Who knew the New Yorker of all publications would write an article about Giannis.
I'm guessing that means, he's arrived.
Late in the Milwaukee Bucks’ close second-game loss to the Toronto Raptors, on Tuesday night, the team’s sui-generis star Giannis Antetokounmpo backed his way toward the basket, along the baseline. His defender, Raptors forward P. J. Tucker, buttressed himself, but Antetokounmpo, all roughly seven feet of him, nimbly spun and charged the hoop. Tucker, a good and muscular defender, kept pace, forcing Antetokounmpo behind the basket—but Antetokounmpo spun again, and extended one cartoonishly long arm to flick the ball into the basket as his body sailed in the other direction. Tucker was called for a foul on the play. “He is one step away from being able to dunk the ball from almost anywhere on the court,” Tucker had said after the first game in the series, which the Bucks handily and unexpectedly won. (Milwaukee is the No. 6 seed; Toronto, No. 3.) At one point in that first game, Antetokounmpo got a high screen, drove, and then dunked over Tucker’s teammate Serge Ibaka. Hanging from the rim post-dunk, his right shoe simultaneously touched the floor.
This past season, Antetokounmpo led his team in points, rebounds, assists, steals, and blocked shots, a feat that only four previous players have managed. But with Antetokounmpo, it is not so much about the numbers as it is the sheer sense of improbability one has while watching him play. That sense, along with his country of origin and the challenge of pronouncing his last name, led to Antetokounmpo’s nickname, the Greek Freak—though lately that moniker has mostly given way among basketball fans to a simple first-name basis: Giannis. “The basketball world has always been compelled by big people who can move gracefully,” Sports Illustrated’s Lee Jenkins, who wrote a January cover story about Antetokounmpo, said recently. “And what’s going on right now is you have big people who are really moving more gracefully than they ever have before—not necessarily sure why that is—and he seems to be the prime example.”
Jenkins was thinking of the Knicks’ Kristaps Porzingis, Anthony Davis of the New Orleans Pelicans, Karl Anthony Towns of the Minnesota Timberwolves, and the injured 76er center Joel Embiid. All of them have lately been called “unicorns,” a label that seeks to capture their almost mythical rarity. But that term starts to lose its meaning when you apply it to five or six young players at a time. Antetokounmpo is the only one of this cohort who regularly handles the duties of a point guard, bringing the ball up the court, creating shots for his teammates. “I don’t think there’s really anyone else like him,” the Bucks’ reserve point guard, Matthew Dellavedova—who, at six-four, has more familiar dimensions for the position—told me earlier this season. “I don’t think you’ll see someone in the exact mold of Giannis.”
The ineffability of Giannis’s play hasn’t discouraged those intent on describing it, but it has posed a challenge. Two years ago, for Grantland, Zach Lowe wrote that, “on any given possession, the Greek Freak can look like he knows nothing and everything at once. He is an empty vessel, and in a blink, he is one vision of modern basketball fulfilled.” In January of this year, after Antetokounmpo hit a contested turnaround at the buzzer against the Knicks, in Madison Square Garden, Jay Caspian Kang wrote, in the Times Magazine, that it was “as if T-1000 from ‘Terminator 2’ had challenged a Wang computer to a jumping contest.” Following Game 1 against Toronto, Tim Bontemps, of the Washington Post, made a more familiar pop-culture comparison: Inspector Gadget, with his go-go bionic limbs.
Antetokounmpo was drafted by Milwaukee with the fifteenth pick, in 2013, at just eighteen years old, and two and a half inches shorter than he is now. Last February, the Bucks coach Jason Kidd, who was himself one of the league’s great point guards, began experimenting with Antetokounmpo at his own former position. The Bucks, a losing team, had room to experiment. And, as with all things basketball-related, Antetokounmpo took to the task with astonishing immediacy. “You hear about all the ten thousand hours, but this guy sort of flies in the face of all that,” Jenkins said, alluding to the popular conviction that reaching an exhaustive threshold of practice results in expertise. “These guys are sometimes born more than made.” Another Bucks point guard, the six-two Jason Terry, who is an eighteen-year N.B.A. veteran, put it similarly, when I visited the team’s locker room in February: “Someone like him is God-given, heaven-sent.”
An angel, a unicorn, a T-1000, a freak, an empty vessel: in every description of Antetokounmpo, one can sense the strain of people trying to put into words a sight they haven’t seen before. On Thursday night, I went to a pub outside Milwaukee to watch Game 3 of the series, against Toronto, and I asked a few of the fans there if they could do any better than the flailing sportswriters. “He plays like a little guy, but he’s seven feet tall,” Brad Lauterbach, a local cabinetmaker who was watching with his wife, Kate, said. Others described Antetokounmpo, whose parents immigrated to Greece when they couldn’t find any work in Nigeria, and who signed a contract worth a hundred million dollars earlier this season, as humble.
In front of a clamorous home crowd, the Bucks pulled ahead early, and their lead ballooned to as much as thirty-two points in the first half. They won by twenty-seven. Giannis put up unremarkable numbers, scoring nineteen points, but they were enough. Late in the third quarter, the Raptors guard Norman Powell drove past Antetokounmpo—and then, with one outsized stride, Antetokounmpo caught up with him just as he torqued his body for a layup. Powell released the ball, and Antetokounmpo sent it flying into the stands. Lauterbach, the cabinetmaker, enjoyed it. “He’s a little man in a big man’s body,” he said.
