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The latest on Giannis Antetokounmpo: The man who will never ask the Milwaukee Bucks for a trade is “ready for a new home” and “has informed the Bucks for months that he believes the moment has come to part ways,” per ESPN’s Shams Charania. Several teams have reportedly made “aggressive” offers for Antetokounmpo, and Milwaukee is “starting to listen.”
Discussions with the New York Knicks last August reportedly went nowhere, but the Knicks are among Antetokounmpo’s suitors leading up to the Feb. 5 trade deadline, per SNY’s Ian Begley. So here’s a question: Can they actually get him?
What do the Bucks want?
The Bucks are looking for “blue-chip young talent and/or a surplus of draft picks” in exchange for their franchise player, and they’re willing to reassess the situation in the offseason if the offers aren’t to their liking, per ESPN. Antetokounmpo is currently sidelined with a right calf strain, and Milwaukee is 18-27, the seventh-worst record in the league. In theory, the Bucks could wait to see how the lottery shakes out — they will receive the less favorable of the New Orleans Pelicans‘ and its own picks — and try to sell Antetokounmpo on playing with whomever they can acquire on draft night, at which point they will be able to trade three first-round picks. Waiting would give prospective Antetokounmpo suitors more flexibility, too.
The Bucks don’t control their own first-round draft pick until 2031. This season, they’ve been outscored by 11.4 points per 100 possessions without Antetokounmpo on the floor in non-garbage-time minutes. This iteration of the team has no future. The point of trading him is to give the team a future.
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Can the Knicks offer them that?
In a two-team trade, no. The Knicks’ stars aren’t young, their young players aren’t blue chips and, as a result of the moves they made in the 2024 offseason — they sent five first-round picks and a pick swap to the Brooklyn Nets in the Mikal Bridges deal and included a first-round pick in the Karl-Anthony Towns deal — they can’t offer Milwaukee any future picks right now.
If New York wants to trade for Antetokounmpo before the deadline, it would almost certainly have to put together a multi-team trade, in which it sends some of its most valuable players elsewhere and the Bucks come away with the young talent and draft capital they’re looking for. That is easier said than done.
In theory, it is mechanically simple for the Knicks to acquire Antetokounmpo. They just need to match or exceed his $54.1 million salary. By himself, Towns gets them most of the way there, as he makes $53.1 million. Alternatively, they could aggregate smaller salaries: OG Anunoby is making $39.6 million this season, Bridges $24.9 million, Josh Hart $19.5 million, Mitchell Robinson $13 million.
In reality, it is a lot more complicated. Towns is an All-Star-caliber player, but his contract, which includes a $61 million player option in 2027-28, likely does not have positive value on the trade market. Bridges (trade eligible as of Feb. 1) and Anunoby are more tradable, but, assuming Jalen Brunson is off the table, it’s not clear that any combination of Knicks players could return the sort of stuff that Milwaukee wants.
One example: The Ringer’s Zach Lowe made note of a rumor about the Portland Trail Blazers facilitating an Antetokounmpo-to-NY deal. In one hypothetical trade construction, the Knicks would get Jrue Holiday, who won a title with Antetokounmpo, and the Bucks would get some of their own draft capital back from Portland. There is logic in all of that, but it falls apart when it comes to the Blazers’ side of the story — they’d be getting Towns and his enormous contract. It’s hard to imagine them relinquishing those (extremely valuable) draft assets in such a deal.
I tried to construct a fake trade involving those three teams without including Towns, and I’m not sure any of the front offices would be happy with the end result, which landed Antetokounmpo and Holiday in New York but sent both Bridges and Anunoby to Portland and Hart (plus Jerami Grant, Guerschon Yabusele and, of course, draft capital) to Milwaukee.
What if the Knicks wait until the offseason?
On draft night, New York will have more to offer, as it could offer its 2026 first-round pick and 2033 first-round pick to Milwaukee. The 2033 pick has real value; at that point, Brunson will be almost 37 and Antetokounmpo will be less than six months from his 39th birthday. This alone makes a potential Antetokounmpo-Knicks trade much simpler in the offseason … as long they don’t mind being hard-capped at the second apron again next year. (This is an automatic consequence of aggregating salaries in a trade.)
The Cleveland Cavaliers are the only second-apron team in the NBA right now. Most teams have little interest in joining them, but, after an Antetokounmpo trade, the Knicks could be the exception, especially if they sacrifice depth in the deal. They’d be as all-in as a team can possibly be, and they’d want to avoid, say, losing Robinson for nothing in free agency.
Two more issues with waiting for the offseason: Other potential suitors (including the Miami Heat) will also be able to include more draft capital in their offers, and the Bucks might have already traded him elsewhere by then.
It is no secret that, at least for some time last summer, Antetokounmpo had interest in playing in New York. If he makes that preference clear, and if the Knicks are willing to put just about everything that they can on the table, maybe there’s a deal to be done. They’re not particularly equipped to win a bidding war now, though, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll have a better shot at landing him in a few months.