{"id":789431,"date":"2026-07-09T15:14:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T15:14:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/789431\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T15:14:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T15:14:11","slug":"bucks-gm-jon-horst-opens-up-on-trading-giannis-antetokounmpo-to-miami","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/789431\/","title":{"rendered":"Bucks GM Jon Horst opens up on trading Giannis Antetokounmpo to Miami"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Wednesday, for the first time since trading Giannis, Bucks General Manager Jon Horst took questions on that decision, addressing why he chose to end things with the man he calls the greatest player in franchise history. Credit to The Athletic\u2019s Eric Nehm, who transcribed the press conference; these quotes came from Nehm\u2019s article, which you can read in full here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Jon Horst\u2019s most important answer of the session came right at the end, when he stressed that the decision to trade Giannis Antetokounmpo was not one he made lightly, but that Miami\u2019s package ultimately won him over.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is hard,\u201d Horst said. \u201cCall it what it is. Giannis is one of the greatest players in NBA history. Top 75 of all time. Greatest player in franchise history. He\u2019s an NBA champion in Milwaukee. All the things that we\u2019ve talked about and that you all know, he is not with us anymore.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, we\u2019ve got a lot of work to do, and we championed balance and getting back foundational players that we believed in, draft capital that we thought we could utilise and capitalise on, either by drafting at some point or by using in future transactions and flexibility to make decisions. The Miami opportunity presented us with the best path in totality, and that\u2019s why we did the deal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Something Horst said during Taylor Jenkins\u2019 introductory press conference in early May was that the team would seriously consider the possibility of continuing to build around Giannis, even while all the outside noise indicated that he was as good as gone. I\u2019ll be honest, I wasn\u2019t too sure Horst was telling the truth at the time, but he reiterated that same message.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn most cases, for most of the last decade, there wasn\u2019t a parallel path of \u2018hey, if we trade Giannis, it\u2019s this,\u2019 and \u2018if we keep Giannis, it\u2019s this.\u2019 It was just, \u2018we\u2019re going to maximise this with Giannis.\u2019 And so, you\u2019d end up trying to find the best opportunity and make the most of it, and hopefully it works.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis time around, we had something sincerely to compare those options to, and clearly, we made the decision what we thought was best for us. But again, there\u2019s a human side of this and a respect factor of Giannis. And what\u2019s best for Giannis was to execute the Miami trade. It was different than years past, in that there were truly paralleling paths to really consider against just the all-in (with Antetokounmpo), and what does it look like.\u201d<\/p>\n

As we all know, Horst has been uber-aggressive during the Giannis era, repeatedly willing to \u201ctrade the future for the now\u201d to give GA the best chance to win. From the acquisitions of Jrue Holiday and Damian Lillard, to executing the largest waive-and-stretch in NBA history of Lillard\u2019s contract to free up enough space to sign Myles Turner, he couldn\u2019t have tried harder. The Bucks GM stood by all of those decisions but also explained that the time had come to stop the aggressive moves and part ways with the two-time MVP, though there was no \u201cdefining moment\u201d that led him to that conclusion.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we\u2019re looking for a defining moment, I don\u2019t know that that exists in any of these things. I think you\u2019re talking about a decade-long, or decade-plus, pursuit of first building competitiveness and then trying to sustain competitiveness, have as much success as you can, weather as many failures as you can. There\u2019s a lot that goes into that, and I think over the course of time, you do everything that you can.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think ultimately there comes a point in time where you have to make the assessment, and you have to assess the opportunities, and if the result of that in our estimation or (Antetokounmpo\u2019s) estimation is you can do more and better differently\u2014and we can do more and better differently\u2014you take advantage of that. We went through an offseason last year and we believed that we had an opportunity to maximise something together. We went through a trade deadline where we assessed whether or not that was still the case. And we went into an offseason this year where we took the same approach. This time around, our assessment was (that) the ultimate opportunity we had with Miami was what was best for the Bucks organisation now and going forward\u2014and best for Giannis.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now with a young team to build with, Horst was under no illusions about where the team is and where it needs to get to.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one\u2019s sitting here today and saying that we\u2019re a better team today after trading Giannis,\u201d Horst said. \u201cHe\u2019s one of the greatest players to ever play, (the) greatest player in the franchise history. We\u2019ve had an incredible amount of success. And as I\u2019ve said to Miami a couple of times, he\u2019s going to have an unbelievable season for them. [They\u2019ve] got an incredibly motivated, healthy, focused Giannis Antetokounmpo that I think is going to have an unbelievable season and seasons, for that matter.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, for us, it was just about the opportunity to build and to again set a foundation. Can we set something in place with a new coach and take advantage of an opportunity to truly build from a place of strength on a roster and a style of player that hopefully makes our city proud and our franchise proud and gets us to the place where we are competitive and we can sustain that competition and that competitive level, year in and year out? And if we\u2019re lucky enough, at some point, to be in a position to knock on the door and have a chance to win a championship.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hearing this from Horst actually made me feel pretty good. It sounds like he\u2019s going to dial back the aggressiveness and allow this young core to develop organically, which seems like the right way to go about it.<\/p>\n

Per Nehm, Horst \u201cshied away from discussing his emotions\u201d during the press conference, but he did call on a sentiment shared with him by former Bucks GM John Hammond, whom Horst worked under when he first came to the Bucks organisation.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the NBA, it\u2019s never goodbye; it\u2019s see you later. And Giannis will be back in Fiserv soon, and he\u2019ll be back in Fiserv multiple times. And I really hope\u2014not hope\u2014I know that each and every time the standing ovation, the love, the respect, the admiration that he gets from this city and this fan base and this franchise will be felt and will be appropriate for everything he\u2019s meant to all of us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brew Hoop community, what did you take from Jon Horst\u2019s press conference?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Wednesday, for the first time since trading Giannis, Bucks General Manager Jon Horst took questions on that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":789432,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,133225,590,85],"class_list":["post-789431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-bucks-news","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=789431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789431\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/789432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=789431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=789431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=789431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}