We’re heard it before and we’re likely to hear a lot of it, but…
Is the Brooklyn Nets’ ultimate goal, their dream target, Giannis Anteotounmpo, the 30-year-old Milwaukee Bucks superstar? Sounds like a worthy endeavor, even considering all the caveats. Just like it had been in the past, according to various reports. Just like Donovan Mitchell was, too. How’d that work out? The weeping and gnashing of teeth is only in the grinding stage.
Marc Stein who’s building quite the staff at The Steinline with Jake Fischer and Chris Haynes now affiliated with him, thinks the Nets are indeed circling the Big Greek’s wagon. Writing Sunday in a Nets-centric substack post.
The scenario repeatedly cited in conversation with rival teams always winds up in the same place: The Nets have long been described and continue to be painted as a team determined to be in position to trade for Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo someday.
The rationale is simple: Superstars get what they want and if Giannis at some point wants out of Milwaukee, the Nets have built up quite the war chest with 31 draft picks — 15 firsts, 12 of which can be traded at any moment and four of them in the 2025 first round plus 16 seconds.
They are also, as Stein notes, the only NBA team who will have enough cap space to take on a superstar in the summer. More than that, they also have several trade exceptions led by a the NBA’s second largest at $23.3 million they can use at the deadline and an owner with a record of spending, whether it’s the $323 million he’s already spent in luxury taxes the $100 million he’s planning on spending on arena improvements or the untold amounts he’d need to spend on a even more ambitious plan, not yet fully detailed, remaking Atlantic and Flatbush as the LA Live! or even the Times Square of Brooklyn.
Great as Giannis is, and he’s a top four player in the NBA, he’s 30 and under contract for two years after this one, at $58.5 million in 2026-27 and a $62.8 million, a player option, in 2027-28. Any trade would almost certainly include an extension of his current deal as well. It would not be easy, as acknowledged by Stein.
Reminder: Someday depends on Antetokounmpo pushing the Bucks to trade him … something he has shown no known inclination to do. There remains zero expectation that the Bucks would even consider the notion of trading Antetokounmpo unless he pushed for it.
Rumbles nonetheless persist that the Nets are positioning themselves to be ready for such a moment if it arrives … with financial relief as well as copious amounts of draft capital to offer to the Bucks.
And presumably, other teams would want in if the MVP and Finals MVP wanted out and Stein notes that there appears there is no current appetite to bring a superstar this summer.
Sources with knowledge of Brooklyn’s thinking maintain that the Nets are not locked into the idea of pursuing a superstar via trade this offseason.
And it’s true that the Nets can build through the draft if they choose or explore other trade pathways after swiftly replenishing their picks cache in response to the implosion of the Kevin Durant/Kyrie Irving/James Harden Nets.
Teams that study Brooklyn, though, continue to describe Antetokoumpo as its dream target.
And so you can argue, it’s not about bodies, it’s about flexibility. As one NBA source told NetsDaily, “the beauty of the Nets situation is that they can move in any direction,” which Marks has basically said in more than one interview. In his most current last week with Brian Lewis, he reiterated that.
“We’re building this, and we’re building this for hopefully sustainable success,” Nets GM Marks told The Post. “That’s what we want. We want to get to that.”
There’s a lot of ways to get there.
In another element of Stein’s latest, the veteran NBA reporter noted that the Nets might play a role in the Jimmy Butler circus, but we was quick to point out “that the Nets have no plans to pursue Butler in free agency.”
But Butler and his agents can point to the fact that only one team the Nets could acquire him through free agency. So if a year wants Butler, it will have to be through a trade.