by Mirin Fader
This entire time, Thanasis had been working blindfolded. “I relate to that video,” he says, smiling, then looking down at the ground, “because it’s not about the results; it’s about what you can do every day to stay ready so when you get the opportunity, you chop down the tree.”
He just didn’t know if the opportunity would come. He went back to Greece in hopes of finding a EuroLeague team to play for. Giannis stayed in America. Their lives were diverging. Again.
* * *
Giannis began to hold his own against the league’s biggest stars. He had a career-high thirty-three points against LeBron James and the Cavs. He guarded not just James but Kevin Love, who was much bigger. James complimented Giannis after the game. Giannis was starstruck: “LeBron said I’m going to be good! I’m going to be good!” he told his teammates.
The Bucks were optimistic. They were young, talented. And having added big man Greg “Moose” Monroe, the Bucks were ready to take another big step forward. Giannis was still learning his body—how to guard bigs and smalls. He had more fouls than anyone in the league by December 1, but Kidd had faith in Giannis. Tried to give him confidence. “We go as you go,” Kidd would tell him.
That was a lot of responsibility for a young player. Sometimes Giannis was so hard on himself, thinking he wasn’t living up to it. “He takes everything personal,” says Jabari Parker, who had grown closer to Giannis. “After a loss, after he doesn’t think he plays well, you know not to talk to him.”
Greivis Vásquez, a point guard who joined the team that year, was concerned. Giannis looked frustrated. Some teammates shared Vásquez’s concern: they thought maybe Giannis was unhappy playing basketball because he looked so serious, so intense, all the time.
“He blamed himself for almost everything,” Vásquez says. “‘I should have done this; I should have done that.’ In reality, he was doing more than enough for us to win. That was something he needed to work on.”
Giannis no longer expressed himself by crying, at least not publicly; he tucked his emotions inside. Vásquez worried Giannis would wear himself ragged over an eighty-two-game season. “Most nights, you couldn’t recognize if he was happy or uncomfortable. Most of the time, he was uncomfortable because he wanted to be better and he was not satisfied,” Vásquez says.
Giannis was obsessed with getting better—and bigger. By 3:30 p.m., he’d already be fully drenched, sweating through a workout, ahead of a 7:30 game. “You know we have a full game in a couple hours, right?” Ennis, the guard, would ask Giannis.
“Yeah,” Giannis said. “I know.”
Opponents, still tying up their laces, would see Giannis sprinting and ask Bucks players, “Does he always do this?”
The Bucks players would just nod. “Yup. That’s Giannis.”
* * *
After the all-star break, in late February, Kidd walked up to Giannis in the locker room right before a game against Atlanta. “You’re going to start at point guard tonight,” Kidd told him. “You’re going to handle the ball.”
“OK, Coach,” Giannis said. “I got you.” Giannis was a little nervous but didn’t show it. He wanted his coach to know that he wasn’t afraid. Then Giannis found Sweeney. Double-checked: “So… I’m playing point guard… tonight? You sure about that?”
Sweeney laughed. “Yup. That’s what it is.”
“OK.”
Putting the ball in Giannis’s hands was the ultimate display of trust, and Kidd felt that Giannis was ready for it. “I was kind of forced to be the leader,” Giannis later told 60 Minutes. “It’s like when you have a little baby and you put them in the water so they can learn how to swim.”
Giannis had nineteen points and three assists against the Hawks, a strong showing, but moving to point was intimidating at first. Giannis wasn’t really comfortable. He could stretch his long arms, wrap the ball around bodies, deliver a pinpoint pass anywhere. But it was difficult to do it at the NBA pace.
“Dang, this point guard thing’s hard,” Giannis told Ennis after one practice. “I gotta push the ball; I gotta talk to everybody; I gotta know where everyone is.”
“Yeah, bro, it’s not as easy as you think,” Ennis said. “Instead of yelling at us all day to get you the ball, now you see!”
Ennis would laugh when he’d see Giannis coming off the floor, gassed. Soon, though, with more conditioning, more reps, Giannis was thriving at the point. The move was brilliant. Giannis was more aggressive, stringing together four triple-doubles over the next month, including his first against the Lakers in Kobe’s final season.
