49runaway MVP. Ask Bucks coach Mike Budenholzer, who
assisted Gregg Popovich for 17 seasons in San Antonio and
thus knows the art of interview brevity, whether he has run
out of ways to describe the Freak. Budenholzer is already
forming the one-word answer “Yes.” If you persist and ask
him to elucidate the player’s continued growth, he says with
a smile: “You had to throw in, ‘Could you describe.. .’ ”
It is a happy problem, he knows, and Budenholzer gives
it a shot: “It starts with his desire to improve and put in
the work to get better, not just every year but every day.
There’s a few things we look for as far as who we want
to be”—work rate, attitude, a panoply of skills—“and he
checks all the boxes. He has an incredible drive but also a
humility to him, and an expectation that he can get better.”
After a pause, Budenholzer adds: “Yeah, we’ll keep him.”
Budenholzer was speaking in Fiserv Forum before a
February game against the Sixers, who had beaten the
Bucks on Christmas Day. On this night, though, Giannis
will go off for 36 points, 20 rebounds and six assists in
a 112–101 win. It is Antetokounmpo’s fifth straight game
with 30 and 15. He is the only player ever to do it besides
Wilt Chamberlain, and the points come on a series of spin
moves and dunks, midrange jumpers, plus one monstrous
putback and a single three-pointer. It is another night
of routine greatness, in a season of workaday brilliance,
that has seen Giannis average roughly 30 points in under
32 minutes per game.
In the Bucks’ locker room afterward, Giannis and Thanasis
sit at the Freak’s locker,
speaking softly in Greek.
After 15 minutes, Giannis
rises to address the wait-
ing media, which numbers
a couple of dozen report-
ers even in small-market
Milwaukee, given the Bucks’
chase for one of the best
records in league history. “I
can get a lot better,” Giannis says. A lot? This is a frightening
prospect for opponents, as Antetokounmpo is already taking
more threes this year, stretching defenses, though he’s still
shooting only 31% from long distance. “I can be smarter,”
he says. “I can be sharper. I can make better passes. I can
make [a higher percentage of ] shots—three-point shots,
two-point shots. I can be better. That’s the mindset that I
have. I still gotta improve.”
Then he rejoins Thanasis, this time at his brother’s locker,
and the two speak softly again, now in English. The first
word that best describes the tableau as they exit together
is tender. The Sixers are headed back to Philadelphia, but
this is brotherly love. “He’s my teammate on the court, but
he’s also my brother out there,” says Thanasis, who made
his first start of the season on Greek Night against the
Nuggets in January and scored on an assist from Giannis.
“And he’s my brother off the court, but he’s also my team-
mate, because we talk basketball all the time.”to wrap his arms around the city. But he’s also in the smaller
banner, just across from the arena, that makes no men-
tion of him but doesn’t have to. Hanging on the side of the
Turner Hall athletic club, it says, simply, immigrants
welcome here.
Giannis covers one exterior wall of the Corner Market
convenience store in Milwaukee’s Tippecanoe neighbor-
hood, just north of the airport. Milwaukee artist Fred Kaems
received a commission to beautify a brick wall facing a
residential street, and in doing so he wanted to exemplify
Milwaukee, celebrate multiculturalism and offer hope in
a city historically polarized by race. “What is Milwaukee?”asks Kaems. “Who is important? Giannis isn’t from this
city, but he’s continued to grow here, and that’s a great
metaphor for the city. He’s growing as we do.” Like the
pigeon-befouled statue of Arthur Fonzarelli that stands,
thumbs raised, beside the Milwaukee River downtown,
Giannis is already a civic totem. The Greek Freak and the
Bronze Fonz represent mythic figures often seen in the
gymnasiums of southeastern Wisconsin. Giannis coaches
the Dominican High fall league team. In the winter, as the
Bucks’ schedule allows, he sits in a corner of the Dominican
bleachers, hood pulled up like basketball blinders. Last
season, after a Knights game 45 minutes away in Racine,
Giannis stood outside the gym in January, signing and
posing for 30 waiting kids. “I was that kid,” he often says.
He’s now a 6' 11", 242-pound, 25-year-old man, as long and
lean as a Giacometti sculpture, which isn’t to say that he’s
fully grown, because Giannis keeps getting better, improv-
ing significantly on last season, when he was the league’sAPRIL 2020CO
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“HOME IS WHERE YOUR FAMILY IS.
AND MY MOM AND MY BROTHERS ARE
HERE,” THANASIS SAYS.