The Giannis Generation

For 13 years, Giannis Antetokounmpo was a player for the Milwaukee Bucks.

13 years is a long time to sum up what any one person means to a team like the Bucks and a city like Milwaukee. And believe me, we have ascribed and attached so many thoughts and labels on the man who eventually became the savior of the Milwaukee Bucks in the eyes of many.

We know the story by heart: A scrawny, stateless teenager gets plucked from playing in Greece’s second division and is taken 15th overall in the 2013 NBA Draft by a Bucks team that was long past any sort of relevancy and prominence. What followed is the greatest developmental story in NBA history. An NBA champion, two-time Most Valuable Player, 2021 NBA Finals MVP, Defensive Player of the Year and perennial All-Star and All-NBA-caliber player since age-22.

As Giannis’ skills and stature grew, so did the Bucks. A decade-plus long All-Star drought ended when Giannis made his first All-Star appearance in 2017. The 60-win Bucks saw an 18-year long drought come crashing down when they won their first playoff series during Antetokounmpo’s first MVP season in 2019. And that’s just before we get to 2021.

Well, where do you even start? Game 7 in Brooklyn? How about going down in Atlanta with a devastating knee injury during Game 4 to come back for the start of the Finals a week later? Ah, it’s definitely the sun block. No, it’s the Valley Oop! Wait…the 50-piece to close out the Suns and help bring the Bucks their first NBA championship in as many years.

It’s not some grand, sweeping statement to say that Giannis has been at the center for the greatest memories all Bucks fans have experienced throughout their lifetimes. He made the impossible look possible and often so routine that we all eventually became numb to it all. It seems quaint to think of the salad days of the Giannis-point guard experiment of the Jason Kidd era and to see what he’s become now. 

And the funny thing is Giannis’ do-it-all talents were unmatched by his drive and determination. The stories of having to be barred from the Cousins Center, the Bucks’ practice facility that they shared with an archdiocese. The endless reserve of hearing anecdotes of what Giannis was like during practice and those war stories that drew him closer to his running partner, Khris Middleton. The time spent practicing on free throws after bad shooting nights. These early calling cards made Giannis a natural within his adopted city’s working class background.

So much time has passed that what Giannis means to you and what he means to me might be different, but it always ends in the same place. The feat of winning an NBA championship that put Milwaukee back on top of the basketball world on July 20, 2021 just won’t compare to anything else that I will ever experience as a fan. In particular, it’s changed how I view sports and what I want out of following a team.

No, I wasn’t among the 17,000-plus crowd inside Fiserv Forum. Nor was I sandwiched within the Deer District with the 60,000 people that wanted a night to remember in this city, especially after how COVID forcibly drew us all apart over the previous 16 months. Instead, I watched Game 6 from my couch in my home next to the woman who became my wife. And when the final buzzer sounded and those images of Giannis tearing up on the bench came through the screen amid the confetti raining and the overjoyed Bucks fans that spilled out onto the court, I started to cry. I didn’t want anything to spoil that feeling of seeing my favorite player and my favorite team do what I thought was unachievable. 

These are the kinds of feelings that make Bucks fans completely biased towards Giannis, by and large.

We’ve seen him grow up from a social media sensation who was completely in awe of living in America and how he lovingly endeared himself to life in this country and the NBA at 18 years old. His love and devotion to his family and loyalty to a city that took him in with open arms captured our fascination. And so did the smoothies and the corny Dad jokes that he would share on media day and Instagram posts.

That Giannis arguably became the most complete player the franchise has ever had completely blurred any objectivity then, now and in the future. He has rewritten the Bucks’ record books from the player that he can only be credibly compared to, that being Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Not only will he see his no. 34 jersey hang in the rafters, but he should be the first player in franchise history to have a statue made in his likeness in or around Fiserv Forum. 

Whatever is necessary to secure your basketball legacy for Springfield, Giannis has already done it in a Bucks uniform. He redefined what can be achieved as a small market superstar, between the on-court success, the Nike signature shoes and endless endorsements that has made him an international mogul. 

