NBA fans will probably look back at this middle part of Giannis Antetokounmpo’s career with intrigue when he finally wins a championship. Let’s be honest: Even after two straight early exits, the odds favor Giannis one day raising the Larry O’Brien trophy, meaning the way we look at Giannis has to be through the lens of how that happens as opposed to whether he breaks through. Things around Giannis will certainly change between now and then, but the past two years have shown that ultimately, Giannis Antetokounmpo, for all his brilliance, needs to keep improving for the Bucks to become champions.
There’s more fun in imagining the system a new coach might run or what type of Eric Bledsoe trade could put the Bucks over the top, but Giannis is arcing up the same learning curve many NBA stars have traversed over time. LeBron James had to round out his offensive game as a shooter and post play-maker before becoming a champion. Michael Jordan had to bulk up, outwit the Bad Boys, and learn to trust his teammates. Greatness has a way of tricking us into blaming those who don’t have it, but greatness is also a spectrum. Giannis is great, but he needs to be better.
That means that until Giannis puts together a signature postseason performance, his shortcomings will always be a major reason why — right alongside any other player’s performance or the decisions made by the team’s various coaches and executives — the Bucks do not win.
Milwaukee built its team around what Giannis is great at. They averaged the shortest offensive possessions in the league in large part because they had basketball’s best fast-break finisher and one of its best turnover creators. Those turnovers were most often created because the Bucks deployed Brook Lopez as a deterrent at the rim and let their wings fly around the court, because that’s what Giannis is best at. Nearly three-quarters of their shots came from the most valuable spots on the court — the rim and the three-point line — which ranked seventh in the NBA. They got to their spots by incorporating Giannis as a drive-and-kick giant, a screener, and a post player. Without a great point guard, Giannis has had to become a chameleon on offense, even if it’s obvious he’s best around the basket.
The soon-to-be two-time MVP’s stat line in nine Bubble playoff games — 27 points, 14 rebounds, and six assists a night — hide the disappointment of his performance. Giannis clearly learned a few lessons from the Raptors’ suffocating six-game dismantling of Milwaukee last year, as he was more comfortable launching from three and more aggressive creating his own shot against Miami, but one thing was unchanged. When the Bucks couldn’t get an easy shot in transition, Giannis could not consistently create good shots for himself and his teammates to match the Heat’s scoring. The Bucks’ game plan was stifled pretty easily. Because of their roster makeup and dedication to to their scheme, Milwaukee needed Giannis to be otherworldly to reach its ceiling and he just wasn’t.
To be fair, the Heat in particular were a difficult matchup for Giannis and the Bucks because of Bam Adebayo, one of the only players in the NBA capable of matching Giannis’ length and athleticism. But the Heat front office also deserves credit for quietly building a stable of forwards who are functionally strong, a long-underrated quality among NBA defenders and one that is vital to contain Giannis. From Adebayo to Andre Iguodala to Jae Crowder to Jimmy Butler, the Heat were able to throw a variety of defenders at Giannis who were all able to match his physicality.
Giannis’ go-to move in the half court is simply to lower his shoulder, create space by ramming into his defender, and then hit them with a spin move or euro-step for an easy layup or a kick-out to beat a rotating defense. Because he is still not an elite ball-handler and doesn’t throw teammates open like the NBA’s best passers, defenses can home in on his drives. Miami was ready to do so, and they were happy giving him space for the first step, knowing they’d corral him and force either a turnover or a contested shot.
In a surprising Game 1 defeat, Giannis tallied six turnovers because of Miami’s aggressive stunting and his reliance on his inside scoring game against a Heat team that stonewalled him in the paint.
By Game 3, Giannis did adjust, and was able to get the ball on the move in more advantageous situations, but the Heat were ready for that, too. Not only did he go 0-7 from deep, he was inefficient all over the court and was flummoxed by Miami’s ability to show multiple defenders as he drove to the rim.
It looked as if Giannis was seeing ghosts. Miami pulled him all the way out of his comfort zone, forcing him into errant threes and even more puzzling fallaway jumpers and pull-ups inside the arc. The Greek Freak looked troublingly mortal through no fault of anyone but himself.
Obviously, there are issues that go beyond Antetokounmpo — the overall construction of the team, Mike Budenholzer’s startling rotations that every single person tabbed as an issue after Game 1, and the fact that the players just did not rise to the occasion as a collective. Milwaukee generated the third-best expected effective field goal percentage in the playoffs yet had just the seventh-best actual efficiency. In other words, they missed shots they should have made, and it was felt even harder after a regular season in which the inverse was true, and the Bucks out-performed their expected efficiency and had the highest effective field-goal percentage in the NBA. A coach’s job with the offense is to create advantages for his players, and there are hundreds of ways to do that. But a star’s job is to take that in and adjust to what he sees on the floor, and where Budenholzer missed, Giannis couldn’t make up for it like he could in the regular season.
The challenge is not unique to Giannis. It’s not as if Frank Vogel is reinventing basketball in Los Angeles, but LeBron James always has a secondary plan. Kawhi Leonard can get to his spot and make shots in isolation whenever he wants (albeit, Denver did a great job of making his life difficult late in their series to bounce the Clippers). Even the shooting-averse Jimmy Butler was able to take and make more jumpers against Milwaukee’s conservative defense in the second round.
To get to the next level, Giannis probably needs to focus less on the outside, where he made just 32.5 percent of his threes, and more about how to be excellent inside. Miami’s defensive pressure exposed that he has still not made the leap as a passer that we’re seeing from Jayson Tatum this postseason. At the same time, Giannis made just 7-19 shots from the restricted circle to the free-throw line in the playoffs. For all his improvements as a finisher, defender, post player and transition killer, Giannis now is largely an elite version of the long-limbed Greek Freak who entered the league in 2013, but there isn’t much new polish to his game. In two straight postseasons, Giannis has not had the capacity to adjust. Adding some effective counters to his head down, attacking the rim style — such as a floater or short midrange pull-up as defenders back up to set up the wall at the restricted area — would make it much more difficult to scheme him out of effectiveness.
Superstars define the playoffs, and so far Giannis has not proven himself up to the task. It is why he has not competed for a championship yet and also why it will be so fascinating to watch as he improves and eventually gets there. Milwaukee’s roster options, Giannis’ contract situation, and Budenholzer’s job status will dominate the offseason dialogue around Milwaukee, but in the end, it will all come back to whether Giannis can adjust to the teams that have outwitted him the past two years and excise his postseason woes.
