Our Discord server is still the single best resource to not only keep track of all the rumors in a chronological and unbiased manner, such as on our free membership in a Discord channel called “Lacob-Dunleavy” — but also if you upgrade to the VIP version, you get all the info real-time as they pop up because we have direct feeds from Twitter.
In fact, all of the following — even the embedded videos — have already been reported there, all on that free Discord “text channel”. Think of them as Warriors topics or categories; Discord groups their “channels” into “categories”, so yeah it’s kinda confusing on there and there’s a slight learning curve, but Discord servers are quite powerful indeed.
Anyways, in true Let’s Go Warriors fashion where my goal is more knowledge and less misinformation, with zero leftover time to do any entertainment, the following are the chances that Giannis Antetokuonmpo ends up getting traded to the Golden State Warriors by February 5th.
The short answer: It depends on whom you talk to. I’ll go out on a limb and grossly speculate that it might even depend on if you’re talking to Giannis after a game, or in between home games or the off-season when he’s with his family. Icymi, he’ll be with family a lot, for a while coming up, as he rehabs a calf strain.
By the way, this brings back memories of my bumping into Giannis (and his wife, Mariah Riddlesprigger) at O’Hare, on my way back from Toronto in the middle of the 2019 Finals:
If you ask an NBA insider
I’ve been told that Giannis absolutely does not want to play on the West Coast. Why? Because it’s harder to get to Greece from here.
Now, before you roll your eyes at a mega-star with generational wealth worrying about plane rides, I simply file that under This insider probably talked to him while he was thinking of family, or something like that.
Of course, in the postgame locker room, even last week after the game in which he got injured, he’d talked about winning and legacy, but if you’ve spent enough time around modern NBA players, especially those with kids, ring-chasing doesn’t always drive every decision.
When Shams Charania of ESPN proverbially waved the green flag that started the sweepstakes with the news Wednesday morning that Giannis was “ready to move to a new home”…
…I was told specific percentages of the top three destinations by this insider. I’ll leave the exact numbers under the paywall below as a bonus to our paid subscribers, but the spoiler is that the GSW are a very, very distant third.
If you ask a capologist
Given the above, some salary cap experts have drummed up ways for the New York Knicks (NYK), Miami Heat (MIA) and Minnesota Timberwolves (MIN) to construct trades that make sense and leave respective salary cap sheets in good order.
NYK lacks immediate Draft capital. MIA has some, but as it stands right now, the Heat are two picks behind the Warriors’ four.
However, during the off-season, not only will Miami be able to unlock the 2033 pick and offer four odd-year picks to match the Draft capital of the Warriors, but also there’s more time for other teams like NYK and MIN to construct multiple-team trades to move assets and get Draft picks back, all to ultimately send to Milwaukee for Giannis.
All told, there are six teams interested in pursuing Giannis, is what sources told Monte Poole of NBCSBA. The six were listed as GSW, NYK, MIA, MIN, the Brooklyn Nets (BKN) and the Toronto Raptors (TOR), by Brett Siegel of ClutchPoints:
On Thursday morning, Jake Fischer of The Stein Line broke the news that MIN have entered the fray as a desired Giannis destination, but imo these multi-team maneuvers for the Timberwolves to match the Draft capital of the Warriors would be really difficult to pull off by February 5th.
Yossi Gozlan of Third Apron had Sam Quinn of CBS Sports on a recent podcast and they had a four-team trade that brought the necessary pieces to MIN.
MIA has Milwaukee native Tyler Herro, agile seven-footer Kel’el Ware and the versatile Jaime Jacquez as attractive young pieces to build around, plus they’ll have access to that those four picks after this upcoming 2026 Draft occurs in June.
And so it makes me wonder if the Bucks wouldn’t just wait until the off-season to get these better offers from those three teams, as well as BKN and TOR and any other teams that pop up in the rumors.
If you ask an OKC thruth-er
Here’s where things start to get a little murky if you’re a Warriors fan trying to get your arms around this — so try our Discord, at least it’s all organized!
Milwaukee is a small-market franchise. OKC is a small-market franchise. Sam Presti built the Thunder by amassing a hoard of picks. It follows that the Bucks should follow this blueprint.
And so this is why Brian Windhorst of ESPN insists that the Dubs have the best chances of landing Giannis, at least right now:
But if you thought collecting four future Draft picks from the Warriors is all it takes, think again:
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OKC built around an up-and-coming star in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the Bucks wouldn’t have that blue-chip player if trading with the Warriors (yes, this assumes Jonathan Kuminga is not quite a blue-chip player yet), and
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As previously mentioned, the Heat will have four picks to trade after the 2026 Draft, matching the current number of Golden State picks (assume that the player GSW just drafted is desirable by the Bucks), and
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As Quinn mentioned on the Third Apron podcast, who’s to say the Heat’s out-year picks in 2030 and beyond wouldn’t be as valuable as the Dubs’? But I think most people would agree that the Warriors’ picks are probably more valuable — basically there is no impact player on the Heat as we know it, that is as old as Steph. Then again, it’s up to the Bucks to decide if the Warriors’ 2030 and 2032 picks are going to be more valuable than Miami’s 2031 and 2033. They wouldn’t have to wait around an extra year if they chose Golden State’s picks.
