by Mirin Fader
Giannis and Maker became close. Giannis saw some similarities to his own game in seven-foot Maker. Maker knew childhood strife too, as his family, members of the Dinka tribe, had fled Sudan’s civil war when he was six, moving to Perth, Australia. Like Giannis’s, Maker’s first love was soccer. They knew hard work; they knew pain. They’d attend chapel together to pray every week.
Giannis became a mentor as the two played one-on-one every day. One day, when Giannis was particularly aggressive on defense, bumping Maker, throwing him out of the post, Maker just looked at him, thinking, What the fuck? Giannis explained himself. “I don’t want Alex to be lazy,” Giannis told Maker, looking over at his youngest brother, who was watching them play. “I want Alex to see that this is hard. I’m working hard, so he got to work hard too.”
Giannis meant that. He wasn’t going to let Alex coast or even just observe him from afar. Giannis ended up coaching Dominican in fall league (the team went undefeated). “Giannis has never said no to us,” says Jim Gosz, the Dominican coach. And Giannis often gave Alex pointers at halftime. Oftentimes, that meant scolding him. One fall-league game, Giannis got really frustrated with Alex for not moving on offense, not moving on defense. He called him out in front of everyone. Alex was embarrassed, but Giannis set the bar high, and if he wasn’t happy with his brother’s play, he’d let him know.
In a way, it motivated Alex’s other teammates as well, seeing that Giannis was watching so intensely. Giannis would talk to them too, give each one advice—even the players who rarely saw any minutes in the game.
Later, in 2018, after Dominican lost in the sectional finals to Kettle Moraine Lutheran, Giannis raced to the locker room. He was the first one in. He was more upset than anyone on the team. And when all the players had filed in, he said, “Remember this feeling. I need you to know what this feels like. What is it gonna take to not feel this feeling again?” Alex just looked at his brother, absorbing his words with the same kind of wonder he’s had since childhood.
* * *
Giannis tried to show Alex that same example in his own games. One game, against the Pistons, Giannis fed Maker the ball again and again. Maker was hot, drilling a three in transition. Giannis screamed, “Yeaaaah!” The next possession, however, Maker airballed. He looked embarrassed. When Giannis passed him the ball again, Maker passed up the shot, whipped the ball back to Giannis. Giannis swung it right back to him, yelling, “No, shoot it!” Maker gave the ball up again. Giannis was furious.
“Listen!” Giannis told Maker during the time-out. “You gotta shoot it! I don’t give a fuck if you miss it! I don’t care how many shots you miss—you still gotta shoot! If you hesitate, I’m gonna punch you!”
Maker blinked. Giannis meant it literally—he would punch him. So Maker went back in the game and let the ball fly. He had five points in the overtime period. “It gives you a lot of confidence,” says Maker, who scored a career-high twenty-three, “when he trusts you.”
Kidd started bringing Kevin Garnett, one of the NBA’s all-time best power forwards, to practice to tutor Giannis and Maker. Giannis could see himself in Garnett. They were both intense, passionate. Obsessive. Giannis had played against Garnett the previous season, Garnett’s last in the league. One time in particular, the two really went at each other. Both were talking trash. Giannis dunked the ball hard—a tip dunk off one of Copeland’s misses. “It was crazy,” Copeland says. “Like, what the fuck? You don’t see a lot of seven-footers just on the rim like that.”
That was Giannis’s statement to Garnett: “I’m here.”
The first time Garnett showed up to Bucks practice, he went to the weight room to get a full workout in. By the time Giannis and Maker walked in, Garnett’s T-shirt was fully soaked. Then they went onto the court, and Garnett demonstrated how to feel a defender on his back, how to master jump hooks. How to have a countermove, how to shimmy. Low-post footwork. “Look at the back of the rim, not the front,” he’d tell them.
Then Garnett walked toward Giannis, who was warming up his shot under the basket. Garnett told him to trust his work ethic. “It’s all about your mentality,” Garnett told Giannis. “You have to have a warrior mentality. Look, man—if you have that, nobody can stop you!” Garnett told him he had to dominate by any means necessary. Don’t have any friends on the court.
