Giannis Antetokounmpo was unfamiliar with Jason Kidd's prolific playing career
Giannis Antetokounmpo was barely a month into his life when Jason Kidd made his NBA debut, 7 years old when Kidd finished second to Tim Duncan in MVP voting during his first Finals run and still a teen, most likely selling sunglasses on the streets of Athens, when the 10-time All-Star won a title in 2011.
So, when Kidd made his controversial move from coach of the Brooklyn Nets to the same role on the Milwaukee Bucks and benched his 6-foot-11 second-year future star, Antetokounmpo had no idea what his new boss had accomplished as a player, according to a new Sports Illustrated cover story.
A nugget from another must-read feature from the great Lee Jenkins:
The first time Kidd benched him, Antetokounmpo was irate. “I was like, ‘Let’s see what this guy did in his career, anyway,’ ” Antetokounmpo recounts, and called up Kidd’s bio on his phone. “I saw Rookie of the Year, NBA championship, USA Olympic gold medal, second in assists, fifth in made threes, blah, blah, blah. I was like, ‘Jesus freaking Christ, how can I compete with that? I better zip it.'”
If you paid any attention to basketball for the two decades following his 1992 Naismith Prep Player of the Year campaign, Kidd’s name probably popped up somewhere between one and 10,000 times. In addition to the accolades Antetokounmpo already listed from his internet search, Kidd was a First Team All-American in college, the second overall pick in the 1994 NBA Draft, the league leader in assists five times, a five-time All-NBA First Team honoree, nine-time All-Defensive selection and the 2007 USA Basketball Male Athlete of the Year — between his first and second Olympic gold medals.
Jason Kidd is inarguably one of the greatest point guards to ever play, so it’s hard to believe anybody, even a 20-year-old who spent his youth overseas, was unfamiliar with his resume in 2014, especially since Antetokounmpo now lists a Kidd predecessor (Magic Johnson) and contemporary (Kobe Bryant) among his favorite players. Heck, Kidd only stopped playing two months before Giannis was drafted.
Yet, upon reading the entirety of Jenkins’ feature on the Greek Freak — in which we learn that the budding superstar did not fully grasp that basketball might be a better future than peddling knockoff sunglasses on the streets of Greece for someone with a 7-foot-3 wingspan and that his crash course in American culture came with first-time viewings of “Coming to America” and “Next Friday” in 2014 — we begin to understand how it is possible that Antetokounmpo actually didn’t know much about Kidd.
“A lot of players will tell you, ‘When I was a kid, I watched Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, LeBron, Magic, and I wanted to be just like them,’ ” Antetokounmpo elaborated to Jenkins. “For me it wasn’t like that at all.”
Thankfully, Kidd and Antetokounmpo eventually found common ground in a shared dream of being Magic Johnson — Kidd a few inches shorter and Giannis a few inches taller — and now the former is teaching the latter the point guard ropes while introducing the Greek Freak to Dirk Nowitzki’s unstoppable fadeaway jumper, Shawn Kemp’s ferocious fast-break dunks and Kiki Vandeweghe’s pivoting post moves. Whether Antetokounmpo had heard of any of them before remains unclear.
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Ben Rohrbach is a contributor for Ball Don’t Lie and Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach
