Giannis

by Mirin Fader

  NBA legends Hakeem Olajuwon and Dikembe Mutombo surprisingly showed up in the second quarter of the game, in full uniform, joining in. “It was special,” says Boris Diaw, another Team Africa teammate. “You never think you will play with these guys.”

  Giannis scored a game-high twenty-two points. Players were allowed to put patches of the flags of the countries they were representing on the backs of their jerseys. Giannis picked only the Greek flag to be on his jersey. Diaw remembers Giannis being sure of the decision. “I remember Giannis only wanting the Greek flag on his jersey,” says Diaw, who put both the Senegalese and French flags on his own jersey.

  Later, in 2017, when Giannis interviewed with 60 Minutes, the producers asked him which pronunciation of his last name he preferred, the African or Greek. Adetokunbo or Antetokounmpo? “Whichever one you like,” Draggan Mihailovich, the producer, remembers Giannis responding. Mihailovich says he had a hunch why: “He just didn’t want to make anybody mad.”

  The producers then asked Giannis about the migrant crisis. Giannis’s answer didn’t make the final piece, but it showed a more open, sympathetic Giannis. “Those people in the boats, they’re just coming over in Greece to have a better life, you know, people that I know, people close to me have done that in the past,” Giannis said. “I hear a lot of people [say], they’re coming over here to take our jobs. They’re coming over here, you know, some people, in the boats in there because they’re having war. They’re about to get killed. That’s the only option they have.”

  He opened up a little more when he defended Thanasis in 2018. A Greek TV host named Takis Tsoukalas had described Thanasis as an “ape” following one of Thanasis’s Panathinaikos games, saying, “They have an ape. That Antetokounmpo guy is an ape. That’s what I’m telling you.”

  Giannis tweeted in response, “I have lost sleep over the last few days over this negative-racist incident which occurred recently. If this happens to Thanasis, who with pride and a permanent smile represents the Greek national team and Panathinaikos, I can’t imagine what’s happening to other [people of color] in Greece.

  “My brothers and I are proud to be Greek-Nigerian,” Giannis said, “and if any one doesn’t like it, that’s their problem.”

  Interviewing with The Undefeated in 2019, Giannis said that he wanted to explore more of his Nigerian roots. “Obviously, a lot of people don’t know where I’m from,” Giannis told The Undefeated. “There are a lot of people that I see and I tell them that I am African. I am not just ‘The Greek Freak.’ It doesn’t matter what people may believe because of my nickname.… Deep down, I know who I am and where I am from.”

  Even when he rose to become a top-five player in the league, in the world, by this point, commentators and fans still joked that they couldn’t pronounce his name, laughing, as if it were somehow not possible to do so correctly. Kenny Smith, an Inside the NBA cohost, asked Shaq on air in 2019: “Can you pronounce Giannis’s last name?”

  Shaq responded, “Giannis Ante-ka-noon-po. Is that right, my brother?”

  The other cohosts chimed in. Charles Barkley said Shaq’s version was “close enough.” Ernie Johnson called it “kind of in the ballpark.” Giannis, also part of the broadcast, acknowledged it wasn’t the correct pronunciation but laughed it off and asked them to call him “Superman.”

  Giannis didn’t publicly speak in depth about his experiences regarding race in America or Greece until a video interview with TNT’s The Arena in 2020: “Greece is a country of white people, so it can be tough for people with my skin complexion,” Giannis said in the segment. “You go through a lot of neighborhoods, and you face a lot of negativity. Racism.

  “It was tough—it’s always going to be tough—being Black in a country of white people,” Giannis continued. “It’s going to be times where you feel like you’re not who you are. Especially if you’re born here [in Greece]. I was born here.”

  The backlash in some quarters was immediate and intense. Greeks, including prominent politicians, bashed Giannis online.

  “What exactly does this monkey do, again? Oh, yeah, he plays basketball,” tweeted Konstantinos Kalemis, the Greek Ministry of Education’s refugee coordinator, who then called Giannis the “[N-word]” and “the ungrateful one” and “nothing but an illiterate who suddenly is called a messiah.… Giannis is not a human being.”

