Winners and Losers of Giannis Antetokounmpo's Record Extension with Bucks

The biggest NBA mystery of the next year is over. On Tuesday morning, two-time reigning MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo announced that he plans to sign a five-year supermax extension with the Milwaukee Bucks.

The announcement comes less than a week before the Dec. 21 deadline and takes the biggest free agent of next summer's class off the market. Coming off a big offseason in which they added guard Jrue Holiday, the Bucks now have Antetokounmpo on board for the next half-decade.

News this big impacts the entire league, and there are many angles of the announcement to unpack.

The Bucks' offseason was controversial. After swinging a blockbuster trade for Jrue Holiday, the team appeared to have a deal in place for Sacramento Kings guard Bogdan Bogdanovic, which then fell through in a bizarre set of circumstances detailed by B/R's Jake Fischer.

Besides being a short-term setback for the Bucks' on-court improvement, it was cause for concern as to whether the front office did enough in this crucial offseason to convince Antetokoummpo to pass up free agency and commit the next half-decade of his life to the franchise.

That uncertainty lingered into training camp. Antetokounmpo's teammates all gave him pens for his 26th birthday, and in his first media availability last week, he tried to downplay questions about his future that were going to linger all season if he didn't give an answer by Monday.

Ultimately, the Bucks did enough to convince him to stay—or maybe he was always going to and the Holiday trade was just a bonus. We'll never know. Either way, the other players on the team won't be playing this season under a cloud of scrutiny.

More importantly, Bucks fans can breathe a little easier. They don't have to go through this season having to read constant speculation about their superstar's future or reckon with the possibility that this strange season, likely played without fans in the stands at Fiserv Forum, will be his last in Milwaukee before the beginning of a long rebuild.

That's all out the window for now.

Every few years, there's a free agent who truly changes the landscape of the NBA—the kind of player teams spend multiple years preparing to pursue, making sure their cap sheets are clear to make a pitch. Think Kawhi Leonard last summer, Kevin Durant in 2016 or LeBron James in 2010.

That's what the promise of a 26-year-old Antetokounmpo would have been.

Miami Heat president Pat Riley was successful in landing James and Chris Bosh in the summer of 2010, kicking off the last decade of unprecedented superstar movement. Coming off a trip to the Finals, in which they defeated the Bucks in five games in the second round of the playoffs, they seemed poised to be among the front-runners should Antetokounmpo choose to leave Milwaukee.

Antetokounmpo is a gym rat, which is the foundation of the culture Riley and head coach Erik Spoelstra have built in Miami and what attracted Jimmy Butler last summer. It would have been easy to picture Antetokounmpo fitting in seamlessly.

Even after they signed fourth-year All-Star center Bam Adebayo, who shares an agent with Antetokounmpo, to a five-year rookie max extension last month that cut into their 2021 cap space, the Heat loomed large over the Giannis sweepstakes.

There goes that plan.

Fortunately, the Heat are in a great position to contend for years to come with two All-Stars in Butler and Adebayo and up-and-coming sharpshooters Duncan Robinson and Tyler Herro. They aren't forming another superteam with Giannis, but they'll be fine.

The most high-profile potential 2021 Giannis suitor was the Toronto Raptors, who hoped to leverage his close relationship with team president and fellow Nigerian Masai Ujiri, along with a playoff-ready young core that includes Pascal Siakam, Fred VanVleet and OG Anunoby.

Just last week, a documentary series called Open Gym, about the NBA's Disney World bubble, aired on Canadian television and, for some reason, included a segment detailing Ujiri's attempt to move up high enough in the 2013 draft to take Antetokounmpo, who he had scouted extensively up until then.

The message behind including this scene was clear to anyone watching, including, perhaps, Antetokounmpo himself: We wanted you back when most other teams didn't believe in you.

Unfortunately for Ujiri, he wasn't able to make that move seven years ago, and the Bucks did draft and develop Antetokounmpo, who rewarded them for that early belief with Tuesday's long-term commitment.

Also on the list of potential suitors were the Dallas Mavericks, armed with cap space and a 21-year-old likely future MVP in Luka Doncic.

The Mavs organization has plenty of experience marketing and promoting international players thanks to Dirk Nowitzki's 21-year Hall of Fame career, and Doncic and Kristaps Porzingis are the next evolution. The prospect of teaming with those two for an all-European Big Three might have been appealing to Antetokounmpo, and a pairing of him and Doncic would have dominated the NBA for the next decade.

Now, Dallas will have to settle for having just one generational talent who hasn't entered his prime yet.

The biggest reason it ultimately made sense for Antetokounmpo to sign: Not many 26-year-olds have the opportunity to lock in a quarter of a billion dollars.

We can talk all we want about whether the Bucks have enough to win or whether another team might be able to make a better case for why he should spend his prime years with them. But that's a lot of money to have in front of you on a piece of paper, especially considering Antetokounmpo's backstory.

Antetokounmpo's journey from poverty back home in Greece to generational NBA superstardom has been well documented in various documentaries and podcasts—and soon a book and Disney biopic.

Now, Antetokounmpo and his girlfriend have a young son. He has three brothers, two of whom are in the NBA with the third on his way. None of them will ever have to worry about money again, and neither will his family in Greece.

Now that they can't spend a whole season speculating about where Antetokounmpo will go in a year, what will the major NBA media outlets do? How soon will it be pointed out that he can still request a trade, despite everything we know about him indicating that he isn't wired that way?

Who's next in the spotlight? Will it be Karl-Anthony Towns, or will the discourse skip forward to Donovan Mitchell, whose ink isn't even dry yet on the five-year rookie max extension he signed with the Utah Jazz?

Trae Young signed with Klutch Sports this year. If the Atlanta Hawks don't make the playoffs, will he want out soon? When does the clock start for Zion Williamson with the New Orleans Pelicans?

This is the cycle of NBA coverage now. Transactions, both current and hypothetical, drive more interest than the product on the floor. Every year, a star or two is either thought or known to be unhappy in his current situation, and that storyline threatens to swallow the season whole.

By signing this extension with the Bucks, Antetokounmpo took a step toward breaking that cycle.

Most importantly, the fact that Antetokounmpo committed a year early to stay with the Bucks long-term is undeniably good for the health of the NBA.

It's become the accepted pattern of events that superstars in small markets will eventually grow restless and leave, either by trade request or in free agency, to join up with other stars in more glamorous markets.

Damian Lillard bucked the trend last year when he signed a four-year, $196 million extension to stay in Portland. But Lillard isn't a two-time MVP. Antetokounmpo staying in Milwaukee is like if Kevin Durant had stayed with the Oklahoma City Thunder instead of leaving for an already-dominant Golden State Warriors team in 2016.

Players having agency over where they play is a good thing. But for fans of all but a handful of teams, it can feel inevitable that if they do happen to get lucky and land a generational talent in the draft, it's only a matter of time until they leave. It's better for the league when there's a reason to care about more than just a few teams, to put a team from Milwaukee on national TV and to get fans in that city to invest.

When you think of Reggie Miller, the only team you think of is the Indiana Pacers. The same is true of John Stockton in Utah. Even though those Hall of Famers never won titles, they were close multiple times and ultimately have an unbeatable legacy in those cities.

Antetokounmpo leaving for the Heat or Mavericks wouldn't have guaranteed him a title. And if he had won one with one of those teams, he would have been viewed by fans as a hired gun, much like Durant was in Golden State.

With both Lillard and Antetokounmpo making these long-term commitments to the teams that drafted them, maybe it will create a precedent that superstars in non-glamourous markets don't have to force their way out eventually.