Milwaukee Bucks: Giannis Antetokounmpo is (somehow) still being underrated defensively

Heading into the 2019-20 NBA season, Milwaukee Bucks superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo is not getting the respect he deserves for his defense.

When Giannis Antetokounmpo took to the stage last June to cap off an outstanding season with the Milwaukee Bucks by accepting the NBA’s Most Valuable Player award, I certainly didn’t anticipate ever having to make a case for him being overlooked or underrated again.

Somehow, just a few months later, that’s exactly where we find ourselves, though.

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Part of what makes Giannis so special, and certainly a major factor in catapulting him to the level of dominant play that helped the Bucks to 60 wins, and earned him MVP honors, is his ability to seize full control of a game on both ends of the floor.

Antetokounmpo can manage, control, and ultimately turn a game on both offense and defense, in a way which only Kawhi Leonard and, possibly, Anthony Davis could currently lay claim to among active players.

Playing as a key cog in the NBA’s stingiest defense last season, Antetokounmpo was allowed to flourish in something of a free safety role, which empowered him to make decisions using his sky-high defensive IQ, and make up ground using his eye-popping length and athleticism.

That led to countless chasedown blocks, and highlight steals in the passing lanes, but it also simply limited high quality scoring opportunities for opponents. With arms as long as Antetokounmpo’s, and the speed to close out in a heartbeat, there may not be another player in the league that poses such a strong deterrent to opposing shooters, both in the paint and on the perimeter.

This didn’t go totally unnoticed last year by any means. Antetokounmpo was named to the All-Defensive First Team for the first time, finished as runner-up to Rudy Gobert in Defensive Player of the Year voting, and it almost certainly played a major factor in him winning MVP over James Harden.

So coming into the new season, it’s more than a little confounding to see Antetokounmpo’s name largely omitted from the conversation surrounding the league’s best defender, and the frontrunner for Defensive Player of the Year in 2019-20.

This was best encapsulated by the results of John Schuhmann of NBA.com’s annual GM survey. As I touched on in a post on Friday, the polling of executives left no doubt of Giannis’ standing as the NBA’s current best player, and yet the one area of that survey that appeared to overlook him to some extent was related to defense.

Antetokounmpo took just seven percent of the vote when GMs were asked for the best defensive player in the NBA. He didn’t receive any votes in the conversation for the NBA’s best interior defender, and appears to have received just one for the NBA’s best perimeter defender. In spite of that, Giannis trailed just Draymond Green (38 percent) and Kawhi Leonard (31 percent) in the vote for the league’s most versatile defender, where he took 21 percent.

It would seem the combination of that versatility, the stellar defensive campaign Antetokounmpo compiled last year, and his overall track record would ensure he factored into the conversation for Defensive Player of the Year picks, but it hasn’t necessarily been the case.

A striking example of this came in Sports Illustrated’s recent awards roundtable, as an excellent group of writers (Rob Mahoney, Jeremy Woo, Chris Mannix, and Rohan Nadkarni) not only opted to pick players other than Giannis with their DPOY predictions, but they failed to mention him in that race entirely.

The intent here isn’t to start a wave of complaining about Giannis not getting the respect he deserves for his defense, as much as it’s a sense of puzzlement as to why that’s proving to be the case.

Although he didn’t pick Giannis to win DPOY, ESPN’s Zach Lowe acknowledged that he considered him for that award, and to earn a historic distinction in the process:

"“Antetokounmpo is the alpha and omega of everything Milwaukee does — the rare superstar with a chance (and boy did I want to predict this) to become only the third player to win MVP and Defensive Player of the Year in the same season."

The other two players to have achieved that MVP and DPOY double are none other than Michael Jordan and Hakeem Olajuwon. Giannis went incredibly close to managing that feat last season, so why can’t he make that a reality this time around?

Maybe the Bucks’ excellent team defense prevents him from getting a sufficiently large share of the credit, but it feels as if the measure of excellent defenders in the NBA has long been, lazily, focused on rim-protecting bigs more often than not.

Antetokounmpo is a rim-protecting big, but he’s also a lockdown perimeter defender, and the Bucks’ wildcard disruptor in the passing lanes. The defensive conversation may be largely excluding him at present, but that’s unlikely to still be the case come the end of the season.