Behind the scenes of the Giannis trade: the restless final hours

A NOTE USUALLY goes out around 6 p.m. in the Milwaukee Bucks‘ facility. There are no strings attached to it. It’s simply an offer from general manager Jon Horst to take a break from a long day of work and hoop for an hour or two downstairs on the team’s practice court.

Whatever business you’re working on — be it a report on a draft prospect, player development update or trading the best player in franchise history — will be there for you when the game is over. So will dinner.

The idea is to reconnect with the game they all love.

Once upon a time, Horst was a guard on the Rochester College basketball team that won two USCAA national championships. Over the past 10 days, before Horst and the Bucks finally traded Giannis Antetokounmpo to the Miami Heat after a year of torturous debate, Horst and his staff got in two or three pickup games.

Sunday night was different. That was the night the two finalists for Antetokounmpo — the Heat and Boston Celtics — had submitted their final offers for the two-time MVP and been told to wait for an answer.

It was also Father’s Day.

Horst had a choice: keep everyone at the facility to debate the merits of both offers until consensus was reached or call it a night and make it home in time to see his two kids before bed.

For a year, the Bucks had debated whether it was finally time to trade Antetokounmpo and, if so, what it would take for them to do so.

Antetokounmpo had communicated to them on numerous occasions that he felt the time had come.

But it wasn’t until this season ended with such a resounding whimper — with Milwaukee winning just 32 games, the league launching an investigation into the team based on Antetokounmpo’s accusations that the club wouldn’t let him play, and missing the play-in tournament — that the Bucks had finally accepted their fate and focused on the return they could get for him, rather than mortgaging the last of their future to convince him to return.

Sunday night was the moment of truth.

Boston’s offer would return a star in Jaylen Brown, a former Finals MVP, around whom the Bucks could start rebuilding.

Miami’s proposal included an All-Star, Milwaukee native Tyler Herro, a strong collection of young players and draft capital that would allow the Bucks more optionality to build their next team.

One offer would lend itself to immediate competitiveness, but essentially restart the cycle they’d just exhausted with Antetokounmpo without replenishing the resources needed to build around Brown. The other was a full reset, with building materials.

Horst had canvassed the league for months, fielding offers and presenting them to his front office and ownership group, then getting feedback from Antetokounmpo’s camp as to whether he’d be willing to extend his contract with those teams.

At least four strong bids had died on the vine after Antetokounmpo rejected them, multiple sources with knowledge of them say.

It was the last night of an exhausting, weekslong negotiation period to finalize the end of a protracted, awkward yearlong saga — one that had consumed three teams, while the rest of the league waited for a resolution. Either way, the ripple effects would be enormous.

This final debate was too complicated to solve overnight, and so Horst didn’t offer a staff pickup basketball break before a long night of work.

He sent everyone home early and made it back to his own kids by 10 p.m.

The Father’s Day celebration was muted: some cake, a card and a bottle of cologne.

THE BUCKS WERE pressing up against the deadline co-owner Jimmy Haslam had set a month earlier.

During a news conference to introduce new coach Taylor Jenkins and sitting alongside Horst, Haslam had made a declaration: The Bucks would have Antetokounmpo’s future settled by draft night. Either he would agree to sign an extension to remain with Milwaukee — or he’d be traded.

But by then, the Bucks had their answer, multiple sources with knowledge of the situation say. Antetokounmpo was not going to sign another extension in Milwaukee.

Antetokounmpo signed contract extensions in 2020 and 2023 to stay in Milwaukee, with one team source joking that those brief periods were the only times the Bucks truly got a reprieve from teamwide and leaguewide speculation about his future with the organization.

For half a decade, the Bucks were one of the most successful franchises in the league, leading the NBA in winning percentage (.686) across the regular season and playoffs from 2018 to 2023.

Several team sources voiced to ESPN a guiding ethos of the organization through the years: Teams don’t willingly trade superstars, especially in a small market such as Milwaukee.

It’s why the Bucks had made every attempt, through multiple roster iterations, to build championship-level teams with Antetokounmpo, gutting their future more and more each time to do it.