If you ask a Draft truth-er
Speaking of the out-year picks, another NBA insider has insisted to me that the 2026 Draft is super-talented and deep, while the 2027 Draft sucks.
That makes me think maybe the Bucks should lean into this year’s Draft which then gives the Dubs an advantage.
Gozlan just did an analysis on Milwaukee’s Lottery odds and there’s a lot of math involved that ends up with Bucks fans having to root against the Pelicans improving their win-loss record for the remainder of this season; New Orleans is not trying to tank because they do not own their 2026 pick.
Gozlan concludes that the Bucks are likely to get the 7th to 9th pick. If you’re Milwaukee, why not get the Warriors’ pick as well and go into that Draft with two first-rounders in 2026? Is that a better near-term scenario for Milwaukee, which does not own its own pick in the 2027 Draft?
But then it makes me think, why not wait until the off-season when you know where every team’s Draft position is?
Incidentally, Mike Dunleavy, Jr. was spotted on Thursday in Australia scouting Karim Lopez and Dash Daniels, who NBADraft.net currently project at 24th and 27th, respectively, in the upcoming 2026 Draft:
If the season ended today, the Warriors would own the 17th pick in the 2026 NBA Draft.
These are just more factors to ponder that could go either way.
If you ask a Curry truth-er
Aside from the aforementioned geography/family issue, does Giannis actually want to play alongside Steph?
I think if you were to ask him after losing a game, Giannis might be thinking yes. But after the season, during All-Star Break, or during rehab, he’ll have more time with family away from the court, and so playing in the Western Conference might be the furthest thing from his mind in those moments.
Long-time Warriors journalists certainly think super-highly of Curry and believe it’s a no-brainer for Giannis to come play with him when compared to destinations like New York or Miami.
But it is worth noting that after Kevin Durant angrily shot down Mat Ishbia’s attempt at trading him from Phoenix to GSW for everything in the Warriors’ war chest last February, I was told by someone who had spoken with Durant’s camp that KD did not want to come back to the Bay because if the Warriors won, Steph would get all the credit and if the they came up short, KD would get all the blame.
I conclude that it is not possible to know, at least not right now, to what degree Giannis wants to team up with Steph.
Furthermore, we can’t know to what degree Giannis’ desires have on Horst’s trade decisions.
If you ask a Lacob/Dunleavy truth-er
I have heard reporters laud Joe Lacob and Dunleavy for their aggressive approach, but the way I look at it, you’re supposed to be aggressive.
The true genius is if you can sell the team you’re trading with on their dream. That happens behind closed doors, so we’ll never know unless the results after many years show some pattern.
It’s the modern era. For all intents and purposes, deals that you do are probably fair, in the moment. For all the praise that Presti gets, I don’t think he has a reputation for fleecing teams left and right. In the moment, those OKC trades seemed fair to both parties. Presti was good at finding those fits.
With the Josh Giddey deal, he was good at selling the dream to Chicago.
Sometimes, like the Jimmy trade, you need two desperate teams to come together and get something done. I don’t see the Bucks as desperate, at least not by February 5th.
And once we get past the deadline, some of the dynamics change. Overall, it feels like the Warriors have a better offer if the deal is done now, but can Lacob and Dunleavy convince Bucks GM John Horst that right now is also the best time for the Bucks to trade Giannis?
If you ask a greedy capitalist
I’m sort of kidding when I say “greedy capitalist” because Siegel is probably not that, but he certainly is looking out for Giannis’ best interests from a financial standpoint, in his latest article:
The 31-year-old signed a three-year, $175.3 million extension with the Bucks in October 2023. That means Giannis will be entering Year 2 of this extension and be eligible for another supermax deal in October before the 2026-27 season begins.
However, should Antetokounmpo be traded, he won’t be able to sign a contract extension with his new team for six months. Essentially, as long as he is traded before Feb. 5, Giannis can sign the four-year, $275 million extension with his new team before the 2026-27 season with no issues.
But if the Bucks wait until the offseason to trade Giannis, he won’t be able to sign this mega extension until January 2027. Over the course of the next week leading up to the trade deadline, this could wind up being a key talking point from Giannis’ camp that puts pressure on the Bucks to make a move right now.
