The Greek Freak Staying a Buck: It Doesn't Assure Anything

Giannis Antetokounmpo is coming off the 2019-2020 National Basketball Association (NBA) season not just with a Most Valuable Player (MVP) award but also with a Defensive Player of the Year (DPOY) award. He led the Milwaukee Bucks to a league-leading 56-17 record in the regular season only to falter in the Eastern Conference Semifinals against the Miami Heat where the back-to-back MVP injured his ankle in Game Three and again in Game Four. The Heat went on to finish the job in Game Five with Antetokounmpo sitting helplessly on the bench.

After another disappointing end to another MVP season, many began to question Antetokounmpo's future with Milwaukee as he was supposed to become a free agent come the 2021 offseason. 

Earlier this week, the hopes of other teams acquiring Giannis Antetokounmpo in a blockbuster trade have been buried to the ground as Antetokounmpo signed a 228 million-Dollar contract extension to stay put in Milwaukee for the next five years.  The question now is: What's next for Antetokounmpo and the Bucks?

For starters, Giannis Antetokounmpo has been with the Bucks for the past seven years and the farthest they've gotten to in the playoffs was the 2019 Eastern Conference Finals where they lost to the eventual champions, the Toronto Raptors of Kawhi Leonard. 

With him inking his signature on the contract extension, the Bucks can start pinpointing the things that went wrong in the past two seasons that saw them take the best record in the NBA but no trip to the NBA Finals. Many are calling the Bucks a "regular-season team" as their success only came during the regular season and that, the Bucks have yet to prove that they can compete when it matters the most in the playoffs.  

One may suggest trading the likes of Khris Middleton, Brook Lopez, and even Eric Bledsoe. Incidentally, those three players have proved to be a good supporting cast for Antetokounmpo but they have their own weaknesses that cost the Bucks especially against a balanced Heat team. Eric Bledsoe, for one, has been misfiring from outside. In the last playoffs inside the Orlando bubble, Bledsoe only shot 25% from the three-point line. As a team, Milwaukee shot 35% from the three-point line in 10 games of the 2020 playoffs. However, trading a misfiring Bledsoe may not be enough to improve Milwaukee's chances in the playoffs. Nor will replacing Mike Buldenholzer as the head coach because whoever takes over will have to have to deal with the same roster. 

Milwaukee's situation heading into the 2020-2021 regular season is complicated. They may have made Giannis Antetokounmpo stay put for the next five years but it doesn't solve anything. It doesn't assure anything. 

For one, Antetokounmpo's signing a supermax deal with Milwaukee doesn't assure that he would stay in Milwaukee until the end of the contract. In 2014, Anthony Davis agreed to a contract extension worth 145 million Dollars to remain with the New Orleans Pelicans, and a year before the end of the contract, he was traded to the Los Angeles Lakers.  

Photo is from Sports Illustrated