After losing in the first round of the 2025 playoffs, the third consecutive season in which they were bounced in the opening round, Milwaukee made its final Hail Mary, stretching the contract of Damian Lillard, who had torn his left Achilles during the postseason and missed the 2025-2026 season, and using that money to sign center Myles Turner.

Later that summer, Antetokounmpo and his reps expressed to Bucks management their concerns over the roster, and asked the team to explore a trade to the New York Knicks.

Talks stalled.

Antetokounmpo began the season with the Bucks, but missed 14 of the team’s first 31 games, and the Bucks were under .500 by December.

It was then that Antetokounmpo and his agent privately reiterated to Horst again that the team was not good enough, and it was time for both sides to move on.

But the Bucks believed they could turn around the season when their star got healthy.

But he never did, and the losses continued to pile up ahead of the trade deadline in February, forcing the Bucks to engage in trade discussions for the first time.

During those negotiations, Bucks team sources insist they were upfront with teams that they were unlikely to deal their franchise star unless they were blown away by an offer.

Ultimately, they weren’t, and chose to wait until the offseason, betting that more teams would join the bidding, and offers would strengthen.

After the deadline passed, and despite wanting to be traded, Antetokounmpo then riled the Bucks fan base by posting a clip from “The Wolf of Wall Street” in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s character says that, despite public pressure, he wouldn’t be leaving.

Any idea of salvaging the relationship deteriorated shortly thereafter. Antetokounmpo played his final game with the franchise March 15, and the two sides engaged in a public dispute over whether Antetokounmpo was healthy enough to play.

Throughout, but especially during the second half of the season, Antetokounmpo often lamented the erosion of the team’s culture and discipline.

After the season, Turner went public with the team’s habits and its lack of accountability — and noted how Antetokounmpo took advantage.

“Guys were late all the time,” Turner told New York Liberty forward Breanna Stewart on their “Game Recognize Game” podcast. “Guys were showing up to film whenever they wanted to show up. Guys were missing meetings. It was one of the craziest things I personally ever experienced.

“Giannis is going to show up whenever he wants, really. I think that this kind of just came with the territory that — and once I saw what was going down, I was like, ‘Hey man, more power to you. They ain’t going to fine you. S—, do what you do.'”

After the Bucks’ season-ending loss to the Philadelphia 76ers in April, by which point they had long been eliminated from the postseason, Antetokounmpo was asked if he had played his last game in a Bucks uniform.

“That’s a very good question,” Antetokounmpo said at the time. “I don’t know. It’s not up to me.”

By then, both sides knew the answer.

The only unresolved question was which uniform he’d play in next.

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HORST SLEPT WELL Sunday night and longer than he usually does, relieved to be on the other side of the most consequential decision of his professional life.

In Miami and Boston, however, sleep was hard to come by. Both franchises believed they had a great chance of landing Antetokounmpo, according to team sources, but they were paralyzed until a final decision had been made.

Either way, the tasks would be daunting. Getting him was the goal, but then they’d have to build the rest of the roster after giving up a ton to acquire him.

But not getting Antetokounmpo was infinitely worse. That would mean repairing relationships with players who had spent the past few weeks — or in Miami’s case, months — hearing their name in trade discussions.

And, of course, still having to grapple with the reason both franchises had pursued Antetokounmpo so doggedly in the first place: They simply weren’t championship contenders, or even close.

Both team presidents had said as much after their seasons ended in disappointment.

“I am not going to tank. We are not going to lose. We are not going into the lottery and do that insanity because I will quit — if I ever get ordered to go down that road. I am always thinking of ways to win,” Heat president Pat Riley said after his team lost in the play-in tournament. “Now, all I can give you is a bunch of excuses. And I don’t want to do that. We are just not good enough. We are not happy with it. This is the first time in those three years that we have an opportunity to do something with our roster, with our flexibility, with our players.”

The Celtics had lost in the first round to the Philadelphia 76ers, sparking a series of organizational discussions that led to the conclusion that the current roster simply “wasn’t good enough,” as one Celtics source put it.