Besides, both sides understand that this relationship is over, so why not just rip the band-aid off and get this over with?
The longer Giannis is in Milwaukee, the more negative media attention will be cast their way. As much as it may pain the Bucks to do, it is time to trade Giannis Antetokounmpo before the trade deadline.
Here’s my rebuttal. I don’t think certain athletes really care about those financial details, especially Giannis. He does not seem like a personality to not only ask for a trade (in private), but also push further and insist it be immediately so he can sign a huge extension sooner than later.
Such a personality is more like Brandon Aiyuk, right?
Plus, Giannis is injured right now. The on-court competitive juices are shut down for a while. There won’t be home fans booing the team because he’ll be rehabbing and they’ll be depleted on the court. Actually, there might be no one in the stands to do the booing while Giannis is out.
There’s less energy and rush to fix things when you’re away from the battle.
By that notion, imo, there really is no “band-aid”, as Siegel states metaphorically, to rip off right now.
If you ask a cap sheet truth-er
Finally, there’s, well, moi. I actually love the second apron because it allows fans to — if they are open to learning — understand and potentially figure out where franchises are headed in this era of the CBA *cough* hard cap *cough*.
Two nights ago on Thursday after Shams got the race fpr Giannis started, I went live on our YouTube channel and went through the exercise of putting Jimmy with JK and then Draymond with JK in trades with the Bucks:
Going through this tedious exercise, as well as putting yourself in Horst’s shoes and pretending to drive a hard bargain, you can deduce which other contracts need to be in the trade, as well as which ones are expiring soon that Milwaukee would want to get rid of in the process.
You look at the trade the way it should be: judging which players on each team have favorable contracts based on their value versus performance and the length of the contract, in the context of what your team is trying to accomplish.
It is an exercise of common sense.
I made some assumptions:
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When you trade for Giannis, you’re also obligated to trade for his brother, Thanasis Antetokuonmpo, who is only making a veteran’s minimum, which is not necessarily trivial when trying to balance out 15-man rosters. In various scenarios, I had to send back to the Bucks Will Richard, whose salary is near Thanasis’ — but let’s not get into that and focus on the heavier objects involved. All in all, the Thanasis contract is not a big deal.
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Getting Jimmy in a trade with the Warriors would enable the Bucks to tank a little bit, but not enough to fall into the Bottom Three which are all guaranteed a Top Five pick. And then there’s that huge complication with their Draft swap with the Pelicans as detailed in Gozlan’s article, above. Milwaukee currently has 18 wins already in its 45 games played as of this writing. Last year’s Bottom Three had 17, 18 and 19 wins out of 82. I’m not sure if going just 1-36 or 2-35 the rest of the way is even humanly possible — the Detroit Pistons set a record by going 0-28 in November-December 2023. Regardless of epic tanking, does tanking even a little bit affect the Lottery in any way? I didn’t look into that, but my suspicion is, it only really matters when you have a legitimate shot at the Bottom Three. And so I tried both scenarios where Jimmy was the fulcrum of the salary matching, just in case they needed an injured player to justify any tanking; then I tried Draymond under the assumption that the Bucks did not want Jimmy’s contract. Kuminga was also assumed to be a salary-matching contract, of course.
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Teams in the Bucks’ situation do not go into the off-season wanting to tank at the beginning of next season. That makes Jimmy’s contract less desirable to obtain in the off-season.
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Draymond’s contract, especially at his age, is not appealing to most teams in the NBA. When you consider his performance so far in the 2025-26 campaign, you would probably consider it a negative-value contract by now.
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If and when the Bucks do trade Giannis, they will use the opportunity to shed at least one bad contract on their roster. You can consider a “bad” contract as either one that is longer-term and goes against the grain of a rebuilding team, very expensive for the quality of play thet are getting from the player, or both. At the present moment, Kyle Kuzma sticks out like a sore thumb, for example. His salary is $22.4 million with one year left at $20.3 million in 2026-27.
Therefore, first of all, if they wait until the off-season, there is little to no reason for the Bucks to trade for Jimmy’s contract this summer. The start of the 2026-27 season would have no Jimmy because of the ACL injury.
Then in February 2027 when he comes back, he would join a team that is in the process of a rebuild, which is a little clunky and could mess up chemistry, especially as we all know by now, Jimmy likes the iso on the wing.
That only leaves Draymond’s contract to salary match for Giannis in the off-season scenario. His and JK’s added together do come close to Giannis’, but you also have to assume the Warriors will need to take a bad contract back. After all, Milwaukee wouldn’t want to give you Giannis and, in return, be stuck with an additional negative-value contract, on top of Dray’s, that’s hard to get rid of.
Unfortunately, neither Green or Kuzma’s contracts are expiring.
