Giannis Antetokounmpo likely won’t move this summer, but he’s still looming over every offseason move

Two names dominated the buildup to the 2025 NBA offseason: Kevin Durant and Giannis Antetokounmpo. Durant’s situation has settled. He was traded to the Houston Rockets on Sunday. Antetokounmpo’s situation is more complicated. Nothing has happened directly. He has not been traded. He has not asked for a trade. By all accounts, he is not available. We should proceed as though the 2025 offseason will not include an Antetokounmpo trade unless something drastic changes in the near future.

And yet, the wider basketball world doesn’t seem especially convinced that he’s going to stay with the Milwaukee Bucks forever. Just think about the Durant sweepstakes for a moment. By all accounts, the San Antonio Spurs were Durant’s preferred destination. Yet San Antonio did not make a significant offer. ESPN’s Shams Charania said on the Pat McAfee show less than a week ago that he believed the Spurs could be “stocking their assets for potentially a bigger move, a bigger player, someone who might fit their timeline.” Hmm. I wonder who that could mean?

The Rockets actually did trade for Durant, but think about the process that it took to get there. For weeks, the Rockets reportedly held the line, refusing to offer their best assets. The didn’t give the Suns control of their first-round picks back in 2027 or 2029. They obviously didn’t dangle prized young players Amen Thompson or Alperen Sengun, but they also managed to keep Jabari Smith, Tari Eason, Reed Sheppard and even Cam Whitmore. The only notable young player they surrendered was Jalen Green, who was redundant and overpaid anyway. Their powder is still relatively dry.

Neither the Spurs nor the Rockets are banking on an Antetokounmpo trade coming this summer. Nobody should be. All of the reporting has suggested that he is staying in Milwaukee. But they’re hoarding the assets it would take to get him. They may just be doing it out of prudence. Anything good enough to net an MVP is good enough to want to keep, after all. Or, more likely, they’re hoping that something changes in the somewhat near future. The ingredients for such a change theoretically exist.

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Sam Quinn

Antetokounmpo rumors have followed a certain cycle in the past. In 2020, he was one year away from free agency and he wanted the team to improve. He used that leverage to pressure the Bucks into trading for Jrue Holiday. It worked. They won a championship. Fast forward to 2023. This time, he’s two years away from free agency. However, he spent that summer on a media tour that essentially boiled down to “no, really, I might leave the Bucks if they don’t put a championship team around me!” They traded for Damian Lillard soon after. That one didn’t go so well.

There are two significant differences in 2025. The first is that Antetokounmpo was eligible for contract extensions in both the 2020 and 2023 offseasons. He signed after both the Holiday and Lillard trades. However, he isn’t extension-eligible this summer. He’ll have to wait until next offseason to re-sign with the Bucks. That makes any proclamations of loyalty this offseason somewhat trivial. We live in an NBA in which Kyrie Irving once publicly told a crowd in Boston that he planned to stay with the Celtics only to eventually leave for Brooklyn. Your word means little in this league. It’s your signature that counts.

Which brings us to our second point: there’s no obvious path to a Holiday- or Lillard-esque trade this offseason. I’ve covered the reasons Milwaukee is going to have so much trouble rebuilding its roster in more depth here, but here’s the short of it: the Bucks control very little of their own future draft capital, they have very little promising young talent on their roster, they are paying max money to Lillard likely not to play for them next season and to return in a diminished fashion after that, and even the veterans that remain just aren’t very good. There’s no obvious path to fixing the roster. The most plausible paths to fixing the team here, short of a truly remarkable and unexpected series of moves this summer, would take multiple years and transaction cycles.

Let’s assume for the time being that such a miraculous offseason isn’t in the cards, and Milwaukee instead makes only modest additions this offseason with the limited resources it has at its disposal. Then the question becomes, just how good can Giannis Antetokounmpo make what will likely be a bad team?

The Bucks may be optimistic on that front. The 2024-25 season just ended and yet the Eastern Conference’s two most dangerous teams, the Celtics and Pacers, are presumably out of the 2025-26 running because of Achilles injuries suffered by their best players. Milwaukee might be looking around and thinking, “this conference is up for grabs and we have the best player.” Antetokounmpo effectively became Milwaukee’s point guard once Lillard went down with a blood clot near the end of the regular season. He nearly averaged a 31-point triple-double from that point on. It’s entirely plausible that he wins MVP in that role if the Bucks can even be a .500 team.

It’s also possible that Milwaukee’s roster has thinned so significantly that no single player, even Antetokounmpo, can raise it to a playoff level. As much upside as the East has lost in Boston and Indiana, it’s not as though those teams are going to tank. Cleveland will return the bulk of its 64-win roster. The Knicks will be back with a new coach. Orlando traded for Desmond Bane. The Pistons and Hawks are young and ready to improve. Maybe this is finally the year that the Philadelphia 76ers stay healthy. There’s a difference between the East being vulnerable at the top and the East lacking depth in the middle. Even now, Milwaukee likely isn’t favored to earn a top-six seed. If they were a No. 5 seed with Lillard healthy, what are they without him? And what happens if Antetokounmpo misses three weeks with a minor injury?

If they’re a play-in team, or perhaps something even worse, Antetokounmpo’s faith in the Bucks is tested. And that’s what teams like the Rockets and Spurs are banking on. It’s one thing to be convinced to give the only thing you’ve ever played for a chance to figure things out in the offseason. It’s quite another to deal with the day-to-day drudgery of a lottery season. If the Bucks are bad at the deadline, these teams will be ready with offers. If Antetokounmpo shows any hesitance to sign that extension, the offers will pour in.

So that’s where we stand. Antetokounmpo almost certainly isn’t moving this summer. But teams will believe that he’s truly locked in on Milwaukee when they see it. Until then, the possibility that he might one day become available is going to loom over everything that happens this summer. Teams are going to preserve assets. They are going to operate cautiously.

The New York Knicks are instructive here. They just made the Eastern Conference finals, but if they could get a mulligan on the Mikal Bridges trade, they’d likely take it. With five first-round picks, a stellar roster and a major market to offer, they might have factored significantly into any future Antetokounmpo sweepstakes. But they likely traded themselves out of it by nabbing Bridges. It might one prove worthwhile. The Knicks have a path the 2026 Finals. But given the myriad issues the Bucks are facing right now, it’s hard to imagine many more teams potentially want to trade themselves out of the Antetokounmpo sweepstakes.