After Garnett left, Giannis pranced around to each of his teammates and screamed, “Yeah! Yeah! Mentalityyyyy! Yeah! I learned this from KG! Mentality! You can’t tell me nothing!”
Giannis had dropped thirty-five points and had nine rebounds and seven blocks against Chicago in late December 2016. Afterward, Brogdon compared him to Kobe, saying that Giannis had the potential to be great. Giannis seemed surprised: “Really, me? I’m Kobe?” Then he admitted that when he hit a jumper in the second quarter, he felt like Kobe. “I’m not going to lie. I was like, ‘Kobeeee,’” he said. “I’m not there yet, but I’m going to work as hard as I can.”
Two games later, in January 2017, he hit his first game-winning buzzer-beater, backing down the Knicks’ Lance Thomas for a fifteen-foot step-back shot in Madison Square Garden. Terry sensed that Giannis was coming into his own. “He was on his way to greatness,” Terry says. “He wanted to win every drill, every sprint, every game.”
Giannis had 1,059 new messages on his phone later that night after his buzzer-beater. He couldn’t concentrate, with interview requests from ESPN, Sports Illustrated, and SLAM, so he stayed off his phone, off social media, for the next six weeks.
Heading toward the all-star break, Thanasis retweeted hundreds of fans saying they voted for Giannis, trying to increase his brother’s vote total. “We all did,” says Alex, pulling out his iPhone and showing screenshots of the tweets he saved from that year.
Giannis and the Bucks were in Orlando when the NBA 2017 All-Star selection show aired. It was a Thursday night. He didn’t believe he’d be named a starter. When he saw James, he didn’t think he’d get picked at all. He thought maybe Jimmy Butler, Kevin Love, or Carmelo Anthony would be selected.
Veronica and Mariah showed up at his hotel room to surprise him. As they all watched, Giannis was named a starter. He had made it. Truly made it. A few seconds later, Thanasis, who was playing basketball in Spain, called to congratulate him. It was early in the morning in Spain, but Thanasis made sure he was up because he wanted to be the first to celebrate his brother.
Giannis became the first Greek player to participate in an All-Star game. He was also Milwaukee’s first NBA All-Star since Michael Redd in 2004 and the first Buck voted in as a starter since Sidney Moncrief in 1984.
Giannis wasn’t celebrating, though. The night before the game, he stepped onto the New Orleans court and had a full-speed workout with Sweeney, who had flown in because Giannis couldn’t bear missing one session.
After the team’s first practice, Carmelo Anthony, his teammate on the Eastern All-Stars, asked him if he was nervous.
“If I get the first layup, first dunk, I’ll be fine,” Giannis said.
Anthony was surprised. “You’re too big to be nervous.”
Too big? Giannis? How quickly things had changed. Three years before, Giannis had been trying to put his elbow in Anthony’s back, and Anthony had laughed off Giannis’s too-eager defense like a kid brother who’d wanted to tag along.
Yet Giannis still acted like the understudy, trying to learn. Anthony gave him pointers, telling him to slow down, gather himself. Giannis always looked him in the eye, always said, “Thank you, thank you.”
“He was a very humble kid,” Anthony says. “He always listened.”
Giannis carried around his black notebook, asking LeBron James questions about moves and jotting down the answers. Giannis was trying to capture every moment, as if it weren’t real. “Let me take a picture first,” he told reporters before answering their questions in a scrum, holding up his phone to take a selfie. “This is crazy!”
Giannis dominated during the game, leading the East squad wi
th thirty points, though his team lost, 192–182. He was one of the few players actually playing hard defense. He stole the ball from James Harden, which turned into a windmill dunk. Stephen Curry lay down on the floor to avoid Giannis, but Giannis posterized him anyway.
Durant had high praise for Giannis afterward. “I expect him to be here every year for the rest of his career,” Durant said. “If he isn’t, that’s on him.” Durant admitted he couldn’t have predicted Giannis’s ascension when they’d first played against each other.
No one could. Maybe except for Giannis’s younger brothers. They all hung out in the hotel room after the all-star game, staying up into the early morning, just like the old days. Giannis was finally a star. But Giannis was still just their big brother. Still the same guy who turns to see if Veronica is in her usual seat at the start of the game. He’ll wave, feeling at ease knowing she’s there. And if she for some reason can’t make the game, the first thing Giannis does after each game is look in his phone for Veronica’s message.
