Giannis

by Mirin Fader

  Giannis and Thanasis were granted a “special exemption” and received citizenship papers on May 9, 2013. In the process, Greek officials changed their last name from Adetokunbo to Antetokounmpo, a more traditional, Greek-sounding name. Though Charles, Veronica, Kostas, and Alex were not granted citizenship, it was a thrilling moment. Not just because that would enable Giannis to play for the national team and potentially the NBA but because the papers validated what they had felt their entire lives: they were unequivocally Greek.

  But the irony—granting him citizenship purely for athletic reasons—was not lost on some, who saw the hypocrisy in the government treating Giannis one way and other Black Greeks another. “If Giannis was an Einstein or a scientist, he would not be getting Greek nationality because there are 100,000 kids, at least, with the same problem,” Velliniatis later told OnMilwaukee. “The problem still stays for 100,000 kids trapped.”

  “Giannis was,” Velliniatis said, “the exception.”

  Nikos Papadojannis, the Greek sports journalist, later published an interview with Thanasis, stating the obvious: “You only got the Greek passport because you are good at basketball.”

  “The passport is the least,” Thanasis responded. “Why shouldn’t a little girl who is capable of painting have a right to life? Or someone who has no particular skills? How is it possible that someone who was born here, went to kindergarten, school, university, received a Greek education, is not considered Greek?”

  Giannis couldn’t say any of those things. He had to keep his head down. The Hawks were on his tail. The draft was around the corner.

  * * *

  The Hawks hid their interest in Giannis. They were worried about word spreading to other NBA teams. Aside from then Atlanta coach Mike Budenholzer, hardly anyone within the Hawks organization knew. “We didn’t want anyone to know,” Ferry says. “It was clear that he was the player that we would want.”

  The level of secrecy was unusual. “There was an intentional effort not to let anybody know within the organization how interested we were,” says Alex Lloyd, then a Hawks player-development assistant. Lloyd, now an assistant coach with the G League’s Memphis Hustle, hadn’t known about the interest in Giannis back then.

  The Hawks arranged two secret meetings with Giannis, the first in Paris, where Giannis was playing in a tournament that May. Kenny Atkinson, who used to coach in France, went to watch him. Afterward, he met Giannis in the lobby of a hotel. Taking out his laptop, he pulled up clips from a Lakers-versus-Atlanta game, peppering Giannis with questions such as “What would you do in this situation?” Giannis kept answering “pass the ball” to every question. Atkinson sensed that he liked to facilitate and was a selfless player.

  The other meeting was held near Treviso, Italy, in early June, as Giannis and the U-20 Greek national team were playing in the European championship in nearby Jesolo. Every June, NBA executives scout the best draft prospects in Europe at Eurocamp in Treviso. But Giannis wasn’t invited to Eurocamp. He was in Jesolo, near the coast. So after Eurocamp, a hoard of scouts, about fifty of them, traveled on a long narrow road to see this unknown Greek player named Giannis.

  Giannis and his teammates were facing off against the U-20 Croatian national team. Giannis impressed: he showed off a nice jump hook. He chased his defender on defense. He looked relaxed, in control, dropping crisp bounce passes. He blocked shots; he played point guard. He had turnovers too, off screen and rolls, but always sprinted back.

  While staying in Italy, Giannis also met with Villar, from Zaragoza, and the late José Luis Abós, who would have become his coach with Zaragoza, in Treviso. “We are so excited to have you,” Villar told Giannis. “You have so much potential.” They talked about him possibly playing point guard for Zaragoza.

  But as the tournament wore on, Villar realized he might lose his player. Giannis’s stock in America was rising. Villar remembers about four hundred people watching one of Giannis’s games in Jesolo, and when Giannis fouled out with eight minutes left in one game, it felt like all four hundred people walked out. “In that moment, I can’t believe it,” Villar says. “I realize Antetokounmpo will get a high spot in the draft. Everybody is starting to talk about him in that moment.”

  DraftExpress projected him to be a first-round pick. Analysts liked that he had the ball-handling skills of a point guard but called him a “poor man’s Kevin Durant.” The word mystery kept popping up:

  “[He’s] a mysterious prospect,” said the New York Times.

  “He is the true international man of mystery,” said NBADraft.net.

