Giannis

by Mirin Fader

  Giannis wanted the coordinators to try to suffocate him. Not with dummy defense either. All had pads on, shoving Giannis with all their might. Naturally, Giannis would still dunk on all of them. “He’s going through us like a running back going through a football line,” says Wes Bohn, an assistant video coordinator that season. Giannis would be drenched in sweat after completing a full workout after all his teammates had left, prompting Bohn to always have three towels ready for him.

  That made an impression on Tim Frazier, who was fighting for a roster spot. It was jarring to him that Giannis, a global icon, was staying later than anyone, sprinting harder than anyone. “I don’t think Giannis knows what a day off is,” Frazier says. Not even when he is supposed to be taking a day off.

  Giannis loved playing chess with Mason Yahr, who worked with the Bucks medical staff from 2016 to 2020, mostly as a sports science data analyst. Giannis was so intense when the two played. Every time Yahr took one of his pieces, Giannis would look completely disgusted with himself. “He was so pissed,” Yahr says. One match, Yahr beat Giannis, as Giannis was forced to surrender when Yahr took Giannis’s queen. “He always told me he’d get me back,” Yahr says. “Giannis didn’t want anyone to beat him in anything.”

  * * *

  Giannis was virtually unstoppable as the season began, eventually dropping forty-four against the Cavs in December 2018. He was trying to lead not just with his actions but with words, something he’d learned from point guard Jason Terry the previous season.

  Terry had told him that being a leader was being able to have hard conversations with teammates. “Leaders have to tell teammates what they need to hear, not only the praise they want to receive,” Terry told him. “Leaders keep their voices heard. And honesty is eventually appreciated.”

  Giannis looked at him, a little shy. “Are you sure?” he asked. “I can say that?”

  Terry nodded. Giannis almost needed permission, someone to tell him it was OK to be that person. Terry would whisper to him during time-outs, “Dominate the next segment. Dominate the next play.”

  Giannis began to operate with a different kind of confidence: he knew there was nobody who could stop him one-on-one, full speed ahead to the basket. He was making an effort to speak up more too.

  “We need to hear you,” Budenholzer would tell him. “We need to hear you as much as we see you on the court.”

  That wasn’t something he had been comfortable with, especially since Kidd had tried to get him to do that. But he was improving. “It’s something he’s still growing into,” Brogdon says.

  Giannis would get on teammates if they weren’t giving as much as he was, but he also listened, offered support. He was never going to become a rah-rah type of leader, but he’d make sure his teammates knew he believed in them by giving each individual attention.

  One such teammate was Christian Wood, a roster hopeful during training camp. Wood had gone undrafted in 2015 and had bounced around the NBA and the G League, hoping to find a home. Giannis barely knew him when meeting him at training camp but respected Wood’s work ethic. He treated Wood like he was a starter. Like he was a focal member of the team. Giannis gave him a bracelet that featured the words “prove them wrong.”

  “He makes you want to compete at his level,” says Wood, who now plays for the Rockets. He was the same way with Frazier, the other roster hopeful. Giannis would stay after with Frazier, teaching him the plays. Frazier once asked Giannis where he wanted the ball and how he could help get him more opportunities, but Giannis ignored the question and asked Frazier what plays he wanted to run. “I was the sixteenth man,” Frazier says. “He didn’t have to do that.”

  Giannis was trying to become a better listener. Be more receptive to what his teammates thought.

  “He listens a lot more,” says Sterling Brown, who now plays for the Rockets. Brown remembers Giannis being so individually focused at one point—“I gotta get better; I’m so determined”—but the last few years he’s understood more of the bigger picture. What it might take for the Bucks to win. Which might not even be him taking the final shot all the time. “For him to sit back and listen to his teammates, and take advice, take constructive criticism, that was huge for me to see,” Brown says.

  The Bucks flourished, taking off for an NBA-best 34–12 start. Giannis was selected as an all-star starter and team captain. He couldn’t believe it—a team named after him (Team Giannis), the other after LeBron (Team LeBron). “If you told me that six years ago, I would have never, never, never thought I would be in this position right now,” he told reporters before the game.