It is usually the same message, even if the Bucks lose: “I’m proud of you.”
* * *
That same month, in February, Parker tore his ACL for the second time. It was a devastating blow. Still, thanks to a stellar defense, the Bucks managed a 14–4 record in March to clinch the sixth spot in the postseason, their best month since going 16–2 in February 1971, the year Abdul-Jabbar helped the Bucks to a championship. Giannis became the first player in NBA history to finish top twenty in total points, rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks in a single season.
There was no one at his size, with his athleticism, who could move the way he could with the ball. Of course, positionless basketball existed long before Giannis—especially with bigger, taller players who could stretch the floor, something Giannis had yet to do, given his long-distance shooting woes—but Giannis brought a different kind of versatility, and unselfishness with the ball. He combined power with grace, dunking on people as if they were pins. “Like it’s nothing. Like it’s just a Nerf ball,” says Sterling Brown, Bucks guard from 2017 to 2020, who now plays for the Rockets. The New York Times described Giannis aptly: “He has the agility of a ballroom dancer and the power of a bulldozer.”
The Raptors, the Bucks’ first-round playoff opponent, would try to slow him down. Toronto was the clear favorite in the series; Milwaukee had a running 2–13 record against them. Giannis was nervous before game 1. He’s always nervous before games, until muscle memory takes over and he settles into his groove. But he came out aggressively in game 1, blocking a shot by DeMar DeRozan. He dunked on Serge Ibaka. The message was clear: Giannis had arrived.
Strong defense allowed the Bucks to steal game 1, though Toronto came back with more physicality to take game 2. Every time Giannis drove, Raptors players clogged the paint, limiting space for him to drive. Toronto’s strategy against Giannis was simple: slow him down in the open floor; bait him to shoot jumpers in the half-court. And it worked, though the Bucks managed to win game 3 at home. The Raptors turned up their defense on Giannis again, winning game 4. Giannis was held to fourteen points and a distressing seven turnovers.
P. J. Tucker smothered Giannis, and Giannis looked like he didn’t know how to respond. He played sloppy, unable to get a rhythm. He was so dissatisfied with his performance he responded by scoring a playoff-career-high thirty-four, plus nine rebounds, three assists, two steals, and two blocks, in game 5. It wasn’t enough to lift Milwaukee to victory, though, and the team was ultimately eliminated the next game despite a final rally in the fourth quarter.
Giannis played nearly forty-seven minutes in that final game. He was exhausted. He looked like he was going to collapse—like every muscle in his body was working to just keep him standing upright. Giannis had given everything. The Bucks had gone further than they had in a long, long time.
“See now, this is how it feels,” Terry, the veteran guard, told Giannis after the game.
Giannis was too gassed to speak. He nodded.
“This is what you should feel as a superstar in this league,” Terry continued. “Every night you step on that floor you should feel exhausted because you gave everything you have.”
Giannis was deeply disappointed. It was a turning point for him. Knowing how different the postseason was from the regular season. Knowing the dogfight it would be just to get back to this point. He made All-NBA second team and won Most Improved Player, but those things didn’t matter as much to him as a championship did. He would need to change, adapt, get better. Stronger.
Oppenheimer and Kidd knew the next step for Giannis didn’t have anything to do with on-court skills. It was something deeper Giannis needed to find, embrace.
Oppenheimer asked Kidd, “What’s the difference between Giannis at this stage and LeBron at this stage?”
Kidd didn’t hesitate: “Confidence.” Oppenheimer remembers Kidd explaining that the two players had the ability to impact the game the same way, though their games were vastly different and they came into the league with different expectations. James came into the league and was expected to dominate; he was given the keys to dominate. Giannis was beginning to find his stride but had never been expected to be the guy. He still needed to build that confidence.
“Confidence is everything,” Kidd told Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer nodded. He felt the same way. Giannis was much more hesitant than James. When he tried to make a pass and the seam closed up, he’d hesitate, whereas James could throw a pass, deliver it on time, on target, no hesitation whatsoever.
“Once Giannis grows past that little bit of hesitancy,” Oppenheimer told Kidd, “combined with that confidence, that can take him from good to great.”
