How many wins does Giannis have left?

The hottest prize of the trade market

Two weeks ago, Giannis left a game against the Pistons with a lower leg injury. He has played 63 percent of the Bucks’ games so far, which is a little above average for players over 30 who make $35 million or more this season. This group, which includes hardy players like Rudy Gobert, Pascal Siakam, and Nikola Jokic, also includes Damian Lillard, Kyrie Irving, and Bradley Beal. PATRICK MCDERMOTT/GETTY IMAGES

Giannis Antetokounmpo has done everything for the Bucks for more than a dozen years. He’s an MVP, a champion, and the shiniest name in the NBA trade market that launched on Monday.

The NBA’s most heated parlor game right now is whether the Heat, Spurs, Thunder, Warriors, Raptors or someone else can put together the best package of young players and picks to land Giannis. ESPN recently conjured trade ideas built around Trae Young, Karl-Anthony Towns, Jonathan Kuminga and other big names and high draft picks. There are many stories like this. Two young players who caught my eye in those conversations are some of the league’s best young big men: the Rockets’ Alperen Şengün and the Heat’s Kel’el Ware.

Are those awesome young big men really available? If so, it’s only because GMs knows how much Giannis has done for the Bucks in the past. But what matters now is how much Giannis will do for teams in the future–and how does that compare to what you’d expect from Şengün or Ware?

Let’s try to figure that out.

Pay no attention to the measly four wins this year, the season is only 27 games old and even though he has missed ten games, Giannis is on pace for 12 estimated wins this season. The bigger question, though, is how far is Giannis from an age-related decline? DUNKSANDTHREES

The chart above, from the respected DunksAndThrees, begs the question: how long can Giannis keep this up? When does that graph curve down?

It’s tempting to dig around in the stats and figure out how long NBA careers generally last.

But average players don’t tell us much about such an exceptional athlete, champion, and MVP. You get to Giannis-level sustained productivity by solving a lot of problems that trip up even other professional athletes. Giannis is not only a superstar but one who still, at age 31, has the potential to join LeBron James as a very rare superstar who avoids catastrophic injury in his early 30s. His diet, his training, his offseason regimen, his sleep, his ability to read the defense … it’s probably all better than average in a way that makes average stats inapplicable. (And, not for nothing, an average NBA career would have ended a long time ago.)

So we’re in rare air.

As a long and position-defying big, Kevin Garnett is an interesting Giannis comparison. (He’s also a generous one, in that he had one of the longest careers in history, playing an incredible 20 seasons.) That’s good news for anyone interested in employing Giannis in the future: Garnett was only 60 percent of the way through his career at Giannis’ age.

However, by 31 Garnett had already delivered 79 percent of the Win Shares he’d ever muster.

I collaborated with Mike Lynch, Executive Director of Data at Sports Reference, to gather data on how players age. Mike’s a real baller, and explained that he dug into the question by looking at every player who was ever an All-Star. He looked into it four different ways: all-time since 1947, and then again since 1974 (which lets you add the metric Value Over Replacement Player). Then he searched again from 1996 when play-by-play data came available.

In ALL of those searches, the peak age by Win Shares, minutes played, and games played, was … 25. 25! In one of the searches the peak for games played was 24. In all of those searches, the age 30, Mike wrote, “looked like a bit of a cliff, the number of players and their availability/impact diminishes quickly.”

Mike continues:

Finally, did a final search in the more recent “pace and space” era which I started with the Warriors championship in 2014-15. Here, the peak moves to age 26. Age 30 once again appears to be the start of a steep cliff.

Again, Mike was looking only at players who were ever All-Stars. You can see the cliff: