Giannis Antetokounmpo saved basketball in Milwaukee
When the Bucks drafted Giannis, we didn't know if the team would be able to stay in Milwaukee. A few years later, he led the team to a championship. 13 years of greatness. What a remarkable run.
The Recombobulation Area is a 19-time 21-TIME! Milwaukee Press Club award-winning opinion column and online publication founded by longtime Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. The Recombobulation Area is now part of Civic Media.
We didn’t even know if the Bucks were going to stay in Milwaukee.
That was the state of the NBA franchise in the city back on June 27, 2013, when the Bucks selected Giannis Antetokounmpo with the 15th overall pick in the NBA draft. The franchise’s future in the city was perilous at best after years of relocation rumors and a team stuck on the treadmill of mediocrity. Outside of their postseason run to the Eastern Conference Finals in 2001, the Bucks did not win a single playoff series in the 23 years prior to that draft. Owner Herb Kohl had retired as a U.S. Senator in 2012 after more than two decades in office, and an uncertain future loomed for the Milwaukee Bucks franchise. Arriving at a fork-in-the-road moment seemed inevitable.
That September, before the 2013-14 season began, Adam Silver visited the city in advance of becoming the NBA’s next commissioner, and said, “We need a new arena in Milwaukee,” making it clear that the Bradley Center was no longer fit for NBA basketball, and a big decision would need to be made. About a month later, a haphazardly-constructed Bucks team would get off to a calamitous start to the season, winning just four of their first 20 games.
The team was terrible, it seemed like a very real possibility that the Bucks could leave town, but on that roster was the player who would alter Milwaukee’s fortunes forever.
We’re sad now because he’s being traded to Miami, but Giannis Antetokounmpo changed everything for the Milwaukee Bucks.
This beleaguered sad-sack franchise mired in an eternal quest for the 8-seed took a big swing, selecting the 6’9” 18-year-old from the Greek second division, where highlights of his play were only available on grainy footage, with the 15th overall pick. You could argue now this was the single greatest draft pick in NBA history, not just because it brought someone who would turn out to be a multiple-time MVP to the team, but because Giannis would save basketball in Milwaukee.
The skinny rookie showed flashes of greatness in his first season, a tantalizing talent with size and skill and unique abilities on the court. Off the court, the wide-eyed teenager discovered smoothies and pancakes, much to our delight. In one tremendous bit of Giannis lore, he was stuck on Brady Street with no cash after wiring money home to his family in Greece at Western Union, and started running down the street toward the Bradley Center, only for a Bucks fan to see him and offer him a ride to the arena. Members of his family arriving in Milwaukee after a fraught legal process to watch him help lead a comeback victory against the New York Knicks, seated next to Kohl, was a truly special moment.
In his first season, he was already becoming a legend. His legend kept growing — and he kept literally growing — from that rookie season through twelve more, transforming the Bucks and transforming the city of Milwaukee. Just a few years after wondering whether or not there would even be an NBA team in Milwaukee, Giannis would lead the team to the mountaintop and parade through downtown to celebrate the city’s first championship in 50 years.
We went from not knowing if we’d even have a team to being the city of champions after one of the most remarkable playoff runs in NBA history. No words could ever capture what that meant for Milwaukee. It is beyond basketball.
From the archives (July 2021):
For me, the Giannis Era for the Bucks has been the most rewarding sports fan experience of my life.
In the early 2010s, a few fellow NBA fan friends started throwing these little watch party type of events with what we called the Slam Dunk Social Club to try to get people excited about Bucks basketball and come together around our hometown team. A few of us would get overly excited about Larry Sanders or Carlos Delfino and wonder if this was going to be Ersan Ilyasova’s breakout season. But it would still take some doing to get the bar to turn the channel from the Packers or Brewers (or even from the Wisconsin Badgers or Marquette Golden Eagles) most of the time. And we’d still mostly be watching the Bucks lose.
That all started to change with Giannis. With Giannis, there was hope. It was almost a cliche, the extent to which his ascent became a type of storybook legend, but it all happened. I was there. We were there.
In 2014-15, he already emerged as starter and the Bucks bounced back into the playoffs. In 2015-16, he got the keys to the offense. In 2016-17, he became the league’s Most Improved Player, averaging nearly 23 points and nine rebounds per game, becoming an All-Star starter for the first of 10 consecutive seasons, and he would only continue to improve amid coaching changes and roster shakeups the following year. In 2018, following the hiring of Mike Budenholzer as head coach and signing Brook Lopez to play alongside Antetokounmpo in the frontcourt, the Bucks blasted out of the gate looking like bonafide title contenders, and Giannis would soar to his first of back-to-back MVPs, and the Bucks would reach the Eastern Conference Finals. For the next five years, the Bucks had the best team in the NBA, competing for a title every season, something none of us who grew up with the Bucks never even really dreamed of experiencing.
