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How long has the NBA been waiting for the Giannis Antetokounmpo sweepstakes? Certainly longer than last spring, when Damian Lillard’s torn Achilles kicked speculation into overdrive. There was real fear for his future in 2023, when the Bucks lost in the first round as a No. 1 seed. They traded for Lillard and earned an extension. The same story played out in 2020, with their early playoff loss even coming against the same opponent, the Miami Heat. The Jrue Holiday trade delayed things. If Bucks fans are to believed, you could trace speculation all the way back to 2017. The moment a small market gets an All-Star, the big city bullies start scheming ways to steal him away.
Signs are pointing to the Giannis trade sweepstakes finally coming — this season and/or this summer — and yet interest seems relatively tepid. The San Antonio Spurs could really pair Victor Wembanyama with Giannis Antetokounmpo for perhaps the greatest big man duo in NBA history. They won’t give up Stephon Castle or Dylan Harper to do it, according to Jake Fischer. That same report indicated that the Hawks won’t offer the 2026 first-round pick they acquired from New Orleans during Draft Day in June — whichever pick between the Pelicans and Bucks winds up being higher. There was even a rumor from a Chicago anchor that the Antetokounmpo camp reached out to the Bulls only to find that they weren’t interested, though that one has received a bit of pushback.
It’s a somewhat startling turn of events. This isn’t Ja Morant or LaMelo Ball, players who come with significant question marks without lengthy track records of success. This is Giannis Antetokounmpo, a two-time MVP, the best player in the world on some nights and no worse than fourth or fifth on his worst, and most of the fanbases of teams that might like to acquire him are preaching caution. Yes, of course everybody wants him. They just want to get him at the right price, while holding onto their best asset or two. To an extent, that’s how negotiations always work. But again, this is Giannis. Teams should be falling all over themselves to get someone this good. Someone ultimately will pay a hefty price to secure his services. But to this point, there’s no indication that it’s going to be, say, the price that the Clippers paid for Paul George, or that the Suns paid for Kevin Durant.
There are a lot of reasons why that seems to be the prevailing sentiment. You can probably guess at several. Antetokounmpo is 31 years old. His playing style, reliant on his remarkable athletic gifts, doesn’t figure to age well, and his limitations as a shooter mean that he can fit onto a smaller pool of existing rosters than most players of his caliber. Injuries have nagged. He’s missed an average of almost 15 games per year over the past four seasons, and his latest calf strain suggests he’ll top that figure this season. Nobody knows which teams he would or would not be willing to sign an extension with, excluding, in all likelihood, his reported offseason preference of the New York Knicks. It’s pretty standard stuff. But George had his share of injuries when he was dealt. So did Durant, and he was 34 when the Suns chased him. This stuff didn’t used to matter at the level of star we’re talking about here.
How one team is shifting the market
It does now, and again, you can point to a number of possible reasons for that. The aprons are a significant one. But really, it boils down to one team, the defending champions currently laying waste to the entire league. The Oklahoma City Thunder have fundamentally broken the trade market, at least for pricey, high-risk stars like Antetokounmpo.
The Clippers are proof of that. They’re what happens when you get one of these trades wrong. The Spurs don’t want to send Harper to Milwaukee only to watch him grow into the next Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. The Hawks don’t want to give up a pick that could very easily land at No. 1 on lottery night. And nobody wants to sit through the agony of year after year after year of surrendering draft assets to a team that’s far better than you. The recent track record of this sort of trade strongly favors the team giving away the superstar, not the one acquiring him. That suggests that the star trade market — far more favorable to buyers for most of NBA history — has shifted toward sellers over the previous decade or so. The Durant trade to Phoenix supports that notion, and now, the league seems to be course-correcting.
But there was one other condition that convinced the Clippers and Suns to make those trades, and it’s a condition that doesn’t exist for any prospective Antetokounmpo seekers: a wide-open league. The Clippers traded for George when one of the reigning NBA finalists, Golden State, had just lost one superstar to injury and another to free agency, while the other, Toronto, was about to lose its best player in Kawhi Leonard to the Clippers themselves. On the day the Suns traded for Durant in February of 2023, the best team in the NBA (the 39-16 Celtics) were on only a 58-win pace. These teams could credibly tell convince themselves those moves made them the championship favorite.
And no feasible Giannis trade can do the same for anyone else because, short of unforeseen injuries, there is nothing anyone can do to build a plausible favorite over the Thunder. Oklahoma City is by no means an automatic champion. Such a thing doesn’t exist. But the price Antetokounmpo will surely extract can only be justified by a championship, and anyone’s odds of beating the Thunder, now or later, with or without him, are precariously low.
Why the Giannis trade pool could be small
How many teams are a Giannis away from competing with the Thunder over the next two or three years? It’s not an especially long list. The Knicks, obviously, but the Bucks would rather trade with almost anyone else. The Nuggets have even less to offer than New York does, and the Lakers aren’t far above either.
