Giannis Antetokounmpo: He’s Greek and Still Growing

The Bucks shooting guard continues to get better in his second NBA season.

By: Daniel Coughlin

Giannis Antetokounmpo. The name is as hard to pronounce as it is to describe his multifaceted skill set. The Milwaukee Bucks shooting guard serves as the city’s beloved Greek son and as one of the pleasant surprises of the 2013 NBA Draft. We know that he came into the league projected as a shooting guard, and then he kept growing. And growing. In fact, it became a part of the Bucks’ PR spin to generate interest in another season by claiming they would gun for the eighth seed as if stacking a few lottery chips would be a bad thing. One of their clever marketing techniques used a poster that featured the slogan, “Greek & Still Growing!”

Endless highlight reels ensued for Giannis, the 15th overall pick in last year’s draft. He would come swooping out of nowhere with his condor-like 7-foot-3 wingspan for fantastic shot blocks, steals and monster slams; all while, as the Bucks PR team will remind us, he was still growing.

The growth process of Giannis portends he will mature into his body and, hopefully, improve his game at the NBA level. There was surely plenty to cheer for in his rookie season, but there were also a lot of things to look at and say, “That needs to change soon.” He has some issues with his length and quickness when moving with the ball and is a bit undersized when tasked with guarding bigs, which is another level of the “still growing” process he’s currently going through. The ceiling for Giannis is lower than it was when he burst onto the NBA stage last year, but it is still much higher than that of a lot of players taken ahead of him in the same draft. And as his body keeps growing, so does his overall game.

Giannis is a wonderful matchup problem for Jason Kidd to have. With his physical growth and improved basketball IQ, he can stretch from shooting guard all the way down to power forward. If he is being guarded by a two-guard, he can work the post, towering over the cover man. If he is being guarded by a four, he can move to the perimeter and exploit his defender with his length and athleticism. That part of his game – deciphering how best to attack given the matchup – is still a work in progress. But there are other encouraging factors in his game. He keeps very active feet on the defensive end of the floor and shows the type of head movement that we see out of the top-performing midfielders in European soccer. If he can maintain the same level of active feet and head movement when he starts to fatigue, while staying mentally and physically engaged, he will be an above-average defender for the long term. And that works as a whole, for the Bucks are currently playing defense at a considerably above-average level, as noted in Jack Maloney’s piece over on Hardwood Paroxysm.

Antetokounmpo has not seen a massive change in his minutes distribution as he begins his second year in the league; he’s seeing an increase of 1.1 minutes per contest through 13 games this season. He is also still an infrequent starter, though he ends up seeing time on the court for more than half of each contest. The big change this year comes from his shooting numbers. He is taking nearly four more shots per contest so far this season and has seen his point average nearly double from 6.8 to 11.9. But it isn’t just volume that is leading him to a significantly higher point average; his accuracy on shots taken is also up from 41.4 percent in 2013-14 to 52.3 percent this season. Giannis is making the most of his time on the floor, and his contributions have essentially doubled what he offered last season. We are probably seeing a best-case scenario for Giannis at this point, and I, for one, hope that it continues. The only area where we might hope to see a big improvement at this point, statistically, is his assist-to-turnover ratio (this article from BrewHoops.com details some of the statistical variances from Antetokounmpo and Parker this season).

He has taken a dip this year, which I would attribute to seeing more time on the floor and playing a bigger role in the offense. The tremendous length that Antetokounmpo is blessed with is also one of his major obstacles. It is a long way from his hands down to the floor. Still, the overall picture is a very positive one. His True Shooting percentage is up nearly 6 percent from his rookie campaign, and, like a lot of his traditional statistics, his Player Efficiency Rating of 17.07 currently has him sitting at 13th among all shooting guards in the league, behind the likes of Wade, Thompson, Harden, Bryant and DeRozan but ahead of Korver, Dragic, Ginobili and his own teammate, O.J. Mayo. In the similarly useful NBA.com metric of PIE (Player Impact Estimate), he has doubled last season’s value. No matter which metrics you are using to measure him, he is a vastly improved player in every category sans his marginally worse assist-to-turnover ratio. Numbers are a fantastic way to measure improvement, but what do our eyes tell us?

The eye test will tell you that Giannis is comfortable, settling in. And he is being smart about how he attacks on offense and how he sticks with his defensive positioning and assignments. He is still a young buck, though, and it shows often. Giannis tends to take a running head start toward his defender and, if lucky, gets off a shot. It looks reckless every time he starts to get excited and push for a play to happen. It’s as if he is reading the defense correctly, recognizing what is in front of him (mature) but gets so excited in his motion that it is not fluid or crisp in execution (youth). Conversely, he shows some flashes of Derrick Rose in this game that I found to be very encouraging. He is pushing the ball on the break, making crisp passes, filling lanes correctly and supplying some highlight finishes. The Rose comparison exhibits itself when you see his work driving into the lane when more under control and able to use his size on smaller defenders. I don’t mean that he has elite MVP-level skills or speed, but more that he worked against a size-mismatched defender and then turned, tucked the ball like a football and absorbed contact to finish the score and draw the foul for the and-one opportunity. You can see a great example in Matt Moore’s post on CBS sports that highlights the best of Giannis.

He’s a mix of good, young and a little bad. The encouraging thing is that I have to look a little harder for the truly bad or poorly executed play. The occasional sloppy dribble off his foot, blundering charge or poor shot selection pops up. The second-year growth on the court is looking a lot like his first-year physical growth: Greek and still growing.

The Bucks have dubbed this season as “Own The Future.” I don’t believe that the Bucks own the future, but I do believe that Giannis was a diamond in the rough. The addition of highly prized Jabari Parker as the No. 2 overall pick in the 2014 draft will make them both exciting and unpredictable this season and in the remaining rookie contract years they have with these young players.

It isn’t just me, though, singing the praise of the young Bucks and what they’re doing. Currently, the Bucks are the owners of a 7-6 record, already nearly half of their win total from last season. This is probably not sustainable, though the Eastern Conference is a fickle thing and capable of making just about any team a world-beater on any given night. Basically, I expect a lot of this over the course of the season, a reaction with which Bucks fans should be awfully familiar by this point.

Giannis is going to continue being a source of great joy and more than a few grimaces over the course of the season, but everything should continue to trend upward as he turns more of his raw skill into technical talent. The growth needs to come in his knowledge and reading of the game at the speed that it is happening. It also needs to arrive in his ability to perform more from the post and take better care of the ball. The Bucks probably do not own the future, but they are definitely on the path to making good on their time spent languishing in the lottery.