That game, Giannis was magnificent. He directed the offense, dunked, posted up, looked confident. He had twenty-seven points, twelve rebounds, ten assists, four blocks, and three steals in the Bucks’ seven-point win. Afterward, Kobe told reporters that Giannis had the potential to be a great player, and that he had the physical tools and intelligence, but it was just a matter of him believing in himself and going after it.
Kidd then took Giannis into the Lakers’ visiting locker room, into a private room to talk with Kobe.
Giannis stared at his idol, this man in front of him who had no idea what it meant to share one pair of his Nike Kobes, the red-and-white ones, with Thanasis. The first playoff game Giannis had ever watched in Sepolia, back in the internet cafés with his brothers, was the Lakers against the Celtics, Kobe against Paul Pierce.
Oh shit, Giannis thought, finally meeting Kobe. Jason Kidd and Kobe Bryant? I’m having a conversation with them?
Kobe gave him advice for about an hour. He told him to work on his jump shot, get in the gym every day, and shoot a thousand jumpers a day. Giannis vowed to shoot fifteen hundred. Kobe also told him about the kind of mentality it took to be great. “Be serious until the last day you play basketball,” Kobe told him, also noting the importance of recovery, of taking care of one’s body, of making sacrifices. “You have to have that killer mindset,” Kobe continued. “That mindset that you will not be beat. That you will outwork everybody.”
Giannis couldn’t stop smiling. He jogged back into the Bucks locker room and told his teammates, “I got to talk to Kobe! I got to talk to my hero! Kobe told me you just have to work hard! I can’t make any excuses!” He was giddy, repeating each line as if trying to memorize it.
“He was just like a little kid,” says Nixon Dorvilien, the Bucks assistant trainer, who watched from afar. “Giannis literally changed after that meeting. It was just a light bulb that went off about what it takes to be great.”
The Bucks as a team, though, were inconsistent. They had a lackluster offense, including Giannis’s own shooting percentages. Teams continued to sag off him, daring him to shoot. Despite this being Giannis’s breakthrough season, averaging 16.9 points, 7.7 rebounds, and 4.3 assists, the Bucks underperformed, missing the playoffs. It was disappointing, to say the least. Momentum felt halted. Stalled.
But for the first time, Giannis’s mind gravitated toward something other than basketball. Other than getting better, getting bigger.
He fell in love.
* * *
Bucks players had just finished a Summer League game and were about to walk out of the gym when Ennis, the Bucks guard, spotted a friend: a woman named Mariah Riddlesprigger. Riddlesprigger, an NBA intern, was working the Summer League. Ennis’s brother and Riddlesprigger had attended the same college, Rice University, and were friends.
Ennis and Riddlesprigger caught up before parting ways. After Riddlesprigger walked away, Giannis went up to Ennis and asked, “How do you know her? Who is she? Can you introduce me?”
Ennis was a little surprised at how eager Giannis was. “Honestly, I’d never seen him talk about anything but basketball and smoothies,” Ennis says. Ennis assumed Giannis had dated before but didn’t really know. Giannis was so focused on achieving his basketball dream that maybe there hadn’t been time for relationships.
But the way Giannis asked about Mariah, looked at Mariah, her bright, big smile, Ennis could tell that G
iannis was intrigued. He agreed to introduce them, thinking they might be a good match. They were similar in a lot of ways: hardworking, athletic, bighearted, family oriented, down to earth, and competitive. Riddlesprigger had played volleyball at Rice.
Ennis asked Riddlesprigger if she was allowed to be introduced to a player, because she was technically working for the NBA. Ennis remembers her saying, “I don’t know. We’re not really supposed to be doing that.” Ennis never found out much more, but a year later, he found out they were dating.
She would later become the mother of Giannis’s first child, Liam.
“Giannis owes me,” Ennis says. “He should have named the baby’s middle name Tyler.”
* * *
That fall, Giannis signed a four-year $100 million contract extension. Only after, of course, postponing the signing by four hours so he could complete a morning workout. He accepted a slightly lower salary—about $6 million less than the max he could have signed, without any player or team options—in order to help the Bucks build a contender.
