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Happy Flagg Day to all who celebrate.
The NBA's annual Draft Lottery takes place Monday night in Chicago to determine, first and foremost, who wins the No. 1 overall pick and the right to draft Duke's Cooper Flagg.
That is the most important matter in #thisleague which ranks as a lock to be determined this week, but the future of Milwaukee's Giannis Antetokounmpo certainly looms over the lottery and the weeklong draft combine activities in the Windy City as the obvious co-headliner.
My latest reporting on the Giannis front in eight separate installments:
League sources say that Antetokounmpo, no matter what was breathlessly discussed and debated on the Monday morning talk shows, has made no firm decisions yet about his future. Maybe he will ultimately ask the Bucks to trade him. At the moment, though, that is still a maybe.
The Bucks, league sources say, remain hopeful that Antetokounmpo will not ask out after a third successive first-round exit. Maybe it is false hope, but Milwaukee — as we've been writing all season — isn't going to entertain the prospect of trading its face of the franchise until it has to.
Neither of the first two points will dissuade 29 other teams from checking in with the Bucks this week as well as Antetokounmpo's representation — and, yes, Octagon's Alex Saratsis is a Northwestern grad based in Chicago — to register their interest in the event that the 30-year-old who has spent his entire 12-year as a career as a Buck is made available via trade.
It is believed that the Bucks' annual postseason sitdown with Saratsis and co-agent Georgios Panou to delve into Antetokounmpo's future has not yet taken place.
Don't forget that Antetokounmpo is likely in the extreme to try to dictate the destination to the extent that is possible … provided, once again, he actually requests a trade. He has two fully guaranteed years left on his contract before a $62.8 million player option in 2027-28.
Putting aside, for a moment, how much Giannis will be able to actually dictate destination … we've been writing since January that Antetokounmpo is Brooklyn's dream trade target. Houston and San Antonio are obviously incredibly well-positioned to make a trade run at the two-time MVP. Oklahoma City certainly could be an extremely viable trade partner if the Thunder decided to divert from their famously patient team-building approach to join the fray. Utah is another team with a variety of trade assets that never gets mentioned in these hypotheticals. New Orleans is a team to monitor, too, as a potential participant in an eventual multi-team Antetokounmpo trade construction because the Pelicans have control of the Bucks' first-round pick in the next three drafts.
Yet we repeat: That is only a partial list of teams expected to make trade bids for Antetokounmpo if (when?) we reach the point that the Bucks start fielding offers. One more time: We are not there yet.
Emphasis on yet.