for 4-6 weeks, Giannis talked to the media about making the playoffs with the Bucks this year. (That was a few hours after Shams Charania reported that “the writing is on the wall” for Giannis and the Bucks.)
Also, a client like Giannis is worth a ton of money to an agent, and so there are always sources suggesting a star and his agent are at odds with each other—the hubbub might create an opening for someone else to move in.
And in this case, Rich Paul of Klutch Sports not only has a tendency to talk about Giannis, but also–multiple sources agree–has been talking to Giannis’s brother Thanasis as of late. Rich, it seems clear, would like to represent Giannis, and (despite what’s happening with Anthony Davis in Dallas) is said to have been making the case that he’s the guy who can get a star player where he wants to go.
Two excellent NBA sources suggest that this kind of agent subterfuge is a constant undertone of NBA life, and it’s not worth worrying about. Two others believe there’s a very real chance that Giannis will soon have a new agent.
The Players Association confirms on Monday: Alex Saratsis is Giannis’ agent. Teams who are trying to trade for Giannis continue to call Saratsis.
Of note: the rules for swapping agents changed last year. If a player sends an agent a termination letter, they used to have a 15-day waiting period before a new agent could take over. But now that is only seven days, meaning that it’s still possible, under the rules, that Giannis could have a new agent by the February 5 trade deadline. As that’s next Thursday, Giannis still has a couple of days to make a decision if he wants a new agent.
The subtext of all this, though, is about getting out of Milwaukee. And that’s where everyone I spoke to agrees: whether it ends next week, or in the summer, the Bucks and their star know it’ll end soon. The reason that might sound surprising is because, like with Damian Lillard in Portland, neither party wants to look like the bad guy in public. And so everyone pretends the marriage is fine, when in reality divorce is assured.
And is maybe overdue. In the summer of 2023, David Thorpe wrote on TrueHoop:
I believe the more seasons that your team is interesting, the better things are for the franchise. An elite, max-contract talent on a mediocre team is far from interesting. We only need to look at Dame in Portland for a recent example. Today, oddsmakers see the Blazers finishing in the bottom eight. Would the organization have been better off today had they moved Dame two years ago, before his huge extension? I think so. Does Dame have the same value today? Nope. Dame’s two lame-duck seasons will cost Portland several extra years of rebuilding. It’s the Bucks’ cautionary tale.
Lesson, not learned.
If the Bucks had traded Giannis in the summer of 2023, they would have gotten the most unbelievable haul in return, and would already be two-and-a-half years into their rebuild right now. It might be fun in Milwaukee! Instead, they traded away all the good players around Giannis—Jrue Holiday, Khris Middleton, Brook Lopez—for experiments that didn’t work. The team hasn’t won a single playoff series in the interim.
In the summer of 2023, 28-year-old Giannis had a reputation for stellar health and durability and made a pretty darn tradable $46 million. 31-year-old Giannis makes $54 million and has worrisome recurring health issues. The Bucks won’t get as much in return, and Giannis won’t have as many good teams ready to blow everything up to get him.
It’s easy to write that off as hindsight being 20/20. Who knew, then, what would happen? Maybe no one. But on the other hand, the Blazers did something in 2023 that looks prescient now: under immense pressure to trade Lillard to the Heat, they instead traded him for a package that controls the Bucks’ unprotected first-round picks from 2028-2030. It was a bet on exactly this.
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I feel like Rich Paul, especially with that new podcast thing, is a year or 2, at most, from getting banned from the NBA. No, I don't know ANYTHING except what I read (which is too much and not enough), but you ever hear anything good about the dude. And once LeBron retires...
Get involved with Rich Paul and there goes your squeaky clean image, Giannis. If he somehow goes to the Knicks, we'll know it was all fixed.