  He led all scorers with thirty-eight points, though his team lost, 178–164. Giannis had eleven dunks, including a play where teammate Paul George tossed the ball off the backboard to him. As he rose up, he saw James under the basket. James instinctively moved out of the way as Giannis threw the ball down.

  After the game, James found Giannis. “I love everything about you, man,” James told him.

  Giannis stood there, shocked. Confused. He was still in awe. Even at this point. “Who, me?” his face seemed to say. He’s LeBron fucking James, Giannis thought, reflecting after the game. James had been a role model for so long. His measuring stick from afar.

  Giannis was taking his game to a new level, especially after dropping a career-high fifty-two points at Philadelphia in March 2019. One play, Giannis backed down Ben Simmons deep into the post and turned around and dunked all over him, screaming, “He’s a fucking baby!” Giannis was done being nice. He was done being modest.

  He continued to be praised for how different he was. What a freak he was. A near seven-footer who can maneuver up and down the floor like a guard. A bigger player who has uncanny vision. A player who can guard positions one through five, not willing to give up a single play.

  “He’s a guy that’s redefining the game of basketball from the inside,” says Caron Butler, his former teammate. “And he hasn’t even peaked yet. I think once the jump shot and the things he’s lacking in but improving in happen, he’s going to be a guy that you cannot tell the story of basketball without mentioning.”

  We simply don’t have language for someone like Giannis, who has been compared to players all across the spectrum, from Scottie Pippen to Shaquille O’Neal. Someone who can miraculously dominate a jump-shooting era without a reliable jump shot. He is, as the Wall Street Journal smartly put it, “the basketball equivalent of a tech billionaire communicating by carrier pigeon.”

  “I don’t know what he is,” says Alvin Gentry, Kings associate head coach. “Is he a guard? Is he a forward? Is he a center?”

  “I don’t know anyone like him,” says Mike D’Antoni, Nets assistant coach. “If you’ve got nine things to do to stop Milwaukee, he’s eight of them,” D’Antoni says. “The preparation it takes to stop him. That’s how he’s changing the game.”

  “I think he’s a center,” says The Ringer’s Bill Simmons. “A center in whatever the modern version of the center is.” Giannis reminds Simmons of a young Shaq—not Shaq from the Lakers or mid-2000s Suns or Heat, but Shaq the amazing seven-foot athlete who, if he was within nine feet of the rim, was going to score.

  “I think the mistake we make in assessing Giannis was comparing him to LeBron or Durant and people like that,” Simmons says. “I feel like the people to compare him to are Shaq or Joel Embiid. He doesn’t seem like a center, but he is. He should be playing center.… He’s devastating around the rim. Completely unstoppable. You have to foul him, or he’s dunking.”

  Giannis is leading a new generation of young international players who are emerging as multidimensional stars, like Luka Dončić (Slovenia), Joel Embiid (Cameroon), Nikola Jokić (Serbia), Ben Simmons (Australia), and Kristaps Porziņģis (Latvia). And they’re bringing their fan bases. In fact, about 74 percent of Bucks Facebook followers in 2018–2019 were international.

  The NBA had 108 international players that season and a record 7 international all-stars, a substa
ntial change from the 1990s and even early 2000s. The 1992 Dream Team, a group that included Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson, asserted itself as the best in the world. European teams, however, were improving. And when America lost to Greece in 2006, in that game Giannis watched as an eleven-year-old, it was clear that European teams had caught up. A long list of international players have now starred in the NBA, including Dirk Nowitzki, Hakeem Olajuwon, Dikembe Mutombo, Toni Kukoč, Manu Ginóbili, Tony Parker, Yao Ming, Peja Stojaković, Steve Nash, Pau Gasol, and many more.

  The number of overseas-born players has tripled over the past two decades. “They weren’t just coming to play,” says Ersan Ilyasova, Giannis’s former Bucks teammate, who is from Turkey. “They were really succeeding here at a high level.”