  He was a mystery because he wasn’t playing for Greece’s top two teams. He was a mystery because he was an international player. He was a mystery because people couldn’t pronounce his name. And he was a mystery because he had remarkable athleticism and an almost freakishly lanky body, having “absurd length, gigantic hands, and springs in his legs,” one analyst wrote. “Throw in a 7'3" wingspan, and it’s like allowing a standard-sized wing to play with a broom.”

  Giannis’s official NBA draft profile read, “Antetokounmpo’s physical profile and ball skills put his potential off the charts. But it’s still just potential. He’ll need several years of top Euro-level competition to get him ready for the rigors of the NBA.” One insider was a bit more harsh: “He is a high risk, he has no experience at a high level, lacks a specific role and his shot is not very reliable.”

  The Hawks, however, thought Giannis was a steal, telling him so in that secret meeting in the basement of a hotel near Jesolo. No one could know about the meeting between four Hawks staffers, Giannis, and one of his agents. They huddled around a table. The lighting was terrible, practically dark. One staffer present was concerned that someone could walk in and listen to the conversation, as the room looked like it might be some kind of a lower-level restaurant.

  The staffer remembers Giannis looking serious. Still warm, still smiling, but very serious. He teared up a bit, emphasizing how hard he would work if they selected him. His English wasn’t that good, but he could string sentences together. The Hawks fell in love with Giannis’s personality from that meeting. The staffer wrote in his notebook later that night, “One of the all-time best interviews. Great smile. Humble, thoughtful. Seems to love the game and his family. Comes across as genuine, young, simple, smart. Biggest takeaway is that the two most important things in his life are basketball and family. He wants to move his dad, mom, younger brothers to the States, and his dream is to live in one big house together. He wants his younger brothers to go to high school and college in the States.” That dream—to move his family into one house in America—still makes the staffer emotional to this day.

  But he wasn’t the only admirer. The Bucks, too, were hiding their interest. There was one problem, though. “We didn’t have his physical,” Hammond says.

  Prospects usually participate in the rookie combine in America and take physicals and complete individual workouts. But the Bucks didn’t have any of those luxuries, given that Saratsis, Giannis’s agent, didn’t provide much information because of the nonbinding promise known as a draft-day guarantee that Giannis and Atlanta had. (Both parties agreed that Atlanta would draft Giannis.)

  Hammond recalls that Saratsis assured him that Giannis was healthy, but how could Hammond know 100 percent without the evidence of a physical? “That scares you,” Hammond says. “Or that doesn’t scare you—it just pushes you in a little bit of an uncomfortable position.”

  It would be a gamble. A big gamble. But Hammond felt comforted by two things: (1) he was selecting at number 15, so there was less risk in the pick, and (2) Saratsis had told him that Giannis wanted his family to come with him to America. Hammond knew how important it was to have family support. He was working for the Pistons at the time of Detroit’s disastrous decision to pick Serbian player Darko Miličić at number 2 in 2003. Hammond says one of the factors in the eighteen-year-old not fulfilling his potential was that he didn’t have family support around him. />
  Giannis was the youngest player in the current draft, and he’d be living in a country he had never visited. He would need that support.

  The Bucks were on the phone with Giannis’s agents a couple of days before the draft, even the night before, according to one former Bucks staffer, trying to smooth over potential concerns.

  The Bucks were all in on drafting him, but other teams weren’t as convinced. Some felt the pick was too risky, like the Suns, picking at number 5. “They thought there was so many question marks around him,” Dávid says. “The risk was a little bit higher to pick him than the rewards.”

  Milwaukee didn’t have much to lose after years of mediocrity. Bucks owner Senator Herb Kohl long had a small-market team mindset of “Just be competitive. Just get to the playoffs.” The Bucks weren’t gunning for championships. They didn’t try to go after championship-level players either.

  Kohl had made seemingly ill-advised decisions in prior drafts and in free agency, spending exorbitant amounts of money on older, past-their-prime players who were not in any place to transform a franchise. The Bucks would do just enough to make it to the first round of the playoffs before losing, aside from a miraculous run in 2000–2001, when coach George Karl took a Bucks team led by Glenn “Big Dog” Robinson, Ray Allen, and Sam Cassell to the Eastern Conference Finals, and of course the glory days of the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then Lew Alcindor) and Oscar Robertson era, when the Bucks won their only championship in 1971. And the Bucks teams of the 1980s were formidable, winning Central Division titles through the stellar play of Sidney Moncrief, Terry Cummings, and Paul Pressey.

