A Jordan or a Pippen: Seeking Giannis in glacial comparisons

Is Giannis Antetokounmpo more like Michael Jordan or Scottie Pippen? And how much nuance is missed in such an obtuse question?

I was reminded recently of how difficult and ill-fitting comparisons can be when Richard Jefferson tweeted that Giannis is a “Pippen” in need of a “Jordan.” Comparisons are born from questions with difficult answers. Who does Giannis Antetekounmpo play like? Who does he lead like? What shall we say about him that hasn’t already been said? Would a Hall of Fame Player by any other name smell so sweet? And the answers, in seeking order, tend to elevate or downgrade their subjects.

Admittedly, such pontificating is highly subjective and full of assumptions. For the comparison to work, people have to either share the beholder’s thoughts and feelings or the beholder better be ready to explain the referent in detail.

I can’t stay up as late as I once did. I watch NBA games to about the start of the fourth quarter. Then I hit record. I turn off all the lights but the one next to my bed and I read. I try and fall asleep. Lately, I’ve been reading Robert Macfarlane’s 2019 book Under Land: A Deep Time Journey. This book relaxes me, except when it doesn’t. And I am currently frozen in a portion of the book about the ice melting in Greenland and Antarctica. I am learning a lot not only about ice melting but also about how ice gathers.

Macfarlane writes beautifully about ice:

“Ice falls as snow, as hail, as sleet; it crystallizes as feather and it gleams as mirror. Ice erases mountain ranges, but preserves air bubbles for millennia and is tender enough to bear a human body unriven for centuries. It is silent, and it creaks and thunders. It sharpens eyesight, and it breeds mirages.” (p. 379)

The soft layer that gathers on the ice cap is called firn. I didn’t know that firn existed until I read about it in Macfarlane’s book. I didn’t know the process and the time it takes firn to become the frozen heart of a glacier. Firn gathers, but the snow keeps falling — and the weight of the snow adds pressure to the firn below it. And all those unique snowflakes begin to compress and break, releasing air that is still trapped. Macfarlane writes of these bubbles:

“This burial is a form of preservation. Each of those air bubbles is a museum, a silver reliquary in which is kept a record of the atmosphere at the time the snow first fell. Initially, the bubbles form as spheres. As the ice moves deeper down, and the pressure builds on it, those bubbles are squeezed into long rods or flattened discs or cursive loops. The colour of deep ice is blue, a blue unlike any other in the world—the blue of time. The blue of time is glimpsed in the depths of crevasses.” (p. 338)

This deep blue remains hidden until a glacier cracks open like an egg — until what was always there is brought to light. After storming through the regular season, the Milwaukee Bucks struggled to reestablish their winning ways inside the NBA Bubble, and in the team’s second-round series against the Miami Heat, they were left exposed. Jimmy Butler, Bam Adebayo, and everyone else in a Heat uniform solved their defensive scheme as if it were an oft-told riddle as the Heat played with more intensity and athleticism than a rather cool and glistening Bucks team.

The firn doesn’t always freeze. The ice cap on which it gathers can also melt. As Macfarlane writes in his book that isn’t about basketball: “In warmer temperatures, meltwater lakes grow over days on the ice sheet, before abruptly draining through a self-created moulin in the course of a few hours” (357). These moulins can “drop all the way to bedrock.”

When the Bucks lost in the first round three and four years ago, no one spoke at length about the team’s flaws, only that future growth was sure to happen. When they lost last year to the Toronto Raptors, the loss could be written off as a learning experience, and for the Richard Jeffersons of the world, it fit the Jordan arc of a team needing to take its lumps to get where it was going. But the Bucks didn’t plant their flag any farther in the snow this year. Instead, they retreated. And now, for the first time, the questions about the team’s shortcomings have bored into the team’s foundations.

Jefferson’s admonitory tweet arrived over 10 days ago. The Bucks played three games against Miami after that. In the only game the Bucks won in the series, Giannis notched just 11 minutes. Prior to that Giannis was visibly hurt. Rising for a dunk and landing with a grimace in Game 3, basketball coach and sometimes television analyst Stan Van Gundy remarked that the young star’s body simply wasn’t right. For Game 5, Giannis stood on the sideline in a mask that kept slouching below his nostrils — as if he were a famed vigilante failing to properly hide his identity.

But what the mask revealed looked very little like the Pippen who pouted against the New York Knicks in a 1994 Playoff series without Jordan. And what the mask revealed also didn’t look like a player willing to forgo offseason surgeries that might “f*** up” his summer. As he cheered and clapped and screamed on his teammates’ behalf throughout Game 5, Giannis appeared hungry enough to play another game, if his teammates only gave him a chance. Of course, since then, he has unfollowed all those teammates on his social media accounts and has met with ownership in order to discuss how his teammates can all be upgraded. As the postseason marches on without them, the only fact that remains true about Giannis and his Milwaukee teammates is that they are still under construction, still adding pressure to one another, still melting into one another.