  “The only real Greeks are those who were born Greek,” tweeted Kyriakos Velopoulos, president of the far-right party Elliniki Lysi (Greek Solution), the fifth biggest in the country. “One can learn to love Greece… but that’s the furthest one can go. Antetokounmpo’s quotes are proof of that.”

  Rachel Makri, a well-known member of the right-wing populist Independent Greeks, demanded Giannis give his Greek citizenship back.

  Papadojannis, the Greek journalist, wrote a column about the incident, about how Greece denies its racism: “Those who refuse to look in their mirror, for fear of what they will see. The blind ostriches of the planet,” he wrote. Papadojannis wishes he lived in a more inclusive Greece. “Giannis right now is not a sports hero. He is a social symbol for Greece,” Papadojannis says. “It makes him a symbol of Greece not as it is but as we would like it to be as a country. At least me, I would like my country to be more diverse, more open, as a society.”

  He can’t help but think that’s not a universal opinion, given that, to some, Giannis had turned from hero to foe, now framed as an ungrateful, disrespectful athlete who should be showing deference to a country that granted him citizenship.

  A few days after the TNT segment aired and was posted online at Bleacher Report, a sports website owned by Turner, the segment mysteriously disappeared from the website. It was pulled off YouTube too. It can’t be accessed online anywhere to this day. It’s as if someone wanted to scrub the record clean.

  CHAPTER 13

  FREAK

  A low rumble echoed from blocks away. Plumes of smoke exploded into the air. Debris scattered into the street as a large yellow crane began to tear down the Bradley Center on this morning in early January 2019.

  The glass-front atrium had been knocked over, the narrow windy hallways plowed through. Bit by bit, the demolition continued over the next few months as the desolate home of the Bucks over the last thirty years was dismantled.

  Aaron Salata, a Milwaukee-area native and Bucks fan since the 1980s, came to watch the first day of the demolition. He couldn’t get too close, as a sign—Danger: Demolition in Progress—impeded his path. Salata loves the Bucks. He was six years old when his father took him to his first game. His favorite players were Sidney Moncrief and Marques Johnson, back when the Bucks were formidable, playing in the beautiful, bright MECCA. He continued to wear his twelve Bucks jerseys in steady rotation, proudly, throughout the miserable 1990s, sitting in the cold, depressing Bradley Center. He’d never give up on the Bucks: “We’ve always had a chip on our shoulder.”

  When Salata watched the demolition of the Bradley Center, he felt something new. Something unfamiliar: hope. He clapped and cheered. He stood next to about a dozen people also celebrating. A man in a green shirt and blue jeans walked by, fist-pumping into the air. Many, too, were sad; sure, the Bradley Center didn’t have much atmosphere, and it housed some pretty awful teams, but it was home. It was sacred. It meant something to Milwaukeeans, to love something so deeply that rarely returned the favor.

  Salata hoped the demolition would lead to new beginnings: “It was symbolic of the old Bucks hopefully going away.” No more just get to the playoffs. No more just be competitive. No more leaky roofs. No more ill-advised free-agent acquisitions. No more mediocrity!

  By this point, about midway through the 2018–2019 season, the Bucks had a new coach in Budenholzer, a new $524 million state-of-the-art arena in Fiserv Forum, an NBA-best record, and, of course, Giannis. He was the generational player fans had been waiting for. He was the reason fans wear Bucks gear proudly throughout downtown Milwaukee, a far cry from his rookie year, when Bucks staffer
s handed out tokens to the few souls daring to wear purple and green.

  If Giannis hadn’t come to Milwaukee, it’s unlikely the Bucks would still be there.

  * * *

  A few months earlier, before the 2018–2019 season began, Coach Budenholzer arrived in Milwaukee with high expectations. There was even more urgency to win, given that Giannis’s supermax-contract decision loomed in the background. He’d have the opportunity to leave Milwaukee after 2021, when he’d be an unrestricted free agent. The supermax was instituted to help teams keep their top players by allowing them to offer more money than competitors.

  Budenholzer had a few things in common with his new superstar: He was a grinder. A perfectionist. A family-oriented person: he and his son, John, work on giant puzzles at home that stretch across the entire kitchen table sometimes for two weeks until they complete it. Budenholzer’s also intensely competitive. The fifty-two-year-old and son John would play one-on-one in the family’s driveway, and Budenholzer would be out for blood. Didn’t matter that his son was barely in high school.