  But since? The Bucks stank.

  The BMO Harris Bradley Center, where the Bucks played, was freezing cold. It wasn’t heated. The cooling system was so antiquated that it relied on a refrigerant that was no longer allowed to be manufactured or sold in the United States.

  “Nobody wanted to go to Milwaukee at the time,” says Brandon Knight, Bucks guard from 2013 to 2015. “It was one of those things where it was like, ‘You’re going to Milwaukee?’ Like, ‘Aw, man, that’s terrible.’”

  Besides, Wisconsin loved its Green Bay Packers. Aaron Rodgers. The Brewers. The Bucks were an afterthought, unless you were a die-hard fan who stuck with them through the miserable 1990s, arguably one of the worst decades for a modern professional sports franchise.

  Those fans? They were always there. They were always going to be there. Tyler Herro, Miami Heat guard, born in 2000 and raised in Milwaukee, was one of them. He’d remain hopeful for the Bucks and then feel let down when they would get knocked out of the first round of the playoffs again and again. “It sucked as a Bucks fan,” Herro says. “Every year it was going to be the year, and then it wasn’t the year.”

  Something really needed to change now, because as Milwaukee headed into the 2013 draft, the future of the franchise hung in the balance. NBA deputy commissioner Adam Silver said that the team would need a new arena to replace the aging Bradley Center, which, Silver said, was too small and unable to compete with other modern NBA arenas. Kohl was fighting to keep the team in Milwaukee, as he had for decades since purchasing the team in 1985, though offers would come up to sell the team. Privately, those around him knew he didn’t want to have it be his legacy that the Bucks would leave Milwaukee. Still, nobody knew what would happen. If there was ever a time for management to take a swing, it was now.

  But Hammond didn’t know that the Hawks had secretly flown Giannis (and Thanasis) to Atlanta on June 25, two days before the draft.

  * * *

  Giannis had refused to get on the plane at first. “My whole family has to come,” he told his agents. But that wasn’t possible, since they didn’t have papers. Charles suggested he take Thanasis, and Giannis finally agreed.

  Some Hawks executives were afraid someone would see the two brothers, take a picture, post it on social media, and ruin their chances of drafting Giannis.

  One staffer took the brothers downtown so Giannis could get a physical. Giannis was shaking, nervous. He had never had a physical before. The doctor told the staff that his growth plates were wide open, delighting Atlanta even more.

  Afterward, Giannis and Thanasis were walking down Peachtree Street, staring at the buildings, smiling, laughing, playing around. This was America! They were here! Of course they forgot they were supposed to keep a low profile. Two super-tall guys speaking Greek in Atlanta? Super low profile.

  The staffer, horrified, quickly hurried them into his car, hoping no one noticed. “It was a high-stress moment,” he says. But Giannis was thrilled, especially when they took him to get a giant meal of chicken wings and Sprite.

  The Hawks didn’t conduct a formal workout but had Giannis in the gym shooting around. “It was more of welcoming him in,” Ferry says. “We were hoping it was the start of a great and wonderful relationship.”

  Ferry had Giannis and Thanasis stay at his own home, eat dinner with his family. One night they had Italian. Giannis looked so happy, according to Ferry, gobbling the pasta down. He slept in a king-size bed in the guest room. He played chess, Ping-Pong, and cards with Ferry’s five kids. Everything felt like it was coming together. And to be there with Thanasis? That meant everything to Giannis.

  Giannis was overwhelmed, staying in such a nice home. This is what NBA money gets you? he thought.

  Ferry and Giannis headed to the Hawks arena, which was then Philips Arena, the day before Giannis was set to fly to New York for the draft. Standing in the middle of the arena, Giannis looked stunned. He had never been in an arena that big. He had come a long way from the five-hundred-seat gym in Zografou. No more broken windows, no more leaky showers.

  Giannis started tearing up. “He could see the life that was in front of him,” Ferry says. The Hawks gave him some gear: flip-flops, shoes, socks. He started crying again; no one had ever given him socks before, let alone a full suitcase’s worth of shoes. Wow, he thought. They really care about me.