Giannis Antetokounmpo mock trades: What potential offers from Knicks, Lakers, Warriors could look like
Sam Quinn
Cleveland is an interesting wild card here. Last year’s success — the Cavs even beat the Thunder head-to-head! — suggests that there’s a champion in here somewhere. This year’s struggles suggest they’ve regressed. With Evan Mobley in place, Cleveland has a fairly high floor for the next 5-7 years. They have a young All-NBA player. They’ll always be good. But if they suspect their window to be great is here and now, while Donovan Mitchell is in his prime, there’s an argument to be made for swapping Mobley for Antetokounmpo, dominating a weak Eastern Conference and putting all of your chips into the present instead of banking on a future in which the conference gets better and you, as Mitchell ages and the picks you spent to get him convey to other teams, start to get worse. Of course, the calculus here isn’t that simple. Cleveland is $22 million above the second apron. The Cavaliers would have to get below it for a trade to be realistic. That means gutting their depth, one of the things that made them special last season.
Golden State has given the Thunder issues in the past. It’s also an organization with an unusually short-term focus. The Warriors tried two timelines and failed. The impetus now is to give Stephen Curry a real chance at championship No. 5. That’s why they traded for Jimmy Butler a year ago. It’s why they should put every draft pick they own — along with Jonathan Kuminga and Brandin Podziemski — on the table for Antetokounmpo now. Those picks are valuable, but they’re a mystery box. Nobody knows where they’ll land. They aren’t the sure thing that a player like Castle or Harper or even a pick in the upcoming draft like Atlanta’s represents. It’d be a good offer, but not a great one.
Most of the teams with realistic short-term ambitions against the Thunder — the Spurs, the Rockets, the Pistons, maybe the Hawks if you squint — also have realistic long-term ambitions against the Thunder. Take Houston for instance. Say the Rockets built a trade around Alperen Sengun, Fred VanVleet‘s contract and a mountain of draft picks. By building around a 31-year-old Antetokounmpo and a 37-year-old Durant, they would in effect be announcing that they think their best shot at the Thunder will come in the next few years. That’s not to say they’ll collapse afterward. They’d still have Amen Thompson, Jabari Smith and Reed Sheppard for their future.
But those three on market-rate contracts without Sengun or spare draft picks to trade probably won’t be able to stand up to the Thunder in a few years, because the Thunder didn’t have to throw a bunch of long-term assets into getting this good. They did so organically. The Rockets can do that too, and they can even preserve their assets for a moment at which the Thunder appear more vulnerable. Maybe there’s a season in which they do face catastrophic injuries. Or, more likely, one in which the aprons compromise their depth. Go all-in now and you can’t do it later. You’re already great now. How much better do you stand to get by adding a high-maintenance player in his 30s in the middle of a season to a roster he doesn’t really fit?
The Spurs, Hawks and Pistons are probably asking themselves versions of these same questions. Why is now the time? The Spurs have three potential stars that are still on rookie deals. They might never have to make another big move. They could just wait the Thunder out from a cap perspective. The aprons will come for Oklahoma City before San Antonio. The Pistons and Hawks are so new to this level of contention. Cade Cunningham hasn’t won a playoff series yet. The Hawks are just finding themselves without Trae Young, which may well be the template they choose to build on moving forward. They both excel in the areas Antetokounmpo would figure to contribute to the most. The Pistons outscore opponents by a gaudy 13.1 points per game in the paint. The Hawks score the fourth-most fast-break points in the league. Detroit has been among the NBA’s best defenses for roughly a calendar year now. The Hawks are ranked in the top 10 defensively for the first time since they drafted Young.
That isn’t to say these teams wouldn’t have any motivation to chase Antetokounmpo. There’s plenty. If the Spurs are at all worried about Wembanyama’s long-term health given the track record for players of his size, you could argue that they should strike while they have the chance. Atlanta and Detroit play in a laughable Eastern Conference. If they can take advantage of it and score relatively easy paths to the Finals, the Western Conference bloodbath might weaken the Thunder or whoever beats them enough to set up a championship.
But there’s a push and pull to all of this. Cost vs. reward. The teams the Bucks would probably like to trade with are teams that frankly don’t need to make this sort of trade. They can all feel relatively confident in their long-term prospects, so why make such a substantial bet on the short-term when there’s a behemoth like the Thunder lurking in May or June? Why not see if something, anything, creates the sort of wide-open path to a title that the Clippers and Suns felt they had rather than poking the 23-1 bear? And if nothing does weaken the Thunder? Well, you deal with that in a few years. Your assets aren’t going anywhere unless you give them to the Bucks. There are so many ways a trade of that size can go wrong — injuries, fit issues, underestimating your competition, luck — that you’re probably likelier to regret such a move than you are passing on one.
And that’s what informs trade value for someone this good. The risk of paying what the Suns did for Durant or the Clippers did for George is substantial. You do so because the potential reward outweighs it. If it didn’t for the Suns and Clippers, who fought on relatively level playing fields, then what are the odds that it does for anyone in Oklahoma City’s world? Does anyone really want to be the team that bets its best assets against the Thunder?
There will be teams that try. But the ones with the players and picks the Bucks probably want most are the ones likeliest to draw a line in the sand. The Bucks need something like Dylan Harper or Stephon Castle more than the Spurs need Giannis Antetokounmpo. The Bucks are looking for a team that needs Antetokounmpo as badly as they need a historic return for him, and most of those teams aren’t capable of providing one. That means for a trade to happen, some sort of compromise is necessary. It will be a difficult pill for the Bucks to swallow, but unless one of these asset-rich teams decides the Thunder are beatable here and now, it’s one they should probably start preparing for.