by Mirin Fader
“The level of basketball was terrible,” Dávid says. “I’d never seen a lower-level Greece league.”
Dávid wasn’t sure what to make of Giannis. On one play, Giannis whirled by on the fast break, finishing strong at the basket. Dávid noticed that he had incredible length but also that he was uncoordinated. He wasn’t necessarily a shooter, though he did take some long-distance shots. Giannis made smart plays; he could dribble, snatch rebounds out of the air. But he wouldn’t even attempt to go into the post because he was too frail. He’d get bumped and fall to the floor but always got right back up. Always sprinted back. He never seemed discouraged.
Despite the unevenness, Dávid was impressed. He returned to his hotel, writing in his notebook that night, “Raw talent. Length, athleticism, mobile for his size. Skinny but runs up and down well. Ball skills advanced for his age. Never tried to take over. Unselfish. This guy could be a Magic Johnson. Not sure why he is playing here. Why isn’t he around better talent?”
A nobody in a nobody division in a nobody gym is the next Magic Johnson? Come on! Even Dávid knew the comparison seemed far-fetched. It was far-fetched. But the way Giannis dribbled the ball, towering over his opponents? “He was far away from being a legend,” Dávid says, “but I thought this guy could become something.”
Dávid was excited, especially since he hadn’t seen other scouts at the game. “I was one of the first who tried to find out who he was,” he says. Back then, in late winter 2012, Giannis wasn’t on any American team’s board for the upcoming June 2013 draft. It was as if Dávid had discovered a secret, and he had to protect it before anyone found out.
* * *
Thanasis had recently signed with Maroussi B.C. to play in the top Greek league. The club gave Thanasis a few pairs of free sneakers tucked into a couple of boxes. In one of the boxes was a pair of red-and-white Nike Kobe 4s. But when Thanasis brought them home to show Giannis—the pair Giannis had always coveted—Thanasis said he wasn’t going to share them as he always had done.
Instead, Thanasis gave him one of the others, a clunky, ugly pair. Giannis accepted them but still wanted the Kobes. So when Thanasis slept or left the shoes unattended, Giannis would take them to practice, feeling like he was one step closer to his NBA dream. Thanasis was angry at him for taking the shoes; he loved them too and didn’t want Giannis to scuff them up.
Charles intervened. “That’s your younger brother,” Charles said to Thanasis. “You’ve gotta share shoes with him. If he wants to wear them, he can wear them.”
But the glory they all felt, wearing these magnificient shoes, was short- lived. Financial issues wiped out the team before Thanasis could play even a single game for it. Plus Thanasis didn’t have citizenship papers, so he was ineligible to play in any event. Watching that sliver of hope dissolve was devastating. “That was the first little bit of success that we’d seen,” Alex says. “It put us at the top, then knocked us down.”
In the fall of 2012, Giannis first secured Greek agents to represent him: Georgios Dimitropoulos and Giorgos Panou. Panou, a former Greek national-team assistant coach who’d been part of the historic 2006 victory over the US, first represented Thanasis. Panou had been aware of Giannis, spotting him as a fourteen-year-old. He was impressed and asked around, “Who is this kid?”
Thanasis had eventually introduced Giannis and Panou in a downtown Athens hotel over burgers and fries. “You might be an NBA player next year,” Panou told Giannis.
“The real NBA?” Giannis said. “The NBA I see on TV?”
Like others, as Panou grew closer to the family, he noticed that Giannis wasn’t eating much and explained to him that he would need to start eating differently than his brothers and family if he were to have a future in basketball. Panou took him to a nutritionist for medical tests, and the doctor was shocked. Giannis’s liver was suffering so much because of his eating habits that the doctor thought Panou had sent him a seventy-year-old who constantly drank.
Panou continued to believe in Giannis, later steering him to agent Alex Saratsis. The group began emailing NBA and EuroLeague scouts, sending Giannis’s game footage, a compilation that ran nine minutes, forty-six seconds, writing, “I’ve got someone here. A secret. Nobody knows about him.”
The agents also sent the tape to a few American college coaches, who were not very interested. That was fine: college wasn’t really an option for Giannis since NCAA athletes aren’t compensated.
