Giannis Is Too Online

Just like the rest of us

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A trade request by any other name is just as vague, league sources tell ESPN. That’s how Shamspeare Charania would have written it.

“Sources said Antetokounmpo has informed the Bucks for months that he believes the moment has come to part ways after 12-plus years together, making a trade increasingly possible.”

Breaking news!!! After years of speculation now, something still might happen at some point in the near future! But probably not!

What does the above sentence even mean? Can’t you just feel the tortured gymnastics to avoid saying the words ‘trade request’? The sheer obfuscation is astounding.

My general theory on this — which is pure speculation too, so bear with me — is that most of this goes back to a reluctance on Giannis’ part to be cast as the bad guy. So long as he has no say in the matter, which seems to have been his line for the last however-long-it’s-been-now, then nobody can prove he wanted to leave the franchise that drafted him.

He didn’t ask out! He wouldn’t do that. They just got rid of him. Totally against his will, I’m sure.

On some level, this is almost admirable. Stars who stay with one team for their entire career are increasingly rare these days, and it’s not as if that’s a bad standard to aspire to. Bird, Magic. Kobe, Duncan. Dirk, Steph. All good names.

Giannis is close to that level as a player. He’s a Hall of Famer, and he’s already played 12 seasons in Milwaukee. He also brought them their first title in 50 years, which counts for a lot on your exit. It’s not like he’s quitting on the team before they have a chance to get to the mountaintop. They already did! I think it might just be time to accept that this particular team has been on the descent for a while now.

And so, too, in all likelihood, is Giannis himself. He’s a hyper-athletic, 7’0” wrecking ball on the wrong side of 30 who’s now on his fourth calf strain, all on the same leg, in the last 18 months or so. That’s a bad physical! It just is.

Again, he’s a Hall of Famer, and there are a lot of teams where I think he could be an interesting fit. I just think there’s also ample reason to think that Giannis’ game may not adjust to newfound physical limitations in the ways that we’ve seen Joel Embiid making do this season. (Crazy, by the way.)

But of course Giannis should bet on himself before things get actually bad. He has every single right to ask out. He just can’t be seen as doing it, because… I don’t know, actually. Because he reads his mentions? I’m guessing that has something to do with it.

Allow me to yell at some clouds for a moment. Is this what we do now? I know they’re famous, so the heat is a 1000x times hotter, but are even professional athletes so prisoner to what everyone might say about them online that they can’t just admit to an entirely defensible opinion?

Self-censorship, meet personal brand. You guys are gonna get along great.

And on the subject of personal brands! I’m on the record, several times over now, with respect to what I think of NBA insiders as a general concept. Or any other insiders, for that matter. Schefter, Shams, Passan. Woj, quite famously.

I do not begrudge anyone out there making a living. And these guys work hard as hell. No shade there either. It’s an around-the-clock job. All granted.

My gripe with the archetype is that these guys are essentially just acting as publicists. Seriously — what are we doing here?

I used to work in broadcast news, a medium in which you tend to report the same story many hours in a row. Oftentimes, many days.

Faced with that conundrum, the old refrain used to be that one must “advance the story,” or “push it forward.” Don’t report the past. Reach if you must, but report the now. Failing that, report the future. I had an anchor who used to hold to a single rule of news-writing. If your first sentence could’ve been in the same article yesterday, you must change it.

It’s good advice, if a bit presumptuous. Due to the trappings of the format, you’re kinda obligated as a newscast to pretend that something has changed, even if it hasn’t. Even if you don’t have any more information, you better pretend like you do, or else your viewers are going to catch on and turn the channel to Wheel of Fortune! And we can’t have that. Nah.

That’s the kind of thinking that results in the paragraph above, which I’ll now repeat. Emphasis mine, all comical.

“Sources said Antetokounmpo has informed the Bucks for months that he believes the moment has come to part ways after 12-plus years together, making a trade increasingly possible.”

You don’t say.

🏈 I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about the Bills promoting Joe Brady to take over at head coach. On some level, I think the continuity is worth valuing, especially on the offensive side of the ball, which has been generally excellent — if undermanned at WR — for years now.

🏈 I also don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about the Patriots being back in the Super Bowl already. At a certain point, you can’t keep blaming a team for beating who’s on the schedule, and I’d say we’re at that point. Would the Broncos have won that game had Bo Nix been playing? Might they have even won with Jarrett Stidham had there not been a blizzard? Hard to say. Maybe, though. Definitely a possibility. Maye hasn’t looked good all postseason. He’ll have a chance to rewrite it all against Seattle. I’ll be picking the Seahawks like everybody else, mainly because I think they’re better. JSN’s pretty special. That was a blast, watching him and Puka trade crazy chunk plays last weekend. But hey, it’s anybody’s game now. In sum: why couldn’t the Bills have just hired Mike Vrabel last year instead? Sigh.

⚾ I also don’t know how to feel about a trio of Joey Votto, Anthony Rizzo, and Clayton Kershaw covering MLB for NBC next year. It would not be an exaggeration to say that they are among the top three Cardinals nemeses of my lifetime. I think I like Kershaw the most, Votto the least by a mile, and Rizzo somewhere in the middle. But then again, I haven’t seen any of them do TV, so those rankings are subject to change.

📚 I’m working on two right now, trying to get back into an audiobook habit that let me squeeze a couple more books in last year. In the ol’ headphones, I’ve got The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Banger so far. Old Italian classic from the 50s about the decline of the Italian aristocracy. Stole that one from my last read, which I’ll plug one last time: An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine. Keeping with the 1950s theme, my present read — apart from Cribsheet, of course — is The Tree of Man by Patrick White. That’s an old Australian classic instead. Thematically, it’s got some things in common with Train Dreams. In terms of style, it couldn’t be much more different. I’m thinking about writing a whole article about the Tree of Man experience before I go on paternity leave, at which point I’ll probably go on paternity leave from this newsletter as well. But we’ll have to see about that one.