“If you would have told me last summer that we would have won 56 games in the regular season, that the young guys would all become contributors, that people would have great impact all up and down our roster, that we would get [Jayson] Tatum back for 20 games or whatever it was, I would have been thrilled with those results,” Celtics president Brad Stevens said.

“But the reality is, we came up short. And so now, the job is to do an honest assessment.”

THROUGHOUT THE DAY on Monday, the Bucks had gone back and forth over the two offers.

There were “spirited debates” and differences of opinion, as one Bucks source put it.

But in the end, they preferred the optionality that Miami’s package gave them in building something new.

Horst had always liked the concept of the Heat’s deal.

It was one of two offers he brought to Bucks co-owners Wes Edens and Jimmy Haslam at the trade deadline in February. But back then, Milwaukee was still torn on whether it had exhausted all options to win with Antetokounmpo. If there was a chance, even a remote one, of competing for a title and convincing him to stay, the Bucks had to play it all the way out. It was a gamble.

So, instead of trading Antetokounmpo, they signed Cam Thomas and traded for Ousmane Dieng, hoping they’d help get them into the play-in tournament.

They didn’t.

“I think they just had to know they’d tried everything,” another source close to the process said. “Then, things got really yucky at the end.”

That Bucks gamble had paid off. The Heat’s offer improved in the offseason, multiple sources with knowledge of it say, with this year’s first-round pick, now known to be No. 13, included in the deal.

Ultimately, though the Celtics were willing to part with Brown, they weren’t willing to also include young prospects Hugo Gonzalez and Baylor Scheierman to land Antetokounmpo, a decision that has put them in an awkward situation with Brown.

Multiple sources say the team is still engaging in trade discussions for the five-time All-Star.

Says one league source: “It’d be insane for Boston to bring him back after dangling him so publicly. “

Says another: “I wouldn’t do a damn thing. Those two guys are so good, you can’t just trade Jaylen because it’s awkward. Make everyone come back and figure it out.”

Heat general manager Andy Elisburg had been down this road before, trying to “land the plane” as Riley often said, many times over the years — and missed. With Lillard, Kevin Durant, and, at the past trade deadline, Antetokounmpo. Elisburg’s job, this time, was to do whatever was necessary to complete the deal.

As he waited, all Elisburg could do while he waited was work through every aspect of the deal on his iPad for the thousandth time and start to consider how the Heat would build a team around him if they ended up with the winning package.

Elisburg had been calling Horst about Antetokounmpo for years, registering the Heat’s interest if Milwaukee ever got to a place where it would consider trading him.

It was a long play, to be sure. But on the wall of Elisburg’s apartment in downtown Miami is an example of Elisburg’s patience — and aggression.

It’s an original 1978 movie poster of “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” signed by John Belushi and director John Landis. Elisburg loves movies. He likes to tell friends that all of life’s answers are in movies, and every answer is in one of the Godfather movies.

He once stood for hours outside a cigar shop in Birmingham, Michigan, after he spotted a poster with the infamous line from “Godfather 2,” “This is the life we have chosen.”

It wasn’t for sale, but he had to have it. So, he made the manager of the cigar shop an offer he couldn’t refuse, and the poster now hangs in his office inside the Heat headquarters, along with the Sicilian translation of the line.

The “Animal House” poster had been something he had coveted for years. When it finally came on the market this spring, he interrupted a lunch to bid on it.

The bidding took about 30 minutes. His phone chirped every time another bidder topped him.

But Elisburg was determined. He would not be outbid, just like during the Antetokounmpo trade discussions.

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SOME 24 HOURS after he had made the biggest move in franchise history, Horst was in no mood to discuss it.

Mostly because he couldn’t — league rules prevent any comment on transactions until they’re approved. But also because his team had just drafted a future — one that, for the first time in more than a decade, would not include Antetkounmpo.

It was 11 p.m. Tuesday. Every TV camera within a three-state radius with an interest in the NBA was in attendance. Wearing a black suit, Horst delivered a statement.

“Before I start, just to be clear, until trades are approved by the league, we’re not allowed to comment on anything, so there won’t be any conversations about that. We are excited about the draft.”

