Giannis Antetokounmpo Decides to Stay in Milwaukee

The biggest question hanging over this NBA season now has an unexpected answer: Giannis is staying. 

Giannis Antetokounmpo ended speculation about his future on Tuesday by agreeing to sign a five-year contract extension with the Milwaukee Bucks worth $228 million. The deal will keep the two-time reigning NBA most valuable player with the franchise that helped develop an unknown Greek kid into a global superstar. 

“This is my home, this is my city,” Antetokounmpo wrote in a tweet, which he ended with emojis of a heart and prayer-hands. 

His decision to stay with Milwaukee—coming less than a week before the deadline, when the season begins next Tuesday—represents a financial windfall for Antetokounmpo and a major triumph for the Bucks. It’s a disappointment for the teams that were planning to pursue him in free agency next summer, but it’s also a sigh of relief for the NBA, a league that had become accustomed to big talents leaving smaller markets behind. 

Antetokounmpo didn’t have to sign the lucrative extension now—or ever. He could have dragged out the negotiations and left all that money dangling. He could have left the Bucks in unrestricted free agency next summer. He could have even signed another deal that promised him more flexibility in uncertain financial times, allowing him to exploit his leverage over the front office as he positioned himself for an even bigger payday in a few years. 

The presence of Antetokounmpo alone makes the Bucks title contenders for the third consecutive season, and his commitment signals a vote of confidence in a team that has flopped as a favorite in the last two playoffs. After their latest disappointing flameout, the Bucks remade their roster by trading for Jrue Holiday, a guard who makes the NBA’s best defense even better. But they bungled another trade in free agency that was meant to assure the face of the franchise that they would remain aggressive. 

His future in Milwaukee looked increasingly bleak as the season approached and Antetokounmpo still hadn’t signed his so-called supermax deal. When he turned 26 years old last week—that he’s only 26 is one of the more remarkable things about Antetokounmpo—his teammates gave him what they hoped would be a useful birthday gift: pens to sign a contract. 

Antetokounmpo himself seemed unsure that he would sign when he said before this season that he was focusing on himself and not his contract. The league’s recent history suggests that’s exactly the sort of thing that basketball players say when they are not prepared to put their names on a sheet of paper that pays them a quarter of a billion dollars. But then he did. 

Giannis Antetokounmpo will be dunking in Milwaukee for the immediate future. Photo: Stephen M. Dowell/Zuma Press

It was yet another welcome reminder in Milwaukee that a guy known as the Greek Freak has never been like other NBA stars. 

A poor kid who sold goods on the streets of Athens, Antetokounmpo came late to basketball and still played for a team in Greece’s second division when the Bucks selected him with the No. 15 pick in the 2013 draft. He slowly blossomed into the most unexpected MVP the league has ever seen. And that meant there was enormous pressure for the Bucks to keep him. 

The supermax contract extension, which was designed to reward incumbent teams by giving them a significant financial advantage over the competition, will make Antetokounmpo a very rich man. It’s expected to pay him $228 million over five seasons, including more than $50 million in 2026, when he’s only 31 years old and could easily be in the prime of his career. Any other team offering him a maximum contract next summer would have been limited to $145 million over five years—a difference of $83 million. 

That rule change has not exactly worked as the league intended. NBA players now make so much money that something like $83 million no longer sounds like that much, and many have politely declined all that cash and ditched their teams even if it meant taking less guaranteed money in the short term. And there is nothing stopping Antetokounmpo from requesting a trade if he’s dissatisfied in a few years. 

That would be out of character for Antetokounmpo, as he showed with his decision on Tuesday. He found himself in the same position that so many of his peers encountered. His choice turned out to be different. 

LeBron James left Cleveland for Miami in 2010. Kevin Durant left Oklahoma City for Golden State in 2016. Antetokounmpo stayed.

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Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com

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