“Exactly,” Kidd said. “Once he realizes he’s confident, he can be the best player in the league.”
* * *
A bit later that summer, in early July 2017, Jim Kogutkiewicz, the longtime Bucks fan, was walking around the Third Ward district one afternoon with his girlfriend, Bridgette Wells, a few hours before Summerfest, an annual Milwaukee outdoor music festival. They planned to go, and since the grounds opened at noon, they decided to walk near the lakefront.
They saw three people coming closer to them, from behind one of the nearby condos. It was Giannis, Thanasis, and Mariah, wearing T-shirts and shorts, like the normal people they are. Still, it was jarring for Kogutkiewicz to see them outside of… being on TV.
“Oh my god,” Kogutkiewicz said to Wells. “It’s Giannis!” He mustered up the courage to ask for a picture with Giannis. Giannis obliged.
Later, after looking at the picture, Kogutkiewicz zoomed in on the giant water bottle Giannis was clutching and noticed something written in black Sharpie on the bottle’s cap: “MVP.”
About a month later, Kobe wrote to players on Twitter with challenges for each of them, as part of his #MambaMentality campaign. Giannis hadn’t received one, so he tweeted to Kobe, “Still waiting for my challenge… @kobebryant.”
Kobe wrote back with just one word: “MVP.” From that point on, Giannis was more determined than ever to win the award.
* * *
Later that summer, Giannis was contemplating moving to a different apartment, and he wanted to throw a yard sale in the front lawn of his home. He had items he wanted to sell, like shoes he had never worn.
Bucks management shut down the idea, for obvious safety reasons. Giannis was disappointed. He had been so excited. He took pride in being a salesman. It’s as if he forgot he was an NBA player. An NBA star. A potential MVP candidate, if he met Kobe’s challenge.
But Giannis still saw himself as Giannakis (Little Giannis). A child hustling for a dollar, concerned for the well-being of his little brothers.
Giannis had gone to as many of Alex’s games at Dominican as his schedule permitted, but most games, Alex didn’t leave the bench. It didn’t matter to Giannis; he came there to see his brother, not his brother the basketball player.
If Alex played or didn’t play, h
e was still Alex with the chubby cheeks. The baby of the family. And now Giannis and Kostas had given him a new nickname: Alex the Great. Alex hadn’t lived up to the name yet, though. He had a way to go in growing into his body. He wasn’t particularly assertive his freshman year. “He looked like a baby deer,” says Gosz, Alex’s coach at Dominican, where Alex finished the season averaging about three points a game.
“He didn’t look comfortable,” says DeVon Jackson, Dominican assistant coach. Alex went back and forth on jayvee and varsity. “He was clueless. When he’d practice with varsity, he’d get dominated,” Jackson says. “Those guys would be throwing him around.” He’d get fouled or stripped and get frustrated: “Call something!” he’d plead to the coaches. He did things fluidly, like the Eurostep, mimicking Giannis, but struggled to grasp the plays, understanding positions. Still, Giannis believed in his brother, often telling his Bucks teammates, “Alex is going to be the best one out of all of us. He’s going to be better than me.”
It wasn’t hyperbole. He meant it. He never had to tell Alex to hustle. He never had to explain something to Alex twice. But he pushed him. Harder than any of his brothers. “Lock that shit out,” he’d tell Alex, sharpening his focus. “It’s just me and you.”
The Antetokounmpos often sat in the same spot in the bleachers at Dominican for Alex’s games. Top left, behind the team’s bench. It was their way of dodging attention. “I [didn’t] want Alex to get nervous,” Veronica says. She knew Alex would be eager to put on a show for Giannis. “Alex would [play] five times better,” Gosz says, at those high school games when the Greek Freak was in the building. And when Alex made a good play, he sometimes turned to the bleachers and pointed to his family.
Kostas, meanwhile, was finding his stride, starting to get noticed by recruiters. He wasn’t highly ranked—number 102 in the 2016 class, receiving a four-star ranking. Dayton offered, and he accepted. Kostas was known for his defense, his hustle. Then six feet nine, he was gangly, long. There is a framed photo of him in the hallway leading to Dominican’s court, stretching his arms out toward the court, screaming. It encapsulates his hustle, desire.