With the third annual Giannis Antetokounmpo trade rumor season in full swing, the pundits are out in full force trying to figure out the most logical pathway for the superstar’s exit. One such circuit comes to us from Sam Quinn of CBS Sports.
Here is the deal in full:
Blazers get: Mikal Bridges, Guerschon Yabusele
Bucks get: Karl-Anthony Towns, Miles McBride, Pacome Dadiet, NYK 2026 FRP (via WAS), POR 2028 FRP (via ORL), 2028 and 2030 pick swaps (via POR) returned, 2030 and 2032 NYK pick swaps
Knicks get: Giannis Antetokounmpo, Jerami Grant
Mikal Bridges isn't worth it for Portland
Stripping away the throw-ins and salary matchers, the Blazers get Mikal Bridges. Is he a better player than Jerami Grant? Yes. Just how much better remains to be seen—is the difference in statistical output worth three extra draft picks? That part is debatable.
In his final Phoenix year, Mikal Bridges finished second in Defensive Player of the Year voting and was named to the All-Defensive First Team. Since then, he’s been traded twice and hasn’t made one all-defense team or received one DPOY vote. Summarily, his scoring average improved dramatically while his advanced defensive stats plummeted.
This season, Bridges’s scoring is back down, but the defensive stats are back up; his Defensive Box Plus-Minus is back up to above his DPOY year and the second highest of his career at 1.2. Unlike many stats, DBPM compares output to the league average; Grant’s is negative, and so is his career average.
On the offensive end, the same is true for both players—the OBPM of Bridges is positive, and so is his career average; Grant is a negative in both respects. Bridges has 46.9 win shares in his eight years in the league; Grant has 38.9 in four more years. Simply put, Bridges is more of a winning player than Grant, a stat that's difficult to quantify.
The Blazers are in a very unique situation; the team traded its star player for bits and pieces, and now has all of those bits and the guy they traded away. The Orlando pick included in this deal came from the Yang Hansen trade, and so in a vacuum, the trade sees the Blazers giving up assets that weren’t theirs three years ago.
The value of those two Bucks pick swaps is truly the meat of the trade, and how Portland’s front office views the future of Milwaukee’s franchise will ultimately be the deciding factor. The 2028 NBA draft is 2.5 years away. Will the Bucks be operating in a post-Giannis landscape at that time?
Milwaukee doesn’t own a single provisionless draft pick in either round until 2031, and the longer Giannis clings to the Bucks, the value of those swaps increases logarithmically—but as Fat Joe once said, “yesterday’s price is not today’s price”.
There are many moving parts here with many speculative unknowns, and I’d prefer to hold onto one of the picks ceded by the Blazers in this hypothetical. Ultimately, this trade epitomizes “right idea, wrong execution”.
Grade: C