There will be trade offers. There will be armchair trade proposals all over social media. There will be endless speculation from talking heads who, for the past year, have been openly attempting to speak into existence one of the NBA‘s most magnetic young superstars leaving an unglamorous market for…take your pick of the Golden State Warriors, Los Angeles Lakers, Miami Heat or some other marquee organization.
Ten minutes after his season ended on Tuesday evening, Antetokounmpo sat down for his final virtual media availability and said something Bucks fans should love to hear but that will be less welcome to fans of 29 other teams hoping he may choose them in a year: “Hopefully, we can build a culture in Milwaukee that for many years we can come out and compete every single year for a championship.”
He then told Chris Haynes of Yahoo Sports that a trade request is “not happening.”
For the second year in a row, the Bucks fell disappointingly short of their championship aspirations despite finishing with the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference. This time, after a five-game loss to the Miami Heat in the second round, the stakes were higher.
The soon-to-be two-time reigning MVP will be a free agent after the 2020-21 season, and unless he signs the extension the Bucks are sure to offer him the minute they’re allowed to do so, speculation about his future, which is already rampant, will kick into overdrive.
No one knows if Antetokounmpo will sign the five-year, $254 million extension the Bucks can give him. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the uncertain status of next season, no one even knows when free agency will begin. But one thing is certain: Even if he turns down the new deal and decides to keep his options open, the Bucks shouldn’t outsmart themselves by trading him to get out in front of the possibility that he leaves.
Their only option is to go all-in on one last run.
Aaron Gash/Associated Press
If they fall short again and he leaves after next season, it won’t be the first time a small-market team lost a generational talent after failing to deliver a championship. But it would be a disservice to themselves and their fans not to take that final shot at a title.
As superstar movement and the formation of superteams have become the norm over the past decade, dating back to LeBron James’ 2010 “Decision,” the timeline of “pre-agency” has crept further and further out from the day a player actually hits the open market. In the past two years, Anthony Davis and Kawhi Leonard forced trades from the teams that gave them their NBA starts, with Davis’ initial trade request out of New Orleans coming a full 18 months ahead of his ability to become a free agent.
Once Antetokoumpo’s future is resolved, the Free-Agency Media Industrial Complex will move on and do the exact same thing to Donovan Mitchell—and then Trae Young and, eventually, Zion Williamson. That’s just how it works.
But unless Antetokounmpo outright asks to be traded—and his Tuesday night comments would indicate that isn’t the route he’ll take—the Bucks can’t entertain the notion even if he doesn’t commit right away to that supermax extension.
The last two players who were this dominant coming up on free agency were in similar situations. James left the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2010 to team up with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh on the Heat; Kevin Durant left the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2016 to join what was already a juggernaut in Golden State.
Each of their teams was fully aware a year or more in advance that losing them was a real possibility. If they wanted to, they could have gotten out in front and set themselves up for the future with a haul of young players and draft picks.
But you can’t trade LeBron James or Kevin Durant, and you can’t trade Giannis Antetokounmpo.
What could you possibly get back that comes close to fair value for arguably the best player in the league when he’s going into his age-26 season? No young prospect Milwaukee could get has a chance to become as good as him unless Williamson or Luka Doncic is somehow on the table.
The Warriors, one of the teams with long-rumored interest in Antetokounmpo, can offer Andrew Wiggins’ enormous contract and the No. 2 overall pick in what is widely regarded as the weakest draft in two decades. What’s that going to do for the Bucks?
The Cavs made moves around James in 2009-10, adding Antawn Jamison at the trade deadline. The Thunder fired head coach Scott Brooks and replaced him with Billy Donovan going into the 2015-16 season, a move Durant supported, and retooled around him and Russell Westbrook. That Thunder team led the Warriors 3-1 in the Western Conference Finals and came within a Klay Thompson scoring outburst of making the Finals.
If they had won that series, maybe Durant would have stayed. They didn’t, and he left. But if Thunder general manager Sam Presti knew exactly how it would shake out, there’s no way he wouldn’t do it again.
What’s clear after a shocking second-round elimination is that this Bucks team, as presently constructed, isn’t good enough to win a title despite its regular-season record. General manager Jon Horst has to do something more to prove he can build a championship team around Antetokounmpo.
Maybe that means a coaching change. Mike Budenholzer won Coach of the Year last season and helmed the best defense in the league this year. But it was obvious from some of Antetokounmpo’s postgame comments during the Heat series that he was annoyed with Budenholzer’s inflexible rotations and refusal to play him and Khris Middleton more than their regular-season allotment of minutes.
If Antetokounmpo signals to the front office that he still believes in Budenholzer, he should stay. But if they think a new coach will give them a better chance to keep him, that’s a change they have to make.
Maybe it means some small tweaks to the roster, replacing Wesley Matthews and Kyle Korver with some younger, more mobile wings or trading Eric Bledsoe or George Hill for an upgrade at point guard. Antetokounmpo and Middleton are a terrific one-two combo, but the supporting cast needs to be better.
Or maybe they take a home-run swing and trade for Chris Paul, who is very available as the Thunder look to rebuild, a move they telegraphed with their surprising Tuesday night decision not to bring back Donovan as head coach.
Paul is still owed a lot of money ($85.6 million over the next two seasons, including a $44.2 million player option for 2021-22), but he had an All-NBA-caliber season this year and led the Thunder to the playoffs, where they took the Houston Rockets to seven games in the first round.