  He has kept the shoes to this day.

  * * *

  New York was thrilling to Giannis. He bought an I Love New York hat. He had hot dogs, Coca-Cola. They took photos everywhere. The day before the draft, Giannis’s agents bought him a suit. Giannis knew so little about the draft that he hadn’t even known he had to wear one, thinking that he would just show up in shorts and a T-shirt. They found a tailor last minute. Getting every measurement, Giannis was amazed at all the things that go into a suit, from the collar to the cuffs.

  He hadn’t had one this nice before: a light gray plaid blazer, black tie, black slacks. He sat next to Thanasis, who of course was a bit bolder with his choice: an extravagant purple-and-navy-checkered french-collared shirt, suit, vest, and tie. That was fitting, given their personalities: Thanasis ever the exclamation point, Giannis the period.

  Thanasis beamed, looking at his younger brother. They had made it. Together. Thanasis believed in Giannis’s potential. Giannis wasn’t really nervous about which team would pick him or what would happen next. Or maybe just a little. But he knew that his life was going to change in a matter of minutes. Please, Giannis thought. Please just let me get drafted.

  Ferry was anxious, excited. Can all of this work? he thought. Will we get him? Giannis thought he was going to be selected by the Hawks. That was the plan, after all. But an hour before the draft, Hammond called him and said they were interested. Giannis had no idea where Milwaukee was. He had never seen the Bucks play before, so he googled “Milwaukee” and saw a ton of snow. That was all he knew about it.

  As the draft began, ESPN draft analysts Fran Fraschilla, Bill Simmons, Jalen Rose, Rece Davis, and Jay Bilas talked about Giannis as a largely unknown player with a great deal of upside. One of the big selling points that they had heard from scouts was about what kind of a person Giannis was: his personality, his character, and what he had overcome, all of which made him an attractive prospect.

  Fraschilla, an international expert, thought Giannis might have been a top 5 pick if he had
come out of high school. “He’s the most mysterious prospect in the draft,” Fraschilla said. “Think of this young man as a McDonald’s All-American that needs a development program.… A great talent with a great feel for the game. Can you put him in an NBA game right now? You probably cannot. But in the long-term picture, this kid has as much upside as most anybody in this draft.”

  Simmons was impressed, thought Giannis had potential as a “huge-ceiling, low-basement” kind of prospect, he says. Simmons spent hours evaluating him on grainy YouTube clips, which made it difficult to understand the caliber of his opponents. “It was hard to tell what he was,” Simmons says. “To me, he looked like Paul George. A really good, long-armed athlete who could be a two-way guy, but you just didn’t know. You didn’t know what the competition was.”

  Simmons spent hours with Jalen Rose practicing how to say Giannis’s last name the day before the draft. They had no idea how to pronounce it. Rose joked that no one would ever call him by his full name, Giannis Antetokounmpo. “They’ll just call him Po,” Simmons remembers Rose telling him while the two rehearsed. Rose imagined future teammates telling Giannis, “Yeah, yeah, go get my bags, Po.”

  The draft was… strange, to say the least. Analysts didn’t know, genuinely, who might be the number 1 pick. At least five different players could have gone first. Simmons heard that if Anthony Bennett didn’t go first, he could fall to number 7 or even number 8. “We heard he was falling, falling, falling,” Simmons says.

  The Cavs did end up selecting Bennett with the number 1 overall pick. Giannis turned to Saratsis. “What’s going to happen now? Are we screwed?” He had no idea how any of this worked.

  “Don’t worry,” Saratsis told him. “There’s a long way to go before we get where we’re supposed to be.”

  Meanwhile, teams were scheming to make deals. The Oklahoma City Thunder’s Sam Presti, picking at number 12, called Saratsis. Saratsis had the sense that he was choosing between guard Dennis Schröder, center Steven Adams, and Giannis and that he was impressed by Giannis. Giannis, however, didn’t want to go there, because Presti would likely stash him in Europe to develop. Dallas later claimed they were interested in Giannis too. Meanwhile, Ferry says the Hawks had plans lined up to move higher, but they all fell through. Still, Giannis was available; team after team passed on him.