Giannis Is Great. His Trade Might Not Be.
- Jan 29
- 10 min read
Daniel Waddleton
Jan 29, 2026
WHAT'S FELT INEVITABLE over the past six months -- and something the league has quietly been bracing for over the last three years -- has finally arrived. Milwaukee Bucks superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo has asked for a trade, with ESPN’s Shams Charania reporting the request ahead of the February 5 trade deadline.
The incentives to act now actually align for everyone involved, starting with Milwaukee. The Bucks owe a 2026 first-round pick swap to New Orleans, but with the Pelicans near the bottom of the standings, that swap is unlikely to convey. Therefore the worse Milwaukee finishes, the better the pick they’re likely to retain.
Giannis has financial incentive. A midseason deal preserves his eligibility to sign a full four-year, roughly $275 million supermax with his new team as soon as October 2026. And the acquiring team benefits from a thinner trade market, an extra half-season to chase a title, and a clearer path to long-term control of their new star.
So here we are, potentially on the cusp of one of the most dominant players in NBA history get traded while still in his statistical prime.
Over the last seven seasons (424 games), Giannis has averaged 29.8 points, 11.8 rebounds, and 6.0 assists. He’s won two MVPs, a Finals MVP, and a Defensive Player of the Year. Despite now being 31-years-old, he still remains one of the most destructive rim-pressure engines the league has ever seen.
This scatterplot from Basketball Index illustrates how extreme 2025-26 Giannis’ rim pressure is. His playstyle has completely broken teams, the sense of balance, the normal concepts of help defense, all that go out the door against a Giannis driven team.
Defensively, even if nightly intensity has dipped under heavier offensive burden and accumulated mileage, when fully engaged he remains one of the better low-man defenders in basketball. His ability to deter shots at the rim with simultaneously recover out to shooters is what earned him a Defensive Player of the Year award, and he can still reach that level.
The Greek Freak remains a superstar in the truest sense of the word, which is exactly why what I’m about to argue requires proper context.
For nearly all teams, I would NOT trade for Giannis Antetokounmpo.
On its face, that sounds absurd. Why wouldn’t you trade for a top-20 player all time at 31-years-old? The answer to that lives in the layers below.
. . .
How It Unraveled in Milwaukee:
To say this collapse was Giannis’ fault would be unequivocally false. The biggest issue was that the ecosystem around him slowly failed to replenish itself.
Since Giannis ascended to MVP status, Milwaukee’s draft history reads as follows:
2017 – D.J. Wilson (17)
2018 – Donte DiVincenzo (17)
2020 – Jordan Nwora (45)
2021 – Isaiah Todd (31)
2022 – MarJon Beauchamp (24)
2023 – Chris Livingston (58)
2024 – A.J. Johnson (23), Tyler Smith (33)
2025 – Bogoljub Marković (47)
The Bucks repeatedly doubled down on the Giannis era -- something they should be praised for -- but doing so thinned the margin for error every year. When you trade picks to chase championships, you have to hit on the few selections you keep. Clearly, they didn't.
And the doubling down meant betting on veteran stability over internal upside. Jrue Holiday (30 at acquisition), P.J. Tucker (35), Serge Ibaka (32), Jae Crowder (32), and Damian Lillard (33) were all moves designed to maximize the current championship window. To acquire them, Milwaukee sent out five firsts, five seconds, and Donte DiVincenzo. Meanwhile, cornerstone running mates Khris Middleton (now 34) and Brook Lopez (now 37) aged alongside this run.
The Bucks weren’t mismanaged, they were committed to contention around Giannis. But once you pivot from upside to stability, you can lose flexibility. There became no internal youth to absorb decline as draft picks missed. When erosion began, it hit everywhere at once.
However, Giannis wasn’t insulated from that erosion either despite his greatness. The mounting injuries, the friction alongside other high-usage stars, and the stylistic constraints of his playstyle when the supporting cast slipped all contributed to the ceiling flattening.
The key point to take away here is that those dynamics existed in Milwaukee, and they don’t magically disappear simply because the jersey changes.
. . .
Injury and Decline Risk:
Injuries happen, but at this stage it's clear Giannis carries elevated risk. The history has grown steadily, particularly with soft-tissue issues, and his recent availability raises red flags.
Recent & notable Giannis injury history:
2022-23 postseason: Lower-back injury vs Miami, missed two games and was limited upon return.
2023-24: Non-contact calf injury late in the season, missed the playoffs entirely.
2024-25: Non-contact calf injury during warmups, missed multiple games mid-season.
This season: 30 of 45 games played, most of time missed with calf and groin issues.
Giannis isn’t getting any younger, and he plays one of the most physically demanding styles you'll ever see. He absorbs waves of contact nightly, lives at the free-throw line, and relies heavily on explosion and brute force. The improvements to his midrange game have helped -- he’s openly talked about developing it to reduce wear and tear -- but he’s taking a beating regardless.
