This was one of the many topics that Basketball Hall of Fame inductees and former Boston Celtics teammates Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce covered in the latest episode of TICKET & THE TRUTH, and the position of “The Big Ticket” will certainly ruffle the feathers of Bucks fans across the globe.
“You can’t say that with [Joel] Embiid over there. And with Jayson Tatum over there. I’m not arguing that,” Garnett said. “He’s probably like the fourth-best player in the East.”
Kevin Garnett didn’t name a third player who he has ahead of Giannis on his list, only mentioning Joel Embiid, the 76ers center who the MVP award in 2023, and Tatum, who joined Michael Jordan and LeBron James as the only players in league history to be named 1st Team All-NBA in the same year in which he won an NBA Title and an Olympic gold medal. Whether that’s because KG realized there wasn’t a player he could make a reasonable case for is unknown.
New York Knicks guard Jalen Brunson and Indiana Pacers guard Tyrese Haliburton were the only two players aside from Giannis and Tatum who made an All-NBA team in 2024. NBA Finals MVP Jaylen Brown deserves some love here, as do Olympic Gold medalist Bam Adebayo, newly re-signed Cleveland Cavaliers guard Donovan Mitchell, and Orlando Magic third-year star Paolo Banchero. But with all due respect to each of those six stars, and every other challenger in the Eastern Conference, Giannis still feels like the top dog.
Can the Milwaukee Bucks return to the top of the Eastern Conference?
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While Giannis’ place atop the NBA still feels secure, the same can’t necessarily be said of the Milwaukee Bucks. Since winning the NBA Title in 2021, the Bucks have won just a single postseason series, and been knocked out of the Playoffs in the opening round as a 3-seed this past season against the Indiana Pacers, and as a 1-seed in the 2023 NBA Playoffs versus the 8th-seeded Miami Heat. Giannis was limited to just three games in 2023, while missing the entire 1st round series versus Indiana this past April.
Returning to championship form may be more difficult for Milwaukee than it would be for Giannis to capture the 3rd MVP award of his career, and that spells big trouble for a Bucks team that has gone all in, perhaps to a fault, to craft a championship contender while Antetokounmpo remains in Brew City. Milwaukee pushed all of their chips to the center of the table when they traded for Damian Lillard last year, and then doubled-down — even though all of their chips were in the center of the table already — when they fired head coach Adrian Griffin and replaced him with Doc Rivers.
The Bucks didn’t make many meaningful changes to their roster in the offseason. The closest thing to a splashy move that the Bucks made was in signing Gary Trent Jr., a nice pick-up, but hardly a needle-mover. The Bucks just got older, and that includes Giannis, who will turn 30 years old in December. But even as Giannis continues to age, we haven’t seen much of a drop-off from the Greek Freak yet.