Zaragoza, a Spanish team in northeastern Spain’s Aragon region, was interested in Giannis. Willy Villar, then Zaragoza’s sporting director, essentially the team’s GM, exchanged emails with Giannis’s agents around October 2012. Then he saw Giannis’s game film. “It was very, very bad quality of video,” Villar says. But the more he watched, the more he was intrigued. There’s something different about him, Villar thought.
Maybe it was the way Giannis gobbled up the length of the floor in three dribbles and dunked. That it was so easy for him, natural for him, to cover that much space with so little effort. Villar hadn’t ever seen the extraordinary potential that Giannis had for his age, seventeen, combined with his height, six feet nine.
Villar told the agents that he wanted to come to Athens to watch Giannis work out “as soon as possible.” The agents explained to him that Giannis was undocumented, but Villar wasn’t deterred.
Villar touched down in Zografou a week later. He and Giannis did low-post work, jump shots, and dribbling. Giannis dribbled around cones with skill and ease. Villar was surprised at how someone that tall could be that agile. “It was amazing. Never in my life had I seen this kind of player,” says Villar, who is now the GM of Herbalife Gran Canaria, a club in Las Palmas, Spain.
But doubts started to creep in. Villar wondered whether this was some kind of joke; he thought Giannis might be one of those exhibition basketball players who does dribbling tricks and videos on the internet but doesn’t know how to play five-on-five basketball. Villar wondered whether he really understood basketball, doubted whether he had control of his body. Maybe he was wrong about Giannis.
He changed his mind quickly once he saw Giannis play against Panathinaikos. Giannis racked up forty-four points and twelve rebounds, and Villar was astonished. His doubts were gone. Giannis played smart. In control. “He fight with great heart,” Villar says, noticing how Giannis never ran out of energy. Villar just couldn’t understand why nobody else had signed Giannis at that point.
“The feeling for me was, How is this possible I’m feeling this about this guy and nobody in the world thinks the same as me? Nobody in the world realizes the potential of this guy?” Villar says. “I’ve never seen a player at this age with this potential. With his hands, his body.”
At the time, Dario Šarić, a Croatian player now with the Suns, was considered one of the top players in Europe. But Villar swore, after seeing Giannis against Panathinaikos, that Giannis was better than Šarić. As absurd as that sounded to Villar, he was convinced. “It is very strange to think this in this moment,” Villar says. “For sure somebody would tell me, ‘You are crazy.’”
Still, Villar tempered his expectations. As good as he thought Giannis could be, he didn’t truly know what the future held. “I didn’t know if he would become a great player. But I did know that he had great potential to be one. Believe me—two-time NBA MVP, difficult to imagine for sure.”
All Villar knew at the time was that he had to sign Giannis to Zaragoza, especially after seeing how polite Giannis was after the workout. Villar visited the Antetokounmpos’ apartment, and though Giannis was shy, not saying much, he said over and over, “Thank you very much. Thank you very much.” His gratitude shined.
Villar and Giannis’s agents went to dinner that night. “I explained to them that I want Adeto,” says Villar, referring to the name he used for Giannis back then, short for his birth name, Adetokunbo, “for the rest of my life.” It was October, and they made a handshake agreement that Giannis would sign with Zaragoza in December, on
ce he turned eighteen. But… Giannis didn’t have papers. “It was a big problem for sure,” Villar says. “First, we needed to get the player; then, we would try to find a solution.”
For now, Villar let himself enjoy the fact that he had landed the biggest steal in Europe. Giannis signed in December 2012, a deal worth $325,000 over three years, with a club option for a fourth season at another $325,000.
Giannis was both excited and nervous, telling Zivas the news. Zivas felt Giannis still had more options to consider. “There’s no need to worry,” Zivas told him. “Because you’ll surely play in the NBA.”
If an NBA team were to draft Giannis, they’d have to buy his rights from Zaragoza. But for the moment, Giannis was stunned that a team would give him an opportunity. He rushed to Kivotos Café to tell Tzikas.
“I’m so happy!” Giannis screamed. “I’m leaving! I’ll be making more than three hundred thousand! They will give me a car! They will give me a house, and I will take my family with me!” Tzikas was so happy for him he nearly cried. Giannis didn’t even have bus money that day, so the thought of $300,000-plus seemed like a fairy tale.
