“How we’re built”

Is invincibility still Giannis’ superpower?

BY HENRY ABBOTT

Age will be Giannis’ toughest opponent. STACY REVERE/GETTY IMAGES

Bucks strength-and-conditioning coach Suki Hobson remembers when she and Giannis were new to the league in 2013. She had come from Australian Rules football; he had come from Greece—as, Hobson remembers, a “scrawny, 197-pound weakling.” 

The Bucks staff tracks workouts. Three years ago, Hobson told the team’s Zora Stephenson, she had already personally overseen perhaps 800 lifting sessions. She noted that, while he was occasionally grumpy (Hobson jokes that Khris Middleton is her favorite), Giannis somehow never had a single weak session.

It worked. In late 2015, we put together the analytics issue of ESPN the Magazine and used a photo shoot of Giannis as the pinnacle of, by many measures, “the NBA’s ideal body.” In the story, Kevin Arnovitz revealed that Giannis had grown two-and-a-half inches after joining the Bucks. Kawhi Leonard was famous for his huge hands; Giannis’ were bigger. Giannis also had a 7-3 wingspan; a core and hips that propelled him explosively in every direction; 26 new pounds mostly of lean muscle; and a biomechanical system that could handle huge landing forces.

Giannis, in other words, was as close as NBA players get to superhuman. The story ended with a particular focus on one crazy part of Giannis’s body: his Achilles. It functions as a rubber band, storing and releasing energy. It’s almost impossible to be an elite jumper with a short Achilles. The Bucks measured Giannis’s Achilles at 13.5 inches—about twice as long as a regular human’s. Troy Flanagan, the Bucks’ director of performance, told Arnovitz: “I have never seen an Achilles like his.” At that time, that seemed like a good thing.