That leads directly into aging curve discussion.
Over the last decade, Giannis ranks first in both rim field goal attempts per 75 possessions and free throw attempts per 75. We’ve established how unique his size and skillset is, but for the sake of the exercise, I looked at the closest Hall-of-Fame player workload comparisons over that same span:
Harden - 2nd in FTA/75, 12th in Rim FGA/75
Anthony Davis - 3rd and 4th
LeBron - 7th and 2nd
Westbrook - 6th and 5th
These aren't stylistic clones. But they are load and geometrical comps -- high-usage, high-rim, high-contact superstars.
When you examine their aging curves through multi-year LEBRON impact data -- one of the strongest publicly available catch-all advanced metrics that measures total two-way impact -- the pattern is consistent. By the time these guys hit their early 30s we begin to see a steady decline curve.
Giannis’ own multi-year LEBRON trend already reflects that flattening. He isn’t falling off a cliff -- his declining numbers are literally higher then most players peaks -- but he’s no longer trending upward either. Needless to say, there’s no historical precedent of a 6'11" interior force with this kind of early-career mileage reversing that curve into his 30s.
Defensively is where that steady decline appears first. Looking at the chart below you can see his defensive impact peaked between 2019 and 2021. Since then, it has trended downward.
Now context matters -- heavier offensive load, declining defensive infrastructure around him -- but the version of Giannis who functioned as a defensive ecosystem isn’t appearing nightly anymore. He’s still very good, but the gap between “very good” and “system-altering” is meaningful.
Don’t believe the numbers? Watch one quarter from a home regular-season matchup against Portland last season. There are multiple plays where he’s either disengaged or a step slow.
When you’re trading a handful of firsts and your developmental core for a 31-year-old big whose value is tied to physical dominance, these are things worth flagging. Even without catastrophic injury, how confident are you in 20-25 straight playoff games of full health, even just this season?
. . .
Fit, Scalability, and Play Style Succumbence:
Even the best players need the right ecosystem if you want to optimize them.
Luka Dončić is the cleanest recent example. Dallas built a roster tailored to amplify his strengths and cover his weaknesses: vertical-spacing screeners, rim protection, 3-and-D wings, and an elite secondary creator who could attack the second side without hijacking possessions. The geometry was clean and the roles were defined. The result was a Luka-led Finals run.
Now in Los Angeles, despite continued gaudy numbers, Luka looks sloppier and the team feels like it's punching below its weight. People are asking if he “got worse,” when the simpler explanation is that the ecosystem isn’t as clean.
Giannis presents the same challenge, and in many ways, an even tougher equation to solve.
He’s a 6'11 perimeter initiator who can't shoot and prefers not to play full-time center. To maximize him, you likely want four other at least passable shooters on the floor, including a five who can both defend pick-and-roll and stretch the floor. You also need secondary ball handlers who won’t lose significant value without offensive primacy.
It’s achievable -- Milwaukee did it beautifully in 2021 and 2022 -- but it dramatically narrows your construction lane, especially if you’ve emptied your asset cupboard to acquire him.
Let's focus on that secondary ball-handler point, because it's going to be very important when it comes to his next team.
“Giannis-ball” tends to dominate the shape of possessions when he's on the court, as the Damian Lillard experiment illustrated this clearly. On paper, it was perfect: elite shooter, elite pick-and-roll operator, historically blitzed guard paired with the league’s most devastating rim attacker.
In practice, it never became the two-man engine people imagined.
Giannis’ off-ball game is subpar. He’s not a great screen setter, rarely runs handoffs, isn’t a pick-and-pop threat, and short-roll playmaking isn’t his forte. And while he often shows flashes as a vertical spacer in the dunkers spot and offensive rebounder, it would be a very optimistic take to say he would ever embrace that role.
The result was a constant push-and-pull between “Giannis-ball” and “Dame-ball.” Their on/off box score splits reflected it: Giannis’ production remained steady regardless. Dame’s dipped alongside him and spiked without him. In other words, Giannis-ball will always take primacy regardless of the other skillsets on the floor. That's not to say it's bad offense, but there doesn’t appear to be “new heights” upside when pairing him with another hypothetical synergistically fitting high-usage star.
If a top-75 all-time player coming off a 32-point, 7-assist season couldn’t fully integrate into Giannis-ball, it’s fair to question how easy that integration really is for the type of secondary star these trade target teams would look to pair him with in an attempt to win a championship.
Milwaukee's Jrue Holiday and Khris Middleton worked in these secondary star roles because they were unique. Jrue’s a point-guard, yet his primary value was defensive and being a little things king. Middleton was this big wing with no fat in his game, thriving in a lower-usage role that still required efficiency. Neither co-star required Giannis to alter his playstyle.
