WHERE’S his ceiling? How high can he go? What’s next?
These are the questions people in and out of basketball are asking about 6-foot-11 superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo, newly 23 and coming off a season where he became the first Milwaukee Buck to start an All-Star game since 1986 and did something only four elite players — Dave Cowens, Scottie Pippen, Kevin Garnett, LeBron James — had ever done before.
The Athens-born son of undocumented immigrants from Lagos, Nigeria, led his team in all five major statistical categories: points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks.
And the terrifying thing for the rest of the league? He’s only getting better.
Just as Antetokounmpo had to learn to drive, trade in some Euro disco for hip-hop, and get acquainted with peanut butter after relocating to Milwaukee in 2013, the Greek Freak, as he’s been dubbed, is still a work-in-progress, according to coaches and the player himself. As future Hall of Fame point guard Jason Kidd, Bucks head coach, told the New York Times in November, “He’s like a plane that just started taking off. He’s at 10,000 feet.”
Or listen to the last Buck to make the All-Star team, sharpshooter Michael Redd, who looks at the 230-pound scorer-distributor-defender, with his 87-inch wingspan and 12-inch hands (bigger mitts than Kawhi Leonard and Wilt Chamberlain), and says simply: “Once he learns how to play play — unstoppable. It’s almost like he’s from another planet.”
Despite still honing his long-range game, and absorbing lessons from Kidd and assistant coaches when it comes to offensive decision-making and defensive subtleties, Antetokounmpo got off to a blazing start this year, leading the league in scoring (31 points per game), while averaging ten boards and five assists through eight games. This kind of liftoff, hitting those numbers, had never been done before in a season’s first two weeks.
Also scary? Antetokounmpo is legendarily hard-working. He’s an athletic prodigy with a gym rat’s temperament. If a teammate stays after practice to shoot, Antetokounmpo will stay, too, and not leave until he’s the last one there. If he played poorly after a home game in his early years, he’d skip the showers and drive straight to the Bucks practice facility on brutal winter nights, staying past midnight, working on the shooting stroke, footwork.
Lots of NBA players grew up in tough circumstances. But the hunger Antetokounmpo experienced growing up in a series of cramped Athens flats, four brothers to a bed, peddling trinkets to tourists from a sidewalk post, has helped fuel a drive to succeed, whatever the cost, that seems notable in its intensity.
And as fierce as he is about being the best, this son of top athletes (father in soccer, mother a high-jumper) is beloved throughout the Bucks organization, from lobby attendants to team execs, for his warm, sociable personality. The Giannis Scowl — the trademark game face he wears, flexing his arms, after dunking on somebody or swatting their shot into the rafters — was created only after a lot of practice in front of a mirror.
It’s been a remarkable journey from working-class Athens, the only black family in the neighborhood for blocks, parents living in fear of deportation, to where he is now. What about in ten years? The best European player since Dirk Nowitzki? Or one of the best players to ever hit the hardwood, period? How high will the Greek Freak fly?
