National Basketball Association

Antetokounmpo's rise began in his rugged first days as a skinny NBA teen in 2013

Updated Aug. 10, 2021 2:29 p.m. ET

By Mirin Fader
Special to FOX Sports

That world [back home in Greece] seemed far away as Giannis lined up across the baseline with two of his tallest teammates, six-foot-eleven Larry Sanders and six-foot-nine John Henson, the first day of training camp.

They stretched their arms out, fingertip to fingertip, comparing wingspans. Giannis looked giddy just being on an NBA court. Energetic. Three-cups-of-coffee energetic.

When pairing up players for a drill, [then-Bucks coach Larry] Drew told him, "Giannis, you’re gonna be with O.J." That would be O.J. Mayo, the former USC playmaker who was at one point the top prep player in America.

Giannis turned around, looked confused. "Who’s O.J.?"

Mayo smirked, cursed under his breath. "This dude don’t know who I am?" He’d have to show him. And he wasn’t the only one. Everyone took turns at Giannis in the next drill. A player from the opposite wing would drive hard to the basket, and the defensive player had to slide over and take the charge. It’s called the "Two-Nine Drill," but it really should have been called the "Knock-Giannis-Over Drill."

The rookie stood above the circle, legs slightly bent, arms high, looking like a very long toothpick. Teammate after teammate plowed into him, knocking him down as if he were hollow. Caron Butler, a six-foot-seven, 228-pound veteran from Racine, Wisconsin, who would work out in the snow in shorts and a tank top if you asked him, laid on some heavy bruises. "Weight room!" Butler would scream, banging into the rookie.

Then Zaza Pachulia, a six-foot-eleven, 270-pound center, had his turn. Then Stephen Graham, a six-foot-six, 215-pound guard and roster hopeful. "Just so he could get tougher," says Graham, now a player-development coach with the Nuggets. "We all had to let him know: welcome to the league, rook."

Graham hit Giannis so hard that Giannis slid across the baseline. He popped up but clutched his chest as if he had been wounded. "Oh my god," Giannis said under his breath, wheezing.

Graham was worried. "I thought I broke his sternum or something." Drew stopped practice to make sure rook was OK. The vets laughed. "Giannis wasn’t ready yet," Graham says. "He looks like he’s pretty much a Greek god right now, but back then? There was no way he was going to make it. If you blew on him, he’d fall over."

He was a super-skinny scrub but an endearing scrub: he got up quickly each time, not looking discouraged. Butler turned to Nate Wolters, another rookie, and smiled. "The kid’s gonna be special."

At the end of the practice, Drew handed every player a playbook so thick that it would take hours to comb through. By dinnertime, Giannis texted Drew and told him he noticed an error in one of the offensive plays.

Drew blinked. The rookie had corrected him? His first NBA coach on his first day in the NBA?

But it would become clear: Giannis was studious. A stickler for the details. He wanted to make an impact. But for now he was a mere punching bag.

The next day, the veterans pummeled him again. They’d toss him out of the paint if he dared go inside. He was a teenager competing against grown men. "It was a very, very, very tough transition for him," Drew says. "Most players would try to just go through him." Giannis wouldn’t back down, using his length and quickness to compensate, but he looked like a puppy. Everything was happening so fast. "You could tell he was lost," says Ersan Ilyasova, Bucks forward from 2006 to 2007, 2009 to 2015, and then 2018 to 2020.

Giannis’s coaches couldn’t get angry at him because they saw that he was trying so hard. But there was so much to learn: if he got a defensive rebound, he’d try to outlet the ball. Drew had to correct him constantly. "Push the ball! You have to push the ball. You’re too long, too athletic, to give it up. Go."

Giannis’s body just couldn’t execute what his mind told him to do. His teammates mocked his thin frame, calling him Baby Giraffe. Gumby. Stop Sign. They told him he was built like Shawn Bradley, the uncoordinated seven-foot-six center who had most recently played for the Mavericks. Giannis didn’t know who Bradley was. Once he consulted Google and realized it was an insult, he fumed to himself.