So let's ask the question that now becomes super important: how effective is Giannis-ball when it’s nearly impossible to pivot away from it?
Basketball Index’s Passing Creation Quality metric estimates the expected efficiency of shots created for teammates. Giannis ranks in the third percentile. That’s more concerning when you factor in volume, because now a major part of your teammates shot diet is the shots your generating them. See the chart below for a visual.
This data doesn’t mean he’s a bad passer. It means the shots he creates for teammates aren’t typically things like high-value rim attempts or free throws.
We know that Giannis-led lineups can get high-value rim attempts and free throws, but that's almost entirely self-generated. Teammates skew heavily toward shots farther away from the basket given the way he attacks defenses.
The regular season has proven this model can work, with Milwaukee fielding former top-five offenses built around it. Giannis gets his 30 efficiently, shooters convert enough open threes, and the defense travels alongside it.
In the playoffs though, it’s not as bread and butter.
The question is whether it has another level once competition stiffens and elite defenses can lock in over seven games. Transition opportunities shrink. The Giannis "wall" is built with precision, as his driving and playmaking angles become easier to crowd or cut off with proper scouting.
Then he can’t reliably punish teams from the free-throw line or by shooting over the top, and his post game isn’t a consistent counter. And when your offense leans heavily on one player collapsing the paint while everyone else lives on threes, you’re inherently operating closer to variance.
So when the system is fully tailored around Giannis-ball, where does the offense turn if that primary action stalls? From my perspective this is why we’ve repeatedly seen Milwaukee’s relative offensive rating dip in the postseason compared to the regular season, with Giannis’ efficiency often sliding alongside it.
The playoffs are about chipping away at great players’ efficiency and tightening the vice-grip against opposing offenses game by game. Some players are built to counter endlessly, some aren’t. That doesn’t make Giannis anything less than elite, it simply means there are structural limits to this specific offensive framework, and when it’s Giannis-ball or nothing, those limits matter.
. . .
What You Have to Give Up, and Timeline Suppression
Even with these question marks, Giannis won’t come cheap. He’s still a top-five player, still in his theoretical prime, and Milwaukee has every reason to be extremely selective. He’s not an expiring contract, and he’s the lone premium asset ahead of a long rebuild. Any acquiring team will have to part with significant assets to maximize Milwaukee’s return.
Take a look at recent blockbuster trades involving four or more first-round picks/swaps (plus rotation players) give us context of the success/failure rate:
Paul George to L.A. (2019): Game 6 Conference Finals
Anthony Davis to L.A. (2019): Champions
Russell Westbrook to Houston (2019): Game 5 Second Round
Jrue Holiday to Milwaukee (2020): Champions
James Harden to Brooklyn (2021): Game 7 Second Round
Rudy Gobert to Minnesota (2022): Game 5 Conference Finals
Donovan Mitchell (2022): Game 5 Second Round
Kevin Durant to Phoenix (2023): Game 6 Second Round
Mikal Bridges to New York (2024): Game 6 Conference Finals
Only two of nine resulted in championships. Really outside of the Gobert deal -- which has produced a stable identity and sustained playoff relevance for Minnesota -- most of these deals either plateaued teams or forced resets within a few seasons.
Granted Giannis may be better than anyone on that list, but history shows adding a superstar doesn’t raise title odds in a clean, linear way. More often it appears to shrink your window and magnifies structural flaws on your roster.
In a second-apron environment, flexibility is oxygen. Recent champions built through the draft and supplemented with opportunistic trade additions -- Andrew Wiggins to Golden State, Aaron Gordon to Denver, Derrick White to Boston, Alex Caruso to Oklahoma City -- without sacrificing their entire margin for error. This isn’t the NBA of 10-15 years ago, where you empty the clip no matter the cost.
A Giannis trade isn’t simply acquiring a superstar; it’s committing to a compressed timeline and a team-building philosophy recent history has punished more than rewarded. There's no more runway. No more patient growth. No “let’s see what we have first and then clean up the margins." Every season becomes title-or-bust.
Timeline suppression manifests in pressure from ownership, pressure from fans, instability among the players and coaches, accumulating in future rash decisions. It’s not a place you want to live if your team isn’t on the doorstep of a championship and with all the aforementioned points throughout this piece, I'm just not sure what team ends up there after this deal.
. . .
Closing Thought
Giannis is an all-time great two-way player. He won a championship for a reason and it's not impossible that he wins another.
Yet, unless you are operating from a place of pure desperation -- Golden State with a 37-year-old franchise icon, or Miami having nothing to protect and longing for a star at any cost -- I believe the risk profile outweighs the upside given what it will require.
This piece isn't meant to be Giannis disrespect or some hot-take theater, it's simply my evaluation of the situation. Time will tell if it's the correct one.
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