The Nets didn’t face Giannis Antetokounmpo in their 96-90 win over the Bucks on Tuesday night at Barclays Center, and it’s unclear if they’ll see him Friday when they travel to Milwaukee.
But it’s almost a fait accompli that they’ll call the Bucks about their want-away superstar this summer.
“They’ll make calls,” a source told The Post. “They’ve made calls in the past.”
Antetokounmpo has been Brooklyn’s proverbial white whale going as far back as 2023, with general manager Sean Marks hoarding draft capital to make a bid for the two-time MVP.
But Antetokounmpo has spent so long dropping bread crumbs about a potential exit but never pulling the trigger that the Nets’ timing has gone from terrific to terrible to…whatever it is now.
“If you’re going after max-level talent, they have to automatically and absolutely change the trajectory of your team,” Marks said at this point last year. “This can’t be like, ‘Let’s go get this [guy] and lock ourselves into being a six or seven seed.’ When we go all in, you’re going in to compete at the highest level and contend.”
The Nets never viewed Mikal Bridges as Superman, but as the perfect Robin to team up with a potential Batman like Antetokounmpo. And sources told The Post that Brooklyn’s hope had been to lure the Greek star back in 2023-24.
But when Antetokounmpo opted to stay put in Milwaukee, Marks pivoted and traded Bridges to the Knicks that June for a record-setting haul of five first-round picks and a swap. They picked a lane, and that lane was headed toward a rebuild with no exit ramp.
There was irony in the fact that when Antetokounmpo finally met with Milwaukee general manager Jon Horst last July in his native Greece and expressed a willingness to leave the Bucks, it was only for the Knicks.
The hard bargain that Marks had driven a year earlier had hamstrung the Knicks and left them without enough draft capital to make a viable play for the superstar.
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According to an ESPN report, Horst and Milwaukee coach Doc Rivers pitched Antetokounmpo and Bucks ownership on contending in the Eastern Conference after waiving and stretching veteran guard Damian Lillard. But a horrible start to the season saw Antetokounmpo and agent Alex Saratsis reiterate a desire to leave.
“With the whole Giannis thing, it made everything problematic for us,” Rivers said Tuesday night of Antetokounmpo’s injuries and lack of availability.
“It’s been a tough year. I have not had a lot of these in my career, and this was not one that I thought we’d have one. On the injuries, we knew that our roster construction was tough. We were going to come into the season with quite a lot of young guys, a lot of minimum salary guys; but we thought it’d work. We thought Giannis would be available for 65 to 70 games. We did know that if we had injuries, it’s going to be a tough year.”
What has been a tough year for Milwaukee is about to get terrible.
Nets fans can sympathize, watching the Big 3 of Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and James Harden break up without even getting the title that the Bucks did.
To be clear, with teams like the Heat, Warriors and Knicks perceived as likelier landing spots, it’s a long shot Antetokounmpo will end up in Brooklyn.
The odds are just better than the microscopic near-zero they were in February.
The Bucks reportedly rejected offers of four first-round picks from Golden State, and Tyler Herro and Kel’el Ware plus assets from Miami.
Despite a Bleacher Report story that claimed Brooklyn had called the Bucks about Antetokounmpo, sources told The Post that the Nets never did. Having paid Houston dearly to reacquire their natural 2025 and ’26 first-round picks — and now committed to building with those lottery picks — it was the worst possible timing.
But this coming summer will surely be better.