Kuzma’s $22.4 million slot is too big to tack on to this deal. You could send back Moses Moody, but then the Warriors are left without a wing to guard the other team’s primary offensive threat.
You could ask for 6’6” Taurean Prince, but now you’ve got to squeeze his salary under the second apron as well.
In my trade machine exercise, I deduced that it’s hard to balance the books and get GSW below the second apron with MIL below the luxury tax, where both teams started, if the Bucks insist on getting rid of unwanted salary.
The Warriors would need to send out the equivalent of Kuzma’s $22 million to a third team, at least, if the Bucks aren’t tabbed with the responsibility for finding a new home for his bad contract.
For the Warriors, it wouldn’t be easy adding up to that salary — let’s say it’s Moody at $11.6 million, Buddy Hield at $9.2 and Al Horford at $5.6 million.
Sure, it can be, what, Gary Payton II instead of Horford, but who is going to willingly take GP2 to help you out in a Giannis deal? And Dunleavy doesn’t have any second-round picks to attach to these side deals.
If you can’t get one team to take all of those three guys that add up to Kuz, then you’ll need a fourth team in this Giannis mega-deal. If you need an additional team to take each of those three guys, then you’ll need a five-team trade, more than Quinn’s four-team concoction for Minnesota!
I haven’t even mentioned how hard it would be to re-fill those multiple missing roster slots you just traded out with minimum contracts.
Put simply, there are too many contracts on the Warriors that are kind of undesirable by other teams. It’s the combination of the Draymond and Kuzma contracts 🤢 🤷🏻♂️ that messes this up for the trying to land Giannis with Golden State.
My first pass at explaining this in gory detail as I walked viewers through the FanSpo Trade Machine, is right here:
You can’t just spitball back-of-the-napkin stuff like, “Oh, Dray plus JK roughly equals Giannis, this should work.” No, you need to fire up the FanSpo trade machine and look at the impact to the roster and make adjustments accordingly.
The Bucks will not want two negative-value contracts each worth over $20 million on their books simultaneously, especially in the process of sending out the main piece in Giannis.
But hey, I could’ve missed something. If I did, I’ll surely figure out my mistake and get better for the next trade season.
It was only maybe a year ago or so before I started getting really comfortable with cap sheets. Yossi Gozlan is my hero! And he started cap sheet analysis about a decade ago, to debunk the wild trade proposals on Twitter back in the day.
What do I think?
You can make a list of all the factors I brought up and see what might weigh more heavily to Horst and to Giannis, but let me put it this way: it’s not my life or my team, at least not directly.
Jotting down pros and cons for the Bucks on doing this deal now or later, constructing SWOT analyses, no thank you.
I’m gonna spare myself of trying to make a decision based on my intellect and just say that every time I think of a good reason for the Bucks to trade Giannis to the Warriors, I think of another reason they shouldn’t.
It follows that I feel like the Bucks would just wait til the off-season. If so, at that point, can the Warriors really improve their offer then or should they simply move on?
There would have to be some unpredictable factor, a wrench thrown in from left field, maybe a demand by Giannis to come to Golden State?
Maybe a sudden realization by Horst that they covet a kid in the 2026 Draft who will land at around the 17th pick? And that pick with JK, Moses and BP is a better core than Herro, Ware and Jacquez, plus the Heat’s 2027 pick?
Maybe Dunleavy and Lacob are such awesome negotiators that they flip all the negatives I’ve brought up here into positives for Horst?
As of now, I’ll have to move on to Plan B and C and, unfortunately if necessary, Plan D. I’ve actually already done Plan B, here:
That was, ironically, the night before Shams’ breaking news on Giannis Wednesday morning. So, Tuesday night, I had already assumed the Giannis ship had sailed due to the “proximity to Greece” tidbit.
Now that Shams injected dopamine into the dreams of getting Giannis, I had to walk myself through the entire process. The FanSpo trade machine reps did it for me.
If you use Jimmy’s contract, things run smoothly. If you don’t, things are very difficult. And if we’re into the off-season, using Jimmy’s contract is not practical.
As you’ll see in follow-ups here and on our YouTube channel the next few days, Plan B is a “block or charge” that makes a few assumptions as well. If you can stomach the extended livestream version above, although there are timestamps in the Comments, the targets are Anthony Davis along with Klay Thompson, Naji Marshall and Max Christie, all in one fell swoop, but Davis’ injury history has me on the fence. More to come on this here, soon.
And so I have a Plan C, just in case. And Plan D would just be something simple, like waiting until the off-season and not touch the contracts of Jimmy or JK until then.
ACL and Achilles injuries suck. Below, as promised for our paid subs, are the exact percentages of where Giannis will end up, from my NBA insider buddy…
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