Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo won his second Most Valuable Player award after an outstanding regular season.
What We Know:
- Giannis Antetokounmpo is now up there with Stephen Curry, Lebron James, Steve Nash, Michael Jordan, Moses Malone, Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Tim Duncan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar after winning his second NBA MVP award. His high numbers from last year support his second winning with 29.5 points and 13.6 rebounds. The 25-year-old pro basketball player is the first to win back-to-back at his age since James in 2009 and 2010.
- The Bucks, however, in their second-round series with the Miami Heat, lost five times, falling short of last year’s finals. Last year, Antetokounmpo was benched because of the ankle injury he sustained in game 4.
- “Obviously, I would love to be still in the bubble, keep playing games, be in the Eastern Conference finals, you know, fighting to get an opportunity to play in the finals,” he said in an interview on NBA TV from Athens. Athens, Greece is where he is from and, in addition to his long wingspan, how he got his nickname “Greek Freak”.
- Of the 101 first-place votes, Antetokounmpo received 85 while James received 16 of the votes. This would have been James’ fifth MVP award had he won. Antetokounmpo will continue to work hard to attain three straight MVP awards like Bird did from 1984 to 1986, even though in March he said that winning the award again wasn’t important.
- He was drafted by Milwaukee in 2013 when he was 18-years-old and his first All-Star game was in 2017, the same year he won the Most Improved Player Award.
After next season, Antetokounmpo will become eligible to be a free agent. He said on Friday that if everybody is “on the same page” to fight to become a champion, then he doesn’t see the reason to not be in Milwaukee for the next 15 years.
