Giannis Antetokounmpo puts Bucks' NBA playoff 'failure' in perspective with honest answer

The Nigerian immigrants who gave birth to one of the greatest basketball players we’ve ever seen struggled so badly to find work and stability in their adopted country of Greece that it was often up to Giannis Antetokounmpo and his brother to hawk cheap goods on the streets of Athens.

Sometimes, the tourists on their way to see the Acropolis would buy a pair of sunglasses or a purse, giving Antetokounmpo enough money to buy food for his family that day. Other days, they wouldn’t.

This is a story that by now has been told thousands of times, an almost miraculous rise from crippling poverty to two-time MVP and NBA champion. And it clearly informs the worldview that came through so clearly on the podium Wednesday night when Antetokounmpo denied that the Milwaukee Bucks’ season was a failure by losing its first-round playoff series in five games.

When you’ve been through what Antetokounmpo has been through, when you’ve seen what he’s seen, there’s little doubt that he’s already won the most important game he’s ever played.

"It’s not a failure. There’s steps to success,” Antetokounmpo responded when asked by a longtime Milwaukee Bucks beat writer if this season had been a failure.

He continued.

“There’s always steps to it. Michael Jordan played 15 years, won six championships. The other nine years was a failure? That’s what you’re telling me? There’s no failure in sports. There’s good days, bad days, some days you're able to be successful, some days you’re not. Some days it’s your turn, some days it’s not your turn. That’s what sports is about.

“You don’t always win. Some other people’s going to win. And this year somebody else is going to win. Simple as that. We’re going to come back next year, try to be better, try to build good habits, try to play better and not have a 10-day stretch playing bad basketball and hopefully we can win a championship.

“From 1971 to 2021, we didn't win a championship. It was 50 years of failure? No, it was not. There was steps to it and we were able to win one, hopefully we can win another one.”

Forget about how the question was phrased, which seems to be a topic lighting up social media today. It generated an amazing response, and a particularly revealing one.

It’s likely not how Jordan or Kobe Bryant would have answered that question under similar circumstances. It’s not how Tiger Woods would have answered a question if he went a year without winning a major. But it is how Antetokounmpo answered it, opening up a window into his sporting soul.

And, in many ways, he’s right.

NBA players and professional athletes generally badly want to win. Their competitiveness is part of what got them to where they are. But for all the money, pressure and attention that comes with the job, at the end of the day it is just that.

The Milwaukee Bucks had a bad day at the office. And when Antetokounmpo goes home to his longtime partner Mariah and two sons, he knows that no win or loss can change how fortunate he is to enjoy the life he has. That’s perspective. That’s real. He’ll shake off the disappointment and go back to work because that’s what you do when you’re arguably the best basketball players in the world.

But was what happened last night a failure?

Of course it was.

That’s part of sports, too — an enterprise where it does, in fact, matter who does the winning and losing.

Basketball is just a game, and nobody who makes millions of dollars plays it for a living is a failure in the larger sense.

But when seasons end, there is always an assessment of what happened and why, and when a team does not come close to meeting its own expectations there are consequences for a lot of people. Otherwise, there would be no point to having a competition.

Maybe the problem here is the harshness of the word “failure,” which evokes a certain sense of doom and reckoning that might be too dramatic for the relatively low stakes of a basketball game within the larger context of the world.

But we all know what we’re talking about here.

Losing to the Heat was an exceptionally bad result for the Bucks, a team that went an NBA-best 58-24 in the regular season and entered the playoffs as the favorite to win a title. They didn’t just come up a little short, they got throughly outplayed in every way that mattered by a team that finished 14 games behind them in the standings.

Regardless of all the factors in play – including Antetokounmpo being injured for the first three games of the series – it was a stunning result and one that will have a major impact on how the team moves forward.

This was not a “some days you win, some days you lose” type of deal. It was a basketball earthquake, and one that could cost people jobs and frame how the organization approaches its long-term future with Antetokounmpo having the ability to pursue free agency two years from now.

Giannis’ big-picture perspective is wonderful and necessary in this world where we sometimes take these things too seriously.

But there is an organizational obligation to face a collapse like this head-on, figure out what it means and try to ensure it doesn’t happen again. That’s especially true when you have a generational talent like Antetokounmpo.

If losing in the first round the way Milwaukee did wasn’t a collective failure of this team and its purpose this season, what was it? Without those stakes – given too much prominence in our culture or not – there wouldn’t be much reason to care in the first place.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Giannis puts Bucks' playoff 'failure' in perspective with raw answer