He called Wes Edens, Bucks co-owner, who was in Ireland at the time: “I just wanted to say thank you for the money. It means so much to me and my family. I’m going to work very hard for it.” Giannis took his family to Capital Grille in Milwaukee. They ordered steak. When the food came, much more than he had anticipated, with appetizers and side dishes, Giannis looked confused. “I don’t know who’s paying for all this,” he said, jokingly but not so jokingly. “Because I only said I’d get the steak.”
The reality of the extension set in: it was more money than he and his family could fathom. And yet Giannis told his brothers, his parents, “Just because your bank account changes doesn’t mean you change.”
Giannis was still the same player who’d skip showers and head to the Cousins Center when he was upset with his performance. The first time he ever flew first-class back to Greece was in his fourth year in the league, right after he signed the extension. Still, he had been hesitant; it was Thanasis who had to coax him to splurge: “We can’t be sitting back in coach, next to the restroom. We gotta move up front.” Up to that point, Giannis wouldn’t even pay if an airline charged more to sit in an exit row, always thinking about saving money for the future, never sure of what might happen.
“As a person, he’s always been the same; we’ve always been the same people,” Alex says. “It’s just the stuff around us changed.”
The family was living in a modest town house when Giannis, at the advice of Dudley, his former teammate, finally moved into his own space within the complex, a compromise that felt OK to all of them. It was a big step for Giannis. Dudley told him that he was proud of him for making the move. But Giannis, of course, was still not spending the bread.
Alex, heading into his freshman year at Dominican, saw the way Giannis remained frugal. He had to be convinced to buy a house. “Are you crazy?” Giannis told his friends and family. “It’s too big. It’s so much. I don’t need all of that.”
When he visited Carter-Williams’s house for the first time, he was astounded. “Bro,” Giannis told him, “this is amazing.”
“Bro,” Carter-Williams says, “you’re gonna be able to buy like thirty of these.”
Giannis still hesitated. He still bought only what he needed. Before the next season, 2016–2017, Sweeney and Giannis were working out at the Pyramid in Long Beach, California, staying at an Airbnb. “Did you watch the game last night?” Sweeney asked him.
“No, I didn’t have a TV.”
“You didn’t get a place with a TV?”
“Nah, but it’s got great Wi-Fi.”
Adding a TV seemed superfluous. “He never thought, The money is good. I’m good. I’m set for life,” says Thon Maker, who played for the Bucks from 2016 to 2019 and considers Giannis a brother. “He was humble enough to say, ‘Look at me, look at where I’m at, I’m making one hundred million dollars—can you believe it? I can’t even believe it.’”
Life began to accelerate. Really fast. More fame, more fans. The family couldn’t move as freely as it once had. Giannis had transformed from a lanky, hopeful prospect to flesh-and-blood savior. The Bucks had finally gotten approval for a new multimillion-dollar downtown arena. “It was like he went from ‘Oh, you might be that dude’ to ‘Oh, you’re Giannis,’” Alex says. “We had to be cautious about who we let in our circle.”
Giannis made sure the family stayed the same: “Thank you” and “How are you doing?” “Our parents, the way we were raised, it overpowers what we have now,” Alex says. “Deep down inside, we’re still the kids that lived back there several years ago.”
Not a day passed when Giannis didn’t think of those days. Selling. Sepolia. Peddling items at upscale beaches. Not having enough. Pushing a fridge down the road. That had been only five years before. Five years before, when no one knew who he was.
That motivated him. That scared him. He often told Kostas and Alex, “Respect the game of basketball because basketball has given us all we have.”
Giannis was a unique emerging star. He didn’t care to wear flashy outfits in the tunnel before games like some of his counterparts, like Westbrook and James. Giannis was always most comfortable in his Bucks sweat suit. He was going to the arena to work. He wasn’t going to a wedding, a party. In his eyes, what reason was there to dress up? To this day, he has still never purchased a pair of sneakers.
“He’s not going to be the guy that has ten, twelve, cars. That’s not how he was raised. That’s how Americans think,” says Jared Dudley, former teammate.
