Rastall Ramblings: End of Giannis era in Milwaukee brings mixed emotions

Even though there has been an air of inevitability to the impending end of the Giannis Antetokounmpo era for a bit now, the fact that the reality has arrived brings about all sorts of emotions.

Most obviously, there is sadness and frustration that this day has come. Like many Bucks fans, I wanted to believe Giannis could be that rare superstar that only ever played for one team a la Dirk Nowitzki in Dallas.

For a long time, it didn’t seem like a pipe dream to believe that could happen. After all, even though there has been breathless speculation from some national pundits about the possibility of Antetokounmpo leaving Milwaukee dating all the way back to his first MVP season in 2019, Giannis signed two supermax extensions to stay with the team that drafted him and led the franchise to its first NBA championship in a half-century.

The connection between Giannis and Milwaukee was special — and still will be, after any bitterness of the way his exit unfolded subsides. 

Giannis clearly loved the city where he became one of the great rags-to-riches stories in the history of sports, going from an immigrant kid from rough beginnings to a global superstar. In doing so, he helped drag the Bucks from an NBA afterthought and a bastion of mediocrity into a golden era for us fans. It’s not hyperbole to wonder if the Bucks would even still be in Milwaukee without Giannis. He is one of the greatest athletes in the history of Wisconsin sports, and the love he had for Milwaukee was reciprocal, to say the least.

However, the last few years have been a slow march toward this result, even if many of us hoped it could somehow still be avoided. The supporting cast around Giannis that helped win a title in 2021 aged out and the Bucks found themselves in the second apron, which, under the NBA’s current collective bargaining agreement, starts the clock ticking on any contender’s window due to the restrictions that come with being in the second apron for too long.

I did not envy Bucks general manager Jon Horst’s situation of trying to both appease Antetokounmpo’s desire to compete for a title each year while living with the reality of a roster that was in desperate need of a reset. But Horst had his share of misses, and wasting a couple of draft picks on clear project players at a time when the Bucks badly needed young guys who could contribute right away will always be baffling.

At an ownership level, the hiring of Doc Rivers after the already-failed Adrian Griffin hire will go down as one of the dumbest decisions in franchise history.

The organizational missteps combined with the way Giannis handled his status with the Bucks over the last year — which ranges somewhere between annoying to outright shady — made this past season a miserable one. It also made the news of the Giannis trade a bit less tragic feeling to me than it would have even a year ago because I was just so ready for the saga to end.

When Giannis returns to Fiserv Forum for the first time with the Miami Heat, he will be met with a well-deserved, raucous ovation for all he contributed to the Bucks. Once he retires (perhaps with a final run in Milwaukee preceding it), his jersey will hang from the rafters, and a statue will go up of him outside the arena.

Yet for the moment, it’s hard to escape the feeling that this all could’ve been handled so much better and, by refusing to outright publicly demand a trade, Giannis turned the whole thing into a worse spectacle than it needed to be.