[Josh] Oppenheimer, the Bucks assistant coach, nicknamed Giannis Bambi. When Giannis would trip and fall on himself, players would howl in laughter. "There goes them Bambi legs!" Giannis knew Bambi didn’t sound like a good thing, but he didn’t understand what it meant. He was still learning English. "Coach," Giannis asked Oppenheimer, "what is Bambi?"

"It’s a baby deer," Oppenheimer said.

"No, Coach. No! I am not baby deer. No. I am not Bambi!" He started speaking in Greek, which he did when he’d get pissed off. But the veterans’ plan was working: they wanted to get in the rookie’s head, make him angry. "We were trying to get him to be that aggressive Giannis, the one y’all see now all the time," says Chris Wright, a Bucks forward that season.

Even then, Giannis wasn’t soft. He was going to compete. But coming from Europe, being as skinny as he was, as young as he was, and speaking in a voice that was as squeaky as it was, he came off as adorable.

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Giannis was scared of [Bucks assistant video coordinator Ross] Geiger’s family’s goldendoodle, London, because the dog kept jumping all over him when he visited Geiger’s parents’ home. At one point Giannis refused to go in the backyard for a good couple of minutes before Geiger reassured him that London was harmless and just wanted to play.

He said he loved The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Justin Bieber. The classic Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America. He seemed so innocent.

But Giannis was in no position to lead. He was just trying to crack the lineup, show that he was not Bambi. Show that he could absorb hundreds of plays in a new language. One practice, the team was practicing a common NBA play called "Floppy." The coaches noticed that Giannis looked agitated. Oppenheimer pulled him to the side. "What’s wrong?"

"Coach, Coach, I know I am skinny. I know I need to get stronger," Giannis said, "but, Coach, I am not floppy. I am not floppy!"

"What are you talking about?"

"Everybody, they just keep looking at me! Yelling at me, ‘Floppy, floppy, floppy, floppy!’"

"Giannis. ‘Floppy’ is a traditional NBA play. They’re just saying it so that you know it. They’re repeating it, trying to help you learn it."

"Oh. So it is a play?"

"Yeah. It’s a play."

"He really was a blank slate," Oppenheimer says. "He knew nothing about the NBA other than superstars. Nothing about coaches. He knew nothing other than ‘I want to go straight at you, I want to prove myself, and no matter how many times I fall, I’m going to get up and go right back at you.’"

Giannis listened. Sought out advice. He was different from many first-rounders with astronomical egos.

"He was like a piece of clay," Oppenheimer says. "Whatever you told him to do, he wanted to do it. And if he couldn’t do it, he did it until he could do it."

The two became close, as Oppenheimer was his first shooting coach. They’d stay for hours working on Giannis’s form and competing in shooting competitions. (Oppenheimer is known as the "Shot Doctor"; Giannis rarely beat him.)

No one spent more time in the gym after practice than Giannis. Jim Cleamons, Bucks assistant coach, who had previously coached Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, winning nine championships over his coaching career, would notice how frustrated Giannis was with himself when he made a mistake. He’d labor on the same move over and over. "He had heart," says Cleamons, who would often tell Giannis, "Giannis, you’re going to be a wonderful player someday; just don’t become Americanized."

"What are you talking about?" Giannis said.

"I mean: Don’t become Americanized. Don’t forget those work habits. Don’t forget what has gotten you to where you are."

Cleamons would see glimpses of greatness: a Eurostep or a dazzling finish. But Giannis was still adapting. His English wasn’t terrible; he just didn’t understand certain phrases or words, especially basketball terminology. Drew always explained concepts twice to Giannis, breaking down plays on a granular level. "I knew I had to be patient," Drew says. Oftentimes, Giannis would respond with a blank face. And that’s when Drew knew the rookie had no clue what was going on.