  Budenholzer would later dive on the hard carpeted floor in the Bucks locker room before a game against Chicago, full suit, chasing an invisible ball, to show his players what intensity looked like.

  He’s had that hustle since he was a kid, the seventh of seven kids. He was never the tallest, never the strongest, never the most athletic, growing up in Holbrook, Arizona, a town of five thousand in eastern Arizona, near the Navajo Nation. He got by on hustle and smarts, being a basketball nerd who genuinely loved to work. To spend hours milling over one play. “Bud’s got that ground-up, nothing-handed-to-him personality,” says Bo Ryan, the legendary Wisconsin coach, who is friends with Budenholzer.

  Like Giannis, Budenholzer didn’t need frills to play. If he had a ball and a hoop, he was happy. He played on blacktop playgrounds, wherever there was a game. He often played on the nearby reservations against Indigenous players, in Navajo towns like Dilkon, Window Rock, Tuba City, and Ganado.

  He was barely recruited for college scholarships and wound up at Division III Pomona College in Southern California. Budenholzer would smother opponents, even in practice. “He was the scrappiest guy on the court,” says Bill Cover, former Pomona teammate and the school’s second all-time leading scorer. Cover remembers Budenholzer chasing his NBA coaching dream upon graduating, driving his “old, beat-up car” to wherever there was a camp. Wherever he might get closer to his dream.

  On one such day, Budenholzer had been driving for a long time, driving down from Oregon to NorCal, and it was nearing midnight. He asked Cover if he could stay at his house (Cover’s mother’s house, that is, in Palo Alto). Afterward, Budenholzer penned a handwritten thank-you note to Cover’s mother expressing his gratitude and telling her she’d raised an amazing son. “She was so touched by that,” Cover says. “She still brings up that thank-you note.”

  Still, like Giannis, Budenholzer wasn’t exactly on the short list for the NBA, coming out of a small school. Even for players who have played for top-tier Division I programs, it can take years. “Nobody was predicting that Mike would become a two-time NBA Coach of the Year,” Cover says. But when Cover thinks of Budenholzer’s work ethic, competitiveness, and ability to communicate—how he’d just come up to anyone and offer a tip, share a drill he knew or a piece of advice that might help a player—it makes sense to him why Budenholzer ended up as a coach.

  He’d apply those same skills when he got his start in the video room with the Spurs under Popovich. Budenholzer worked his way up as a film-room guy and an assistant coach for more than fifteen years. He studied basketball religiously, laboring alone for many hours in dark rooms, breaking down video highlights while eating Subway sandwiches—hoping to make it as a head coach one day. Finally, he joined the Hawks as a head coach from 2013 to 2018.

  “He was an assistant for so many years,” says Boris Diaw, who played for Budenholzer on the Spurs, “that he could have had a chance to be a head coach before, but it’s hard when you’re not a former player to get a chance. He kept learning all those years.”

  Especially from Popovich. Budenholzer adopted Popovich’s attention to detail, becoming obsessive about details when joining the Bucks. Budenholzer would get upset if the font size was one point too small or too big. It would irritate him if an apostrophe was missing or a double dash was inserted instead of the warranted single dash. Assistants would put a sheet of paper up to the whiteboard as a guide because they knew Budenholzer wanted the writing to be perfectly straight. Every detail had to be perfect.

  Even at home. He’d review film constantly, shuffling hundreds of papers into narrow binders. “He’s extremely organized,” says Ricky Muench, a Bucks video and player development assistant in 2019–2020 who also spent multiple afternoons a week training Budenholzer’s son, John. “Bud goes through the papers like it’s all for a finals game.”

  It became clear to Budenholzer, in his first meeting with Giannis, that Giannis was as much a stickler for the details as he was. Budenholzer took Giannis, as well as Khris Middleton, to breakfast at a Spanish restaurant at the start of the season. While they ate eggs and Iberian ham, Budenholzer explained his new system, one that catered to the strengths of his team, of Giannis: more spacing, more speed, emphasizing three-point shooting, tough defense.

  Listening intently, Giannis took out his notebook and started jotting down notes. Giannis asked question after question, writing down each response, such as how practice would be run, who initiated offense, the philosophy on defense.