  And changing the way the game is played. Nowitzki, especially, changed things for big men. The way he shot the ball, the way he ushered in new expectations for taller, bigger players to be more mobile and perimeter oriented rather than back-to-the-basket post players, defined a generation.

  European clubs were teaching players fundamental skill work from a young age—ball handling, passing, footwork—while American clubs were stuffing players in eight-court gyms and having them play AAU games from morning until night.

  “The coaches in Europe are there to develop talent, not to win,” says D’Antoni, who had played in Italy from 1977 to 1990 before turning to coaching, “but in the US, if you’ve got a high school coach, he’s trying to win.”

  Giannis benefited from that development-first mindset, but his story was different from those of other international stars. He didn’t come out of a top club. He proved that if a player is talented or has potential, has the physical capabilities and intangibles, the incredibly vast network of American and international NBA scouts will find him.

  “It gives a lot of kids back home an opportunity to believe that it is possible and that it can be done,” says Bismack Biyombo, Charlotte Hornet and vice president of the National Basketball Players Association, who was born in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo. “It just shows how global the game of basketball is. Everywhere you go, kids are talking about the NBA.”

  John Hammond, now the GM of the Orlando Magic, feels emotional every time an executive or a scout asks him about a potential prospect by saying, “Could he be as good as Giannis?” That Giannis, the one people weren’t sure what to make of, is now the benchmark. The model comparison. Hammond notices it, too, when asking young players which player they want to emulate. They often tell him, “Giannis.”

  “He’s inspiring players,” Hammond says. “They want to be him.”

  One such prospect is Jalen Green, the prospective number 1 pick in the 2021 NBA draft, who bypassed college to play for the G League’s Ignite. Giannis inspired Green, who is half Black and half Filipino, to take his game overseas and explore his roots. “Giannis kind of inspired me to go to the Philippines,” Green says. Green enjoyed competing there in 2019. He’s become almost a cult figure there, as young as he is. “When I saw Giannis’s story, I thought, Why not go represent for my Filipino side?”

  The more famous Giannis has become, the more he’s been asked to explain both of his cultures. His Greek side, his Nigerian side. Even his own younger brothers often made fun of him because he’s the only one of all of them who still has a Greek accent.

  “When you gonna change your accent?” they’d ask him. “When are you gonna start talking a little bit more Americanized?”

  “Nah, this is who I am,” Giannis would tell them. “I take pride in who I am.”

  Giannis has never much cared what people thought of him, but he did read what fans, strangers, said about him, how they questioned whether he could be the face of the NBA because he was, in their words, “not American enough.” Or that he didn’t have enough swagger because he’s a low-maintenance person. A superstar who doesn’t want the attention that comes with being a superstar.

  “A lot of people say that I can be the face of the league,” Giannis told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2019. “Lately, people have told me… the closest people, you know, my family, my girlfriend, my mom, my brothers, [other] people say that I cannot be the face of the league because I’m not American. I don’t have the American culture in me.

  “I sat back and thought about that. Should I have a little bit more American swag? Should I come with the suit to the game? Should I be more Americanized? But man, if I can’t be the face of the league being me, I don’t want to be the face of the league.”

  * * *

  A few weeks after the 2019 all-star game, Giannis visited Alex’s practice, as he often does when he doesn’t have Bucks practice, and started leading players through drills. Some of Alex’s teammates were still shocked that Giannis not only was Alex’s brother but showed up so frequently—and not just to watch but to coach.

  And on this particular March afternoon, Giannis wasn’t in a good mood. He didn’t like the way players were lackadaisically moving through drills. Going through the motions, like they had somewhere better to be. He gathered them at center court and told them about his teammate Eric Bledsoe, who had recently signed a four-year $70 million extension. “Do you think that made him feel comfortable because he had the extra money?” Giannis asked the group.

  No one said anything.

  “No,” Giannis continued. “No. He’s in the gym a lot more now than he was before. And it pushes me to be in the gym more and be with him more.”

  Players nodded. But Giannis wasn’t finished. “Who do you guys feel is the best team in the Eastern Conference?” he asked. It was the kind of question players weren’t sure if they were supposed to actually answer. Jamari Magee, Alex’s closest friend, raised his hand. “The Bucks,” Magee said.

  Giannis looked surprised. “You think we’re better than Toronto! You think we’re better than Boston! You think we’re better than Philadelphia! No. We’re not better than them.”

  Technically, the Bucks were the number 1 seed in the East at that point, had playoff pairings been predetermined, but Giannis’s message was clear. “We haven’t done anything,” Giannis said. “We didn’t win a championship. We haven’t done anything! You can’t ever get comfortable.”

  Giannis certainly wasn’t getting comfortable, even though the Bucks had transformed into a legitimate title contender, something that had seemed inconceivable his rookie year. But Budenholzer challenged Giannis to slow down, to put as much time in his recovery as he did in his work. It wasn’t about getting comfortable, but it was thinking more about how he could preserve himself to be at his best.

  He’d sub Giannis out when Giannis didn’t want to be subbed out. Giannis wanted to play every minute. “We need you later, not today,” Budenholzer would tell him. That was difficult for Giannis to accept. Even with the knee soreness that he’d dealt with off and on for the past two seasons, he felt he could play through anything.

  Because he had played through anything. He had lived through so much—there was nothing on the basketball court that could truly hurt him. In Giannis’s mind, he couldn’t relax. He always told his brothers that: “It’s human nature to want to relax, but you can’t relax. You have to get back into killer mode.”

  Budenholzer, however, knew there were times to kill—and times to recover. With an eighty-two-game season plus playoffs, plus the number of times Giannis was smacked underneath the basket, it all took a toll on his body.

  “They’ve had to pull him back, save him from himself a little bit,” Yahr says, “because literally Giannis won’t leave the gym if you don’t make him.”

  * * *

  The Milwaukee River was dyed green, Bucks green, celebrating the Bucks’ top seed heading into the 2018–2019 playoffs. It was glorious, the way the city embraced the Bucks. Were excited about the Bucks again. Everything had changed in the six years Giannis had been with the franchise. The arena had birthed an entire entertainment complex nearby, Deer District.

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p; It seemed like the Bucks could actually compete for a title. They finally had their first generational player since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Their first shot back at that elusive 1971 championship. “You never expected the Bucks to be playing during the prime-time games on ESPN, on TNT,” says Tyler Herro, the Heat guard and Milwaukee native. “It’s crazy to be seeing it. They’ve proved they are at the top of the league.”

  It was surreal for Paul Henning, who’d rallied for organizational change with Save Our Bucks just six years before. “Now, the first thing people think of when they think of Milwaukee is Giannis,” Henning says. “He’s changed something that’s been in place for forty years.”

  “He is,” Henning says, “Milwaukee’s son.”

  So much of Giannis is Milwaukee. How blue-collar he is. How he doesn’t act like he’s better than anyone else. “He treats everybody with the same respect as the next person,” says Logan Miranda, a Bucks team attendant who often guards the home locker room. During Miranda’s first year with the Bucks, Giannis was putting on sneakers when he noticed Miranda. Giannis then walked up to Miranda and introduced himself. “Hi, I’m Giannis.”

  As if Miranda didn’t know. “What’s your name?” Giannis said.

  “Logan.”

  “Cool. Good to meet you.”

  The next day, Giannis walked by Miranda. “Hey, Logan.”

  Miranda still can’t get over that Giannis remembered his name.

  Matthew Smith, a longtime Bucks fan whose two sons now have Bucks posters on their bedroom walls, wasn’t sure what the Bucks were thinking when they drafted Giannis. He had never heard of him. Now? “He’s a once-in-a-lifetime player,” Smith says. “And to have him in Milwaukee? You see players like that, but they’re in New York or LA or Chicago. To be blessed to have a guy like that in Milwaukee? It’s amazing.”