On Wednesday, for the first time since trading Giannis, Bucks General Manager Jon Horst took questions on that decision, addressing why he chose to end things with the man he calls the greatest player in franchise history. Credit to The Athletic’s Eric Nehm, who transcribed the press conference; these quotes come from Nehm’s article, which you can read in full here.
Jon Horst’s most important answer of the session came right at the end, when he stressed that the decision to trade Giannis Antetokounmpo
was not one he made lightly, but that Miami’s package ultimately won him over.
“This is hard,” Horst said. “Call it what it is. Giannis is one of the greatest players in NBA history. Top 75 of all time. Greatest player in franchise history. He’s an NBA champion in Milwaukee. All the things that we’ve talked about and that you all know, he is not with us anymore.
“So, we’ve got a lot of work to do, and we championed balance and getting back foundational players that we believed in, draft capital that we thought we could utilise and capitalise on, either by drafting at some point or by using in future transactions and flexibility to make decisions. The Miami opportunity presented us with the best path in totality, and that’s why we did the deal.”
Something Horst said during Taylor Jenkins’ introductory press conference in early May was that the team would seriously consider the possibility of continuing to build around Giannis, even while all the outside noise indicated that he was as good as gone. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t too sure Horst was telling the truth at the time, but he reiterated that same message.
“In most cases, for most of the last decade, there wasn’t a parallel path of ‘hey, if we trade Giannis, it’s this,’ and ‘if we keep Giannis, it’s this.’ It was just, ‘we’re going to maximise this with Giannis.’ And so, you’d end up trying to find the best opportunity and make the most of it, and hopefully it works.
“This time around, we had something sincerely to compare those options to, and clearly, we made the decision what we thought was best for us. But again, there’s a human side of this and a respect factor of Giannis. And what’s best for Giannis was to execute the Miami trade. It was different than years past, in that there were truly paralleling paths to really consider against just the all-in (with Antetokounmpo), and what does it look like.”
As we all know, Horst has been uber-aggressive during the Giannis era, repeatedly willing to “trade the future for the now” to give GA the best chance to win. From the acquisitions of Jrue Holiday and Damian Lillard, to executing the largest waive-and-stretch in NBA history of Lillard’s contract to free up enough space to sign Myles Turner, he couldn’t have tried harder. The Bucks GM stood by all of those decisions but also explained that the time had come to stop the aggressive moves and part ways with the two-time MVP, though there was no “defining moment” that led him to that conclusion.
“If we’re looking for a defining moment, I don’t know that that exists in any of these things. I think you’re talking about a decade-long, or decade-plus, pursuit of first building competitiveness and then trying to sustain competitiveness, have as much success as you can, weather as many failures as you can. There’s a lot that goes into that, and I think over the course of time, you do everything that you can.
“I think ultimately there comes a point in time where you have to make the assessment, and you have to assess the opportunities, and if the result of that in our estimation or (Antetokounmpo’s) estimation is you can do more and better differently—and we can do more and better differently—you take advantage of that. We went through an offseason last year and we believed that we had an opportunity to maximise something together. We went through a trade deadline where we assessed whether or not that was still the case. And we went into an offseason this year where we took the same approach. This time around, our assessment was (that) the ultimate opportunity we had with Miami was what was best for the Bucks organisation now and going forward—and best for Giannis.”
Now, with a young team to build with, Horst was under no illusions about where the team is and where it needs to get to.
“No one’s sitting here today and saying that we’re a better team today after trading Giannis,” Horst said. “He’s one of the greatest players to ever play, (the) greatest player in the franchise history. We’ve had an incredible amount of success. And as I’ve said to Miami a couple of times, he’s going to have an unbelievable season for them. [They’ve] got an incredibly motivated, healthy, focused Giannis Antetokounmpo that I think is going to have an unbelievable season and seasons, for that matter.
“So, for us, it was just about the opportunity to build and to again set a foundation. Can we set something in place with a new coach and take advantage of an opportunity to truly build from a place of strength on a roster and a style of player that hopefully makes our city proud and our franchise proud and gets us to the place where we are competitive and we can sustain that competition and that competitive level, year in and year out? And if we’re lucky enough, at some point, to be in a position to knock on the door and have a chance to win a championship.”
Hearing this from Horst actually made me feel pretty good. It sounds like he’s going to dial back the aggressiveness and allow this young core to develop organically, which seems like the right way to go about it.
Per Nehm, Horst “shied away from discussing his emotions” during the press conference, but he did call on a sentiment shared with him by former Bucks GM John Hammond, whom Horst worked under when he first came to the Bucks organisation.
“In the NBA, it’s never goodbye; it’s see you later. And Giannis will be back in Fiserv soon, and he’ll be back in Fiserv multiple times. And I really hope—not hope—I know that each and every time the standing ovation, the love, the respect, the admiration that he gets from this city and this fan base and this franchise will be felt and will be appropriate for everything he’s meant to all of us.”
Brew Hoop community, what did you take from what Jon Horst had to say?