He had just drafted his first two lottery picks since taking over as GM in 2017, and the highest Bucks draft picks since 2016, when the team had selected Thon Maker at No. 10.

“We’re building,” Horst said.

“These guys are important to it,” he said of Arizona’s Brayden Burries, drafted No. 10 and Tennessee’s Nate Ament, selected No. 13.

“We’re just really excited to continue to build and add on piece and piece and create an identity, a style of play, a roster full of character and versatility and size. Got a lot of work ahead of us, but it’s a good start.”

He seemed excited, refreshed. To build anew again, to emerge from the pressure of trying to appease Antetokounmpo and ignore the coy, passive-aggression that had come to define the last year of their relationship.

Last fall, when Antetokounmpo moved his family from Milwaukee back to his native Greece, it seemed to be a signal that the emotional chord between the city and the man who had become a star in it had been severed.

Antetokounmpo could never bring himself to publicly ask for a trade, but moving his family to Greece and enrolling his children in Greek schools seemed to be his way of doing so.

The move didn’t last long, though. Antetokounmpo’s family was back in Milwaukee within a few months, multiple sources say. Even during the most uncomfortable periods this past spring, he brought his family to Bucks games and played with his children on the court.

Antetokounmpo was genuinely torn, multiple sources close to him say. Between loyalty and love of a city that had embraced him as a skinny kid from Greece 13 years ago, and his desire to compete for more championships with a franchise that had exhausted all its resources to try to do that for him.

Those contradictory forces had swirled for years.

“Winning a championship comes first,” Antetokounmpo told The New York Times in 2023, after the No. 1-seeded Bucks had lost in the first round to the No. 8-seeded Miami Heat. “I don’t want to be 20 years on the same team and not win another championship.”

Antetokounmpo had wanted to guard Heat swingman Jimmy Butler in that series, despite a back injury he suffered in Game 1.

Point guard Jrue Holiday, instead, had drawn that assignment and faltered. Holiday had struggled in back-to-back playoff series, shooting a combined 37% in Milwaukee’s last 12 playoff games.

That frustration led to two fateful decisions that serve as the line of demarcation for the beginning of the end of Antetokounmpo’s time with the Bucks.

The first was the firing of coach Mike Budenholzer, launching a coaching carousel in Milwaukee that led to the hires of first-time coach Adrian Griffin and veteran coach Doc Rivers.

Neither coach clicked with the locker room. Griffin was fired after 43 games and a 30-13 record (.698 winning percentage). Rivers lasted 200 games, and the team went 97-103 (.485).

The second was the inclusion of Holiday in the trade that brought superstar Lillard from Portland.

“Looking back on it, the one thing we did that changed everything was put Jrue in that trade,” a Bucks source said. “Jrue was such a leader on and off the floor. He would do things like if Giannis was holding the ball too much, Jrue would just bring it up and play with everybody else without making it a thing. He was a pro at it.

“But Jrue was in the deal [for Lillard] because we thought we needed offense over defense. But once he was gone, we lost our whole defensive identity. It’s not so much that getting Dame was a mistake. He would’ve been perfect if we still had Jrue.”

That was in 2023, though. Everyone moved on. Lillard is back in Portland. Butler is in Golden State. Holiday won a title in Boston and somehow ended up back in Portland.

The Bucks’ front office played a pickup basketball game late Wednesday night after the draft was over. Horst went home early for the first time in months with his kids.

Antetokounmpo will soon be introduced as a member of the Miami Heat.

Outside the Fiserv Forum, however, a reminder of the golden era of Bucks basketball remains in limbo.

In the summer of 2023, Antetokounmpo and his brothers opened a branch of their retail chain, Antetokounbros. It was one of the signature investments he made in Milwaukee to show his commitment and connection to the city.

The two other branches of the store are located in Athens.

But now, there’s a sign in the window of the Milwaukee store.

We are refreshing our space and preparing for new inventory. We look forward to welcoming you back soon.

Regular hours will resume June 30.

Thank you for your understanding.