The peak arrived, of course, in 2021, when Giannis and the Bucks went on the most incredible playoff run imaginable, sweeping a Miami Heat team that dispatched them from the playoffs in the covid bubble the year before, defeating the vaunted Brooklyn Nets in an epic seven-game series, overcoming an injury to Giannis in the Eastern Conference Finals to best the Atlanta Hawks, and upon his miraculous early return, coming back from a 2-0 deficit to win four straight, capped off by a 50-point closeout performance that transcends NBA legend. There was no way Giannis was losing that game. A ferocious competitor as the league has ever seen, once the title was in his grasp, he did everything he possibly could to win that game. A true champion, in every sense of the word.
Along the way, as we watched the Bucks become champions, we saw the city transform. Before Giannis, there was no Fiserv Forum, no Deer District, no Bucks gear everywhere you turn. The team was an afterthought, and then it became the best show in town.
If you told me this all would actually happen, I never would have believed it. When I was watching those games with friends in the Slam Dunk Social Club, I never dreamed that the Milwaukee Bucks, of all teams, could ever actually win the Finals. I loved basketball and I loved Milwaukee, but a championship? That was for other fans in other cities, not for our beloved Bucks.
But that all changed with Giannis Antetokounmpo. Throughout that time, I had one guiding principle as a Bucks fan: As long as we had Giannis, I liked our chances. And just a few short years after wondering whether the team would even be able to stay in Milwaukee, we had a championship parade winding through the streets of downtown. I brought my daughters to that parade with me, and shed tears carrying them on Water Street, overcome with emotion. What the Bucks brought to this city was bigger than basketball. And none of it would have happened without Giannis Antetokounmpo.
I will be endlessly grateful for that experience, and beyond glad I savored it every step of the way. Milwaukee has only hosted two championship parades — for the Braves in 1957, and for the Bucks in 2021 (the 1971 Bucks never got a parade). It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience in a city like Milwaukee. The collective joy from the celebration on the night of Game 6 and the parade later that week is something I will cherish for the rest of my days.
Since that day in June of 2013, where I tweeted with exuberance about the “Greek dude” the Bucks drafted, I got married, became a father, moved across the country, moved back, started a business, had another child, and experienced so many wonderful things along the way. Throughout all of this, so often, Giannis and the Bucks have been there in the background — from having the game on anytime they were playing to organizing our lives around playoff runs to endless get-togethers with friends and family around Milwaukee. So many conversations and group chats and Twitter nonsense centered around our team, for years and years. The way sports can bring people together and bring a city together never felt more real than it has with Giannis and the Bucks.
The championship T-shirts the players wore for that parade spelled “EARNED” across the front. I loved that then and I love it now. Milwaukee is a tough city. Things don’t come easy for us here. But that 2021 team, like the city itself, was resilient. Bringing a championship to Milwaukee had to be earned, there could be no other way. The collective joy we experienced in this city that wonderful summer was beyond our wildest dreams.
What Giannis brought to Milwaukee is nothing short of miraculous. The end has been messy and uncomfortable and really goddamn annoying at times, as endings tend to be, but for 13 years, what he’s brought to Milwaukee and to Bucks fans around the world is well beyond what any of us could have ever hoped for. He’s the greatest player in franchise history, he brought us a championship, and flags fly forever.
What a run. What an absolutely phenomenal, unforgettable run. To quote “The Sandlot,” “Heroes get remembered, but legends never die.” In Milwaukee, Giannis Antetokounmpo is nothing short of a legend. He may play for another team now (which profoundly sucks), but he’ll always be a Milwaukee Buck, he’ll always be a champion, and he will always be the one who saved NBA basketball in the city of Milwaukee.
Dan Shafer is a journalist from Milwaukee who writes and publishes The Recombobulation Area. In 2024, he and the publication joined Civic Media, where he is currently a Contributing Editor. He’s written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Heartland Signal, Belt Magazine, WisPolitics, and Milwaukee Record. He previously worked at Seattle Magazine, Seattle Business Magazine, the Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Magazine, and BizTimes Milwaukee. He’s won 24 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Journalism Awards. He’s on Twitter at @DanRShafer.
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Follow Dan Shafer on Twitter at @DanRShafer, at BlueSky at @danshafer.bsky.social, and on Threads at @danshafer.
Terrific post that perfectly captures my feelings. He has helped transform this community in a very large way. We could argue about whether a community should invest such weight in a game played by millionaires, but no one can deny the civic pride and unity that was earned by Giannis, the Bucks and Milwaukee. My deepest, and most unrealistic, wish was that he would be a Buck his entire career, but we know how rare that has become. That Greek kid ran down Brady Street and into our hearts. He'll always be Milwaukee, no matter the jersey he wears.
Well done, Dan. Thank you. As a guy who was around for the first title in 1971, the city had a lot more fun with the recognition in 2021. That was true in large part because of the love for Giannis (and Khris Middleton and Jrue Holiday and Brook Lopez and others). Giannis was a player who was easy to love, and who also proved to be a very wise young man. He will always be beloved in Milwaukee. As will Bobby Portis. I wish both of them all success.