Later that day, Panou and Dimitropoulos told Giannis that if he did end up playing in Spain, he’d have to find a place to live by himself.
“Excuse me? What do you mean I have to go there? We will go,” Giannis said, referring to his mom.
“You’re a young guy,” his agents said. “You’ll have fun there. Why do you want to take your mother with you?”
Giannis started crying, tore up the contract. “I’m not going anywhere.”
The agents were flabbergasted. They all climbed into Panou’s Fiat. Veronica, in the back seat, was trying to soothe Giannis as he continued to cry. “Don’t cry. Don’t worry about it,” she told him. “You’re gonna help everybody. We know you want to help everybody. Don’t worry about it; just play.” But she was sad too, thinking of him leaving.
Giannis insisted he would not go without her. He said to Panou, “You think that now I’ve got money, I will forget my mother and my family? You must never forget that.”
Panou apologized and said he was joking and to not worry about it. But Giannis couldn’t help but worry. It didn’t matter if his dream was within reach. Without his family, it meant nothing.
* * *
John Hammond, Bucks general manager at the time, was sitting in his office when Jeff Weltman, assistant GM, walked in.
“Hey, there’s a young player in Greece that’s getting a lot of attention,” Weltman said. “I think it would definitely be worth the trip for us to go see him.”
Hammond can’t remember if it was Weltman or Dave Babcock, a.k.a. “Mr. Buck,” the Bucks’ longtime vice president of player personnel, who was the first to identify Giannis. Other staffers at the time remember Babcock as being the first, bringing Giannis’s game tape back to the scouting department. Nonetheless, both men were instrumental in bringing Giannis into their field of vision.
Ross Geiger, a Bucks assistant video coordinator, was in charge of breaking down draft film that year. Geiger remembers meeting with Jonathan Givony, draft guru at DraftExpress; Hammond; Weltman; and Jon Nichols, then manager of basketball analytics, at a Chipotle in Milwaukee. Givony gave them discs containing four of Giannis’s games. “Givony certainly expressed how intrigued he was when speaking on Giannis but didn’t go overboard,” Geiger says.
Givony conducted the first media interview of Giannis in June 2013. “My name is Giannis Antetokounmpo,” a baby-faced Giannis said into the camera. Looking up the entire time as Givony asked him questions, Giannis had a curious sparkle in his eyes. Dark brown and glittering, they hardly blinked. He seemed sure of each word, though his English was not great.
“What kind of basketball player are you?” Givony asked.
“I’m an all-around player,” Giannis said. “I can jump; I can shoot; I can pass the ball. I can do everything on the court.”
“What is your goal for your career?”
“I want to be an NBA player.”
“What kind of player will you be in five years from now?”
“I’ll be… I’ll be…” Giannis said, thinking, pausing. “Much stronger. I’ll be much better—in everything that I do on the court.”
Though the Bucks had some game tape of Giannis, they didn’t really have much. There weren’t any advanced stats available or any track record of other prospects coming from Greek A2. “It was uncharted territory,” says Cody Ross, former Bucks video coordinator. “He stuck out. He had this unique X factor. He was like a gazelle. That’s what really captivated us.”
But since Giannis’s opponents were nowhere near NBA level, scouting him was difficult. “I had to project, and it was nearly impossible with him,” says a former Bucks staffer now working for a different NBA team. “There were so many unknowns.”
Still, the Bucks were impressed with what they could see, even if Giannis was occasionally crashing into three defenders or unable to physically hold his own. “You could see immediately that he had a great feel for the game,” Hammond says. “He had that gift.”
It wasn’t love at first sight. It was intrigue at first sight. “We knew he was a huge risk,” says the former Bucks staffer. “It was a swing.” But the Bucks needed a swing. Hammond’s (and the Bucks’) philosophy was “We’re the Milwaukee Bucks. We’re not going to sign the next LeBron. Stars aren’t going to try to come to Milwaukee. Every once in a while, we’re just going to have to get lucky. And, at some point, we’re going to have to take a swing at the draft.”
But before Hammond could take any swings, he had to come to Greece to see the kid for himself.