He knew basic phrases like "pin down" or "back pick." But he looked lost hearing more complex lingo like "pick the picker," "flare with a rescreen," or even "crashing the glass." As a result, sometimes film sessions that were ordinarily one hour took three. "Giannis spoke more English than I did when I came here," says Ilyasova, who came from Turkey. "When you come from a different country, it’s really hard to get transitioned."

Sometimes Giannis would accidentally scream out the name of the play—"Red!" or "Blitz!"—so that he could remember what to do. Butler had to pull him aside. "Giannis, you’re not supposed to say the play out loud! You can’t tell the other team what our plays are! Keep it to yourself, man!"

There was so much to learn it was overwhelming. "I think his head was spinning," says Wolters, the fellow rookie. "It’s hard enough to transition to the NBA when you do know the language."

Sam Reinke, a Bucks team attendant that season, once asked Giannis what color shoes he wanted.

"Uh . . . gray," Giannis said.

Reinke held up a pair of gray shoes. "You already have those; do you want a different color?"

"Black."

"You have those too. Is there something else?"

Giannis was quiet for a minute. Then Reinke realized Giannis didn’t know the English words for other colors. Reinke pulled out two red shoes. "What do you think? Red?"

"Oh. Yes. Red."

That stubborn part of Giannis, who wanted to get every move perfect, was the same way with learning English. He worked hard. He didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for him. "He understood it was only a matter of time before he got it," says Alex Antetokounmpo, who would Skype his big brother constantly, asking him what America was like.

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When Giannis would learn a new word, he’d get so excited he’d repeat it over and over, cracking his team up with his high-pitched voice and Greek accent. The day he learned the expression "Yo mama!" he ran around the locker room screaming, "Yo mama! Yo mama! Yo mama!"

Henson taught him what ice cubes were after Giannis asked, "What are those little square things?" Then Giannis kept repeating it: "Ice cubes! Ice cubes! Ice cubes!"

When he learned trash talk, specifically the word bitch, he’d scream "Bitch!" when he’d miss a shot.

Another favorite saying he adopted: "Where they at, though!"

He’d walk into the locker room. "Where they at, though!"

Walk onto the court. "Where they at, though!"

Walk into the showers. "Where they at, though!"

He’d watch American movies—specifically movies such as Friday or his eventual favorite, Coming to America—in order to learn English and to learn more about Black culture. He’d repeat his favorite line "Sexual chocolate!" in that high-pitched voice. Then he discovered TV shows like Martin and The Jamie Foxx Show. "These are staples in the African American community, so he put on all those to watch, to catch up," Henson says. The movies also made Giannis feel like he had something in common with his teammates. "He would love to think he’s American," Wolters says, "getting cool or whatever."

One night, long after all his teammates had left after the game, Giannis took a long shower, taking his time icing afterward. The only other person left was Dave Weber, an equipment manager for the team from 2010 to 2017. Weber and Giannis were friends, but Weber kept making fun of Giannis’s thick accent. A few days earlier, Giannis had warned him, "Dave, if you make fun of me again, I will put you in that trash can!" referring to the large gray bin near the locker-room entrance.

So that night, Weber again poked fun at Giannis’s accent, testing the limits. True to his word, Giannis lifted him up and dropped him in the can. Fortunately for Weber, the trash can was empty. After letting Weber stew a bit, Giannis came back a couple of minutes later and pulled his friend out.

Giannis made his teammates laugh when he’d speak quickly; his cadence sped up the more excited he got about something. Luke Ridnour, the team’s point guard that season, would be explaining something to him, and Giannis would respond, "YesOKlet’sgo." It always came out as one word: "YesIgotyou." "YesOKnoproblemIwillrebound."

"He was hearing you, but he wasn’t hearing you," Ridnour says. "He’d go out there and mess up, and we’d talk to him again. He was frantic." Still, he ran hard. Rebounded hard. Never gave lip. His answers always began with yes.

Mirin Fader is a staff writer for The Ringer. She previously wrote for Bleacher Report. Her work has been honored by the U.S. Basketball Writers Association, the Associated Press Sports Editors, the Pro Basketball Writers Association and the Los Angeles Press Club.