[Fischer] The Minnesota Timberwolves circled back with the Milwaukee Bucks this week on Giannis Antetokounmpo and they were asking for even more now than they were at the deadline. Their requests have been described as “unrealistic.”
Source: https://open.substack.com/pub/marcstein/p/the-nbas-latest-and-greatest-trade?r=nuq3a&utm_medium=ios
I’m told that the Timberwolves, for example, indeed circled back to the Bucks this week to see what it would take to make another run at pairing Antetokounmpo with Anthony Edwards … after The Stein Line revealed in late January that a partnership with Edwards had quietly appealed to Giannis for some time. Yet Milwaukee is said to have asked for even more now than the teams discussed in the winter when Minnesota was at the forefront of the Giannis Trade Chase along with Golden State and, of course, Miami.
The Bucks are obviously entitled (and even expected) to ask for anything they want in exchange for Antetokounmpo, but they also might be forced to acknowledge that the landscape certainly has a different look now than it did at the in-season trade deadline.
At the time, Milwaukee left several suitors with the impression that it was engaging in trade talks it had no intention of completing … that its front office was merely gathering information and/or setting the table for an offseason auction. Yet it was the Bucks themselves whose co-owner Jimmy Haslam established a deadline by volunteering to the world in early May that the team intended to trade Antetokounmpo by draft night if it could not secure a long-term commitment from him.
One of the Bucks’ major problems now, though, is that the more robust market they clearly anticipated for Antetokounmpo’s services in May and June compared to February is not materializing. Houston did not come calling. Nor did Oklahoma City or San Antonio or the NBA’s newly crowned champions from New York.