Giannis still carries the same level of salesmanship that he and his family had to resort to while selling trinkets on the streets of Greece as a way of making ends meet and surviving in this world. Basketball has been the way out of a life that could have seen his story go unwritten and unfulfilled. No one gets to where Giannis has gone without any sort of help along the way. There are so many figures that stood in his corner that helped him establish his future in Greece and in Milwaukee. And in this day and age where what clicks on social media is covered as much as what happens on the court, we got to see all chapters of this story.

We know this story by heart because Giannis let us all in. He has since capitalized on it with that 60 Minutes-produced segment, the Disney+ movie and the Amazon Prime documentary, but the prime example still is Mirin Fader’s Giannis: The Improbable Rise of an NBA Champion. A book that stands the test of time, in part because of its objectivity and the way in which it captured that Milwaukee slice of life and what Giannis means to so many different people and places.

You can’t go anywhere around Milwaukee without seeing something related to Giannis. It might be the mural on the side of 600 East painted by Mauricio Ramirez when you go down Wisconsin Avenue coming from the lakefront. It might be seeing someone wearing a Giannis jersey at Summerfest. Or it could be a little kid wearing some fresh Giannis kicks as they put up shots on their neighborhood court. 

We experienced these last 13 years of Giannis seeing the hope of wanting to win the big one fulfilled. He became the personification of success and being a champion to a city that is always battling its inferiority complex. It’s not enough that players and athletes, much less superstars, never call Milwaukee their home for very long, but the threat of relocation — something the Bucks know about over their 58 years — is rooted in our insecurities as fans. The looming specter that this could all be taken away from us makes us all hold on to our fandoms tighter.

For a long time, Giannis did his best to quell speculation. It always came with a caveat that as long as the Bucks were winning, he’d be happy in Milwaukee. He returned that favor by signing his supermax extension before the start of the Bucks’ championship run late in 2020, and he did it again when the Bucks went all-in on Damian Lillard. Unfortunately, the good times never last forever. When the Bucks stopped winning at the highest levels, the questions always returned in some form or fashion. 

The Bucks’ playoff crashouts, coaching carousels and questionable roster building accelerated the end of the line as we see today. The Bucks exhausted all resources to make good on the Giannis era pre-and-post championship and all Bucks fans that have paid close attention to the last 13 years know the exact twists and turns where this story could have gone wrong. It was a steady throughline that always made the ups and downs feel that much more extreme. 

The messiness of the last year showed the cracks in the foundation from top to bottom. It only came because Giannis did everything in his power short of saying, “I want out of Milwaukee,” perhaps as a way of preserving his legacy to the team and to the city. That isn’t to say Bucks fans can’t have their grievances towards how he handled his side of things or towards the team for letting this day come to pass when we never wanted it to happen in the first place. It goes to show that endings are never clean, especially with someone as universally adored as Giannis is here.

With this chapter closing, it's stark to see just how much things have changed. 

The loyalty part of Giannis' relationship to Milwaukee may certainly be tested and no scrubbing of old Twitter and Instagram posts can change his original intent that he wanted to be in Milwaukee for his entire career. It was essential to his ascension as a superstar and it will always be associated with him to some degree. But July 20, 2026 will mark five years since the Bucks won that NBA title — the only championship that will likely ever be won in July. It’s an aberration and fits out of the NBA’s history, just like the Lakers’ title in the bubble at Disney World the year before.

We all know what living the high life felt like in that moment and in the years since. To some Bucks fans, it may have harkened back to the Bucks’ origins and their run to the top in 1971. To a younger generation, all that they might have known about the Bucks was success and contending for a championship. For people like me, we know what it was like for a brief moment in 2001 and what the long winter that followed felt like before Giannis came along. 

To live during the Giannis generation was to believe what you were seeing. To live in the moment and be focused on the present. And if you were there, you knew to cherish it. Because you knew one day, it was all going to be over.