* * *
Hammond arrived in Zografou on a quiet morning in March 2013. He saw a coach outside the gym on a scooter smoking a cigarette. Some windows were cracked. He entered the gym and thought Giannis looked even taller in person. Then he saw the kid’s hands. They seemed freakishly long. Ten-inch-diameter long. Those hands allowed Giannis to control the ball like a floor general, whirl downcourt for layups.
Hammond took a seat. A local coach tapped him on the shoulder: “Look up—there’s his family.” Hammond craned his neck and saw Veronica, Charles, Kostas, and Alex cheering from the top of the stands. My gosh, the whole family’s here, Hammond thought. “You could feel this amazing family connection,” Hammond says. He found Zivas, Giannis’s coach, and started asking about Giannis’s family—where they lived, what they did for work.
Hammond started to brainstorm which NBA player Giannis could morph into. He thought of Kevin Garnett. Could Giannis become that? Strength-wise, intensity-wise? He didn’t know. Truly didn’t know. “It was hard to forecast his potential,” Hammond says. He’s conscious of the ways others have framed Giannis’s story in the coming years as a fairy tale, describing Hammond as having had some kind of clairvoyant power to see that Giannis was MVP material. That wasn’t the case at all. Not even close. “I’m not going to make myself sound better or smarter than I am and make the story more than it is,” Hammond says.
Hammond wasn’t the only NBA GM in the gym. Word had spread since scout Kornél Dávid had visited, as other scouts alerted other teams. Zivas remembers twenty-eight representatives from NBA teams showing up, many of them GMs: Danny Ainge, president of basketball operations for the Boston Celtics; Daryl Morey of the Houston Rockets; Danny Ferry of the Atlanta Hawks; Sam Presti of the Oklahoma City Thunder; and Masai Ujiri of the Denver Nuggets.
Filathlitikos didn’t have room for all of them at first. The coaches brought out chairs but still didn’t have enough; they had to go buy extra chairs. “You couldn’t believe it—like, how is this possible?” says Asterios Kalivas, then an assistant coach for the Greek national team. “We have guys in the A1 Division, and nobody’s coming to see them. It was crazy.”
Giannis didn’t believe his agents at first when they told him the guys watching him were truly NBA scouts. It was almost surreal.
“For Greek standards,�
�� Zivas says, “that was something extra special.”
“It was something that I think will never happen again in Greece,” Saloustros says.
“It was very unusual,” says Kostas Kotsis, the Greek Basketball Federation general manager.
“This was the fucking NBA!” Gkikas says. “There were, like, twenty guys with clipboards. There’s a guy with fancy glasses, and after the game finishes, this guy gets out of the court into a limousine that is, like, fucking ten meters. We are looking, like, ‘What the fuck is this shit! What are we watching? It is like a movie. A movie!’” (Gkikas later found out he was a GM.)
Georgios Diamantakos, the former Panathinaikos player who was destroying Giannis on the block a few years back, was starstruck too. “It was a dream for me,” Diamantakos says. “I thought, I have to play good here, because if I block Giannis, maybe the scouts will see me also.”
Scouts came to see Giannis because he was athletic and his game fit more into American basketball than the more fundamentals-based EuroLeague. If there’s talent abroad, international NBA scouts will come to see a prospect—wherever he is. Even in a dinky Zografou gym where one backboard was missing a rim.
The scouts do their homework; they know talent when they see it. Word travels fast. “Hey, have you seen this kid?” turns into a plane ticket, even if that ticket might not lead to a draft pick. “A lot of times, it’s the boy who cried wolf,” says Bob Donewald Jr., former NBA assistant coach who has coached in Russia, Ukraine, and China and is now an assistant coach with Texas Tech.
But with Giannis, the decision makers weren’t flying to Greece to try to discover something. The scouts had already identified him as talented, even if he was still largely a no-name. The question was, How good was he?
“Giannis was a mystery,” says Fotios Katsikaris, the Greek national-team coach. “You cannot say he was a super, super talent. You cannot imagine the risk.”
Adding to the risk? Giannis wasn’t able to come to America and work out with prospective teams since he didn’t have a passport. “It’s not a common thing, drafting a guy out of nowhere. And he was a guy out of nowhere,” Dávid says. “Not having citizenship, delayed passport, all of these circumstances kept him a secret. How can you evaluate a guy that cannot leave the country?”