It would be hard to make the salaries match, and they’d probably have to part with starting center Brook Lopez, but that’s the kind of move that would materially increase their short-term ceiling and show their star they’re serious.
Antetokounmpo’s comments Tuesday night don’t guarantee he’ll ultimately choose to sign long-term. There’s a longlineofstarswhosaidsimilarthingsbeforeleaving. But they at least signal he’s willing to give the Bucks this final shot to show him why he should.
It’s on them not to mess it up.
Sean Highkin covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. He is a graduate of the University of Oregon and lives in Portland. His work has been honored by the Pro Basketball Writers’ Association. Follow him onTwitter, Instagram and in the B/R App.
PARIS (AP) — French judicial authorities are investigating the disappearance of two Paralympic athletes from Congo who recently competed in the Paris Games, the prosecutor’s office in the Paris suburb of Bobigny confirmed on Thursday.
Prosecutors opened the investigation on Sept. 7, after members of the athletes’ delegation warned authorities of their disappearance two days before.
Le Parisien newspaper reported that shot putter Mireille Nganga and Emmanuel Grace Mouambako, a visually impaired sprinter who was accompanied by a guide, went missing on Sept. 5, along with a third person.
The athletes’ suitcases were also gone but their passports remained with the Congolese delegation, according to an official with knowledge of the investigation, who asked to remain anonymous as they were not allowed to speak publicly about the case.
The Paralympic Committee of the Democratic Republic of Congo did not respond to requests for information from The Associated Press.
Nganga — who recorded no mark in the seated javelin and shot put competitions — and Mouambako were Congo’s flag bearers at the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games, organizers said.
An investigator gave the World Anti-Doping Agency a pass on its handling of the inflammatory case involving Chinese swimmers, but not without hammering away at the “curious” nature of WADA’s “silence” after examining Chinese actions that did not follow rules designed to safeguard global sports.
WADA on Thursday released the full decision from Eric Cottier, the Swiss investigator it appointed to analyze its handling of the case involving the 23 Chinese swimmers who remained eligible despite testing positive for performance enhancers in 2021.
In echoing wording from an interim report issued earlier this summer, Cottier said it was “reasonable” that WADA chose not to appeal the Chinese anti-doping agency’s explanation that the positives came from contamination.
“Taking into consideration the particularities of the case, (WADA) appears … to have acted in accordance with the rules it has itself laid out for anti-doping organizations,” Cottier wrote.
But peppered throughout his granular, 56-page analysis of the case was evidence and reminders of how WADA disregarded some of China’s violations of anti-doping protocols. Cottier concluded this happened more for the sake of expediency than to show favoritism toward the Chinese.
“In retrospect at least, the Agency’s silence is curious, in the face of a procedure that does not respect the fundamental rules, and its lack of reaction is surprising,” Cottier wrote of WADA’s lack of fealty to the world anti-doping code.
Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and one of WADA’s fiercest critics, latched onto this dynamic, saying Cottier’s information “clearly shows that China did not follow the rules, and that WADA management did nothing about it.”
One of the chief complaints over the handling of this case was that neither WADA nor the Chinese gave any public notice upon learning of the positive tests for the banned heart medication Temozolomide, known as TMZ.
The athletes also were largely kept in the dark and the burden to prove their innocence was taken up by Chinese authorities, not the athletes themselves, which runs counter to what the rulebook demands.
Despite the criticisms, WADA generally welcomed the report.
“Above all, (Cottier) reiterated that WADA showed no bias towards China and that its decision not to appeal the cases was reasonable based on the evidence,” WADA director general Olivier Niggli said. “There are however certainly lessons to be learned by WADA and others from this situation.”
Tygart said “this report validates our concerns and only raises new questions that must be answered.”
Cottier expanded on doubts WADA’s own chief scientist, Olivier Rabin, had expressed over the Chinese contamination theory — snippets of which were introduced in the interim report. Rabin was wary of the idea that “a few micrograms” of TMZ found in the kitchen at the hotel where the swimmers stayed could be enough to cause the group contamination.
“Since he was not in a position to exclude the scenario of contamination with solid evidence, he saw no other solution than to accept it, even if he continued to have doubts about the reality of contamination as described by the Chinese authorities,” Cottier wrote.
Though recommendations for changes had been expected in the report, Cottier made none, instead referring to several comments he’d made earlier in the report.
Key among them were his misgivings that a case this big was largely handled in private — a breach of custom, if not the rules themselves — both while China was investigating and after the file had been forwarded to WADA. Not until the New York Times and German broadcaster ARD reported on the positives were any details revealed.
“At the very least, the extraordinary nature of the case (23 swimmers, including top-class athletes, 28 positive tests out of 60 for a banned substance of therapeutic origin, etc.), could have led to coordinated and concerted reflection within the Agency, culminating in a formal and clearly expressed decision to take no action,” the report said.
WADA’s executive committee established a working group to address two more of Cottier’s criticisms — the first involving what he said was essentially WADA’s sloppy recordkeeping and lack of formal protocol, especially in cases this complex; and the second a need to better flesh out rules for complex cases involving group contamination.
The French league’s legal commission has ordered Paris Saint-Germain to pay Kylian Mbappé the 55 million euros ($61 million) in unpaid wages that he claims he’s entitled to, the league said Thursday.
The league confirmed the decision to The Associated Press without more details, a day after the France superstar rejected a mediation offer by the commission in his dispute with his former club.