  This was Giannis’s third head coach. He was used to adapting, but this time he had a much stronger supporting cast as the Bucks added talented big man Brook Lopez. The strange part, though, was that his new coach wanted him to shoot threes. Yes, he wanted Giannis, the non–jump shooter, to shoot threes.

  “I don’t care if you make it, miss it, hit the backboard, airball—I don’t care,” Budenholzer told Giannis. “Shoot the ball.”

  It was the first time someone had encouraged him like that. Asked him to do something other than just go to the basket. It was exciting but weird. New. A coach asking him to not just use his natural gifts of exploding downcourt, dunking over people, just because he could, but try the one thing that everyone thought he couldn’t do? And Budenholzer was serious: he’d yell at Giannis to shoot if he hesitated or turned down a shot. He wanted more of Giannis. And Giannis wanted more out of himself.

  * * *

  The first day of training camp, Budenholzer outlined boxes in blue tape around the three-point line of the court so players could get used to spacing across the perimeter and spotting up for threes.

  Giannis wasn’t exactly confident in his shooting, and his opponents knew it. They’d sag off a foot or two when guarding him, daring him to attempt, knowing he’d likely brick. Of course, they also played him that way because they were terrified of giving him an open lane to the basket.

  It was still strange, hearing Budenholzer tell him to shoot. Kidd hadn’t allowed him to shoot much at all in their first two seasons together. The memory of getting benched for launching threes was still fresh. And that caused him to think before acting at times. But Budenholzer didn’t want him to think; he wanted him to let it fly.

  The hope was that Giannis would gain confidence and not hesitate as much. But his form was slow. Clunky. It looked like he was thinking of what to do rather than just… doing it.

  Giannis’s shooting woes puzzled those around him. Was it a technical problem? A confidence problem? A mix of both? Some wondered if he simply wasn’t able to morph into a reliable shooter because of his body. He’s an enormously long-limbed person with huge hands, and honestly, people with those proportions can have difficulty catching, gathering their bodies at high speeds, rising up, getting enough backspin on the ball, with their hands stretching across the ball. Yet Kawhi Leonard’s hands are enormous, and he’s an incredible shooter, an observation that’s sometimes made.

  It was
(and still is) confusing because Giannis wasn’t a particularly poor shooter during his rookie year. He even attempted 118 threes that year. Even back in Greece, he launched threes. That wasn’t a huge part of his game by any means, but it wasn’t discussed with any urgency as it is now. But with every passing pro season, his shot seemed more uncomfortable. His torso would tilt back. He’d palm the ball. His release was higher, but it looked a bit unnatural. Slow. “I honestly don’t know what happened to it,” says one Bucks staffer. “It’s pretty bad.”

  Earlier in his career, Giannis had a pretty midrange fadeaway jumper. Drill after drill, he’d work on post moves and finish with the midrange jumper. “He had an unbelievable mid-post game,” says Eric Harper, former assistant video coordinator from 2017 to 2018. “I mean, that was his shit.” Harper would walk in at 10:00 p.m. and find Giannis there, laboring on the midrange. But as he progressed in his career, various Bucks coaches have tried to take him farther away from the basket and mold him into more of a pure guard—a guard who shoots threes.

  “I just think it’s analytics,” Brogdon says, “the way the NBA is moving. The Bucks are one of those teams, where Bud wants threes and layups, high-percentage shots.”

  Budenholzer paired Giannis with Ben Sullivan, assistant coach, who trained under renowned Spurs shooting coach Chip Engelland. Sullivan and Giannis would work for hours on different dribble-shooting combos, trying to replicate game-rhythm shots. Follow-through was a big emphasis—trying to create one fluid motion in which the release point moved away from Giannis’s head.

  But Giannis could get to the basket so easily. And he’d often do just that instead of settling for a jumper. It was hard to blame him: his body was now so chiseled, so powerful, he looked like a Greek god. Especially with how much he was lifting. Giannis looked nothing like the scrawny player practicing his scowl in the mirror. But he still acted like the player afraid of not measuring up, just trying to crack the starting lineup. He was the last person to leave training camp in 2018–2019, asking the Bucks’ video-coordinator crew to hound him in the paint after practice, especially Schuyler Rimmer, a six-foot-nine, 240-pound assistant video coordinator who became his designated defender and rebounder.