Opinion | Jefferson thinks Antetokounmpo is a sidekick
Joe Perrino, Sports Editor
Every star, throughout the history of the NBA, has needed a complementary sidekick to win a championship. There may not have been a Michael Jordan without Scottie Pippen. There may not have been any 2010s Miami Heat championships if LeBron James didn’t have Dwyane Wade or Chris Bosh. However, the newest face of basketball, Giannis Antetokounmpo, may be a second fiddle according to former NBA player and current ESPN analyst Richard Jefferson.
In a tweet Sept. 2, after Antetokounmpo and the Milwaukee Bucks fell to a 2-0 deficit in the second round of the NBA playoffs against the Miami Heat, Jefferson shared a ludicrous thought.
“Giannis might be Pippen … there I said it. He needs his Jordan,” Jefferson said.
That’s some tough talk from someone who rode LeBron James’s coattails to an NBA Finals victory in 2017. Antetokounmpo is likely going to take home his second Most Valuable Player (MVP) award in a row in the coming days, the first player to do so since Stephen Curry in 2014-15 and 2015-16. In fact, Antetokounmpo could be the first person since Hakeem Olajuwon in 1994 to win both an MVP and Defensive Player of the Year award in the same season, a feat that Jordan achieved as well.
Why is this so important?
Pippen has zero MVP awards and zero Defensive Player of the Year awards. The same can be said for Wade and Bosh. All great players, but none have accumulated nearly the accolades Antetokounmpo has – and he’s done it in only a few short years.
This is what makes Jefferson’s take so bad. How dare a former player, especially someone who played with the second-best player of all time (yes, Jordan’s still better than LeBron, but that’s an argument for another time), call a player of a similar caliber a second option because of two bad playoff games.
Let’s get into the accolades. It seems like Jefferson was considering Antetokounmpo in the same realm as Jordan. However, with Antetokounmpo’s struggles early on in the Heat series, Jefferson felt this great need to show the world a frankly garbage opinion. He was right in his first determination.
Antetokounmpo, 25, has made five playoff series in his young NBA career. Through those years, his team has made it out of the first round twice. At the age of 24, he brought the Bucks to game six of the Eastern Conference Finals, two wins away from the NBA Finals.
At the age of 25, Jordan entered his fifth playoffs as well. He, too, had only taken his team out of the first round twice.
Jefferson’s take reaches out into an overarching problem in sports media. Commentators like Skip Bayless and washed-up former players hop on TV and wax poetic about expecting so much out of young players who have yet to enter into their athletic prime – generally 28 to 31 years old. If we took Jordan’s first five playoffs like we do Antetokounmpo's, would he be the best player ever? No! He was enduring the same exact criticism at that point in his career that Antetokounmpo is now.
What is my point? Not that a 25-year-old Giannis Antetokounmpo is better than the greatest ever, but that he has strikingly similar experiences to Jordan. Normalize letting young players develop.