Bucks' Antetokounmpo Trade: Did They Wait Too Long and Choose Poorly?

Thank the basketball gods, the Giannis Antetokounmpo trade soap opera is finally over . The  Milwaukee Bucks are sending Antetokounmpo (and Bobby Portis ) to the Miami Heat in exchange for  Tyler Herro , Kel'el Ware , Jaime Jaquez Jr. , Kasparas Jakucionis and three first-round picks, one of which is the No. 13 pick in Tuesday's 2026 NBA Draft.

It's a pretty uninspiring return for a player of Antetokounmpo's magnitude. Miami has been offering versions of this package for a while. It wasn't enough to score Damian Lillard , but it's suddenly enough to land a two-time MVP and NBA champion? How does that work?

It's simple, really. The Bucks waited too long to trade Antetokounmpo, and as a result were forced to execute this trade from a position of weakness, if not desperation. That's not how you win a negotiation. What the Bucks should have done was accept the reality that the Giannis era had run its course the second the aforementioned Lillard ruptured his Achilles in the 2025 playoffs and started looking to trade him last summer.

At that time, Giannis still had two years left on his contract, and presumably Milwaukee's market wouldn't have been limited to teams with which Giannis would agree to sign an extension (more teams would be willing to take a two-year shot with a player like Giannis and figure the rest out later). But with only one year left on his current deal? You're down to teams he'll sign the extension with, as nobody is going to give up anything of real value when Giannis could simply be a one-year rental.

Giannis Antetokounmpo trade grades: Heat earn 'B+' in blockbuster, while Bucks pay for waiting too long Sam Quinn

How the Bucks got to this point

Giannis could've also done the Bucks a favor and formally asked out. He should've known there was no shot to recreate a championship roster in Milwaukee. But he was never going to play the bad cop. Instead, he allowed Milwaukee to sign Myles Turner  12 months ago in an effort to appease him.

Even at the time, anyone with an even halfway functional set of basketball eyes could see that Turner signing was an act of delusion -- notably because the way Milwaukee funded it was to pay Lillard to the tune of paying him $113 million over five years to play for someone else.

Even under optimal conditions, there was no chance the 2025-26 Bucks were capable of competing for anything meaningful. It's a hard thing to do, but you have to get ahead of these superstar trades. Last summer, or even at February's deadline, was the time to pull the plug and go hunting for Giannis trades from a position of strength.

But the Bucks didn't do it, and that how they ended up having to swallow a Miami package that doesn't include a single indisputable foundational piece. Sure, Heat fans will tell you all about how great Jaquez is, but he's not great. He's good. Ware is the guy most people would say has the most upside (personally I would argue that distinction actually belongs to Jakucionas). But, either way, the three draft picks are the center of this deal.

Getting No. 13 in Tuesday night's draft is a solid pick in a deep class. The other two are reportedly Miami's 2031 and 2033 picks, both of which are unprotected. That's far enough down the road that the Giannis-Bam Adebayo run will be over in Miami, and notably, there could very well be a new "draft credit" lottery system in place , which could create opportunities that don't exist in the current framework.

But that's all an unknown at this point. If the Bucks wanted a known quantity, they could've, and perhaps should have, gone with Boston's package.

Why did the Bucks turn down the Celtics' offer?

From Boston, the Bucks reportedly could've gotten the two draft picks and Jaylen Brown -- a five-time All-Star, the 2024 NBA Finals MVP and a far more established player than any of the four the Heat included. Milwaukee could've kept Brown or the franchise could've flipped him this summer for presumably another pretty significant return.

It's hard to say that for sure. The NBA market is getting really strange in the apron era. Value cannot be judged in a vacuum anymore. It's all about context. Mikal Brdges isn't worth five first-round draft picks in a lot of contexts. But for the Knicks , even before it worked out the way it did, he was worth the stretch because he put them over the top and was in total keeping with their two-way wing movement in support of Jalen Brunson .

Brown could put a lot of teams over the top, too. The Rockets . The Wolves. The Spurs . The Pistons . The Lakers . The Warriors . The Hawks . The Blazers. Just about any team that is close could use Brown to make it, and we're probably going to be hearing a lot about the Celtics , even after missing on Giannis, still looking to move him for that very reason.

None of us are in the Milwaukee front office, so it's hard to know their exact thoughts on why they went with the Miami offer over the Boston one. They must not have believed that they could squeeze more out of a secondary Brown deal than what Miami was offering in the first place. And if that's the case, it's only further proof that they waited too long.

At the end of the day, you should get more for a player of Giannis' magnitude than what the Bucks got out of the Heat. Even in a limited market, there's a real argument to be made that they didn't even take the best offer on the table.

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_Originally reported by [CBS Sports](https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/bucks-waited-too-long-giannis-antetokounmpo-trade-celtics-heat/)._