Giannis also didn’t care to work out with other players in the league in the off-season—not because he wasn’t friendly but because he reasoned that when you’re friendly with someone, you don’t compete as intensely against them, with the same aggression. “Giannis is not a guy that wants to be friends with everybody,” Brogdon says. “He’s not a guy that’s really friendly. But once you get to know him, and break down that barrier, that will, he becomes a friend. And you can talk about anything.”
He wouldn’t let opponents see that side of him, though. He’d turn down invitations from top-flight private trainers with NBA clients, preferring to stick with Bucks staffers, not wanting to give opponents even a glimpse of his tendencies on the court. “Giannis is a bit of a throwback. You see him after games, there’s a cordial handshake and a hug, but he’s not getting on the banana boat,” says Oppenheimer, referring to the banana boat that James, Chris Paul, and Dwyane Wade famously rode in the off-season in the Bahamas that became a viral meme. “If Giannis is on a banana boat, it’s him and his brothers.”
He didn’t much care about social media. While other players posted their workouts on Instagram, Giannis preferred to keep quiet about his routines. His parents had a saying that they used to tell Giannis and his brothers growing up that came from the catechism: “If your left hand does something, your right hand doesn’t need to know.”
Milwaukee was the perfect place for Giannis to live. People recognized him on the street, of course, but didn’t interrupt him during meals. He liked how quiet Milwaukee was, how serene. “I don’t like all these flashy cities like LA or Miami,” Giannis told the New York Times. “I don’t know if I could be the same player if I played in those cities.”
But it was clear: Giannis was now undoubtedly the franchise player. And there was pressure to perform. “The people who remembered Kareem thought, Wow, maybe he’s the guy?” says Eddie Doucette, the former Bucks broadcaster. “Maybe he’s the next Kareem? Maybe this is the guy that’s going to carry us to the promised land?”
With more expectations came more demands. Especially with media. “He doesn’t have the free time he once had,” Oppenheimer says. “With that, becoming the world’s face, you can lose your face.”
Giannis kept a sense of humor, though, tried to open up a bit to media, especially when he discovered dad jokes right before the 2016–2017 season. “I have a joke. I’m gonna say a joke,” he told reporters at
media day that season.
“Knock knock,” Giannis said.
“Who’s there?” a couple of reporters said.
“Obama.”
“Obama who?”
“Ohhhhhhh-baaaaaa-myyyyseeeelf,” Giannis sang to the melody of Eric Carmen’s “All by Myself.”
Another instance, a year later, Giannis asked reporters, “Have you guys seen the new movie Constipation?”
“No,” one reporter said. “What movie?”
“Constipation. That’s because it hasn’t come out yet!” He then ran away from the media scrum, tickled with his joke.
“Giannis is a big kid,” says Tony Snell, Bucks forward from 2016 to 2019, now with the Hawks.
He was a kid dealing with adult responsibilities. And he began to close up more as his fame grew. He’d sometimes leave reporters waiting for more than an hour. “Come on, Giannis,” Bucks PR said on one of those occasions. “Just come out there for a second. They’re not out to get you.”
Milwaukee was probably as friendly as an NBA media scrum could be, but Giannis just didn’t want any attention. Life was so simple when he could just play basketball rather than try to explain it. Try to explain himself.
One afternoon, Telly Hughes, Bucks TV reporter from 2010 to 2018, told him, “You keep playing the way you’re playing, you’re gonna have to get comfortable talking to the media.”
“Nah, yeah, whatever,” Giannis told Hughes. “I still don’t like it.” He walked away.
“Giannis keeps a lot of things inside,” Hughes says.
Thon Maker, too, noticed how much Giannis held within. He noticed the way Giannis would clench his fist when he’d make a mistake, harping on himself. He saw the way, after a loss, Giannis would be so angry, so silent, in the locker room, hands on his head, just thinking, thinking, thinking.
Giannis was trying to prove that he was the team’s leader. If there was a new player, he’d play more aggressively. “Not in a selfish way, but he was playing mental games with the player,” Maker says. “He’d expose him and really assert himself so that people can see, ‘All right, yeah. This is his team.’”