While feigning certainty about the individual and the team, Jefferson’s tweet avoids acknowledging a basic tenet of the sport: the team’s legacy is the individual’s legacy. What Jefferson did was push a conversation about a flawed championship contender into a rotten territory rife with essentialist views and character debates, and this wouldn’t be all that surprising except that Jefferson is a former teammate of LeBron James, Tim Duncan, and Jason Kidd. In other words, despite his vast array of basketball experiences, Jefferson can’t shake a lack of imagination as to what a leader on a championship team can be.

Sometime in April, ESPN aired The Last Dance about Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls. That season was also Pippen’s last with the team. And, while the basketball world had appeared to be moving beyond the Batman and Robin mantras of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the documentary’s airing during a delayed season seems to have revived all that Alpha-Beta talk. (Or maybe it never left.)

ESPN’s Jay Williams (who Chicago once selected to succeed Jordan and Pippen’s championship years) embedded Jefferson’s initial tweet about Giannis underneath a thought of his own: “So LeBron was a Pippen with D Wade once. Nothing wrong with that until you get over the hump.”

LeBron responded to Williams’ tweet with a bit of blue bluntness: “Explain to me what the fux I gotta do with this subject matter!”

That’s a King answer — a free-floating iceberg of an answer.

This debate, if you want to call it that, is also quite premature. Giannis is in his seventh year and is still only 25. To some, his back-to-back MVPs and Defensive Player of the Year Award suggest he should be even more accomplished than he already is. After all, Jordan won a title in his seventh season. But Jordan was also 27 at the time. Giannis’ teams have only been legitimate contenders for two seasons now. LeBron had played in a Finals by age 22, but he didn’t win a title until age 27. Other players have all accomplished these feats at earlier and later times in their careers. The window isn’t closing so much on Giannis but possibly on his tenure with Milwaukee. And Jefferson’s line of thinking is a crack in the proverbial ice.

Tens of thousands of years ago, the ground underneath Milwaukee was covered in ice. Forty-five years ago, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played his last game in a Milwaukee uniform. Four seasons before that, Kareem’s skyhook carved out a championship effort in those lakeside bluffs. For some that history is but a stone’s skip from the present. For others, it is prehistoric. But Sam Quinn of CBSSports believes that long Eemian between Kareem and Giannis is reason enough the organization won’t consider trading him.

A great deal of what Jefferson and Williams have to say projects what scouts and writers wrote about their generation’s moment in time, when every team was looking for the Next Jordan and therefore the Next Pippen and on down the bench went the search to reassemble Chicago’s Bulls in some other city. At one point, the Toronto Raptors had Vince Carter, Tracy McGrady, and a whole host of Charles Oakleys. It didn’t amount to much in terms of history, but it was spellbinding for those who witnessed it. It was also over in the blink of an eye. One could say the same about Philadelphia’s ill-fated efforts to pair Allen Iverson and Jerry Stackhouse. It didn’t last. It couldn’t have lasted. Finding a Pippen is as difficult as finding a Jordan, and usually, a team ends up with neither.

But neither LeBron nor Giannis was drafted to a team that already included a Pippen or a Jordan in the first place, and the fact that either has put its Midwest city at the center of the NBA universe is much more Jordan-like than Pippen-like. Pippen was never asked to do such backbreaking work (and yet the work he ended up doing still wreaked havoc on his back). The rumors that circle players today also aren’t quite the rumors that circled players in Jordan’s day. He was never going to take his talents to South Beach or Los Angeles. He also wasn’t a physical specimen in the same way that Giannis and LeBron are. Jordan was speed and flight, and he worked himself into a precise post player. Are there aspects of Jordan’s game Giannis has learned from or might want to borrow? Sure. But LeBron’s styles of play and leadership seem more within reach of what Giannis can be than Jordan’s. After all, how many generations of NBA players have come and gone between Jordan’s prime and the prime Giannis has yet to enter? In the layering and folding of NBA chronologies, Jordan is in closer proximity to Kareem’s skyhook than he is to Giannis’ Euro Step.

As easily as Jefferson compared Giannis negatively to Jordan, he could have compared him with LeBron. After back-to-back seasons with the NBA’s best regular-season record, Giannis now wants the Bucks to take more chances with their roster — to be creative in ways they haven’t yet. There is always a risk in such pressurized tweaking. The push to constellate stars could burden an MVP with an aging Shaquille O’Neal or a vanishing Antawn Jamison — moves for moves’ sake. Then again, reexamining the roster could build the kind of supporting cast the Dallas Mavericks assembled around Dirk Nowitzki for the 2011 playoffs. But accumulating such talent also takes longer.

Dirk was drafted by Milwaukee with the ninth pick in 1998 before being traded to Dallas. By his second year, he was a starter. By his fourth season, he was an All-Star. In 2006, his Mavericks were two wins away from an NBA title, but Dwyane Wade hijacked the moment of apotheosis. In 2007, Dirk tore through the league and lay claim to the league’s most esteemed individual award. Then his Mavericks were bombarded in the first round by Baron Davis and a wild Golden State Warriors team that was all vitriolic battery acid and hyperbolic dunks. Dirk punched a hole in a wall at Oracle Arena. Some believed his soul crawled inside that hole to die. In two out of the next three seasons, his teams failed to survive the first round, but then 2011 happened.

The roster was far from a super team. It didn’t even have a Big Three. There was no Pippen either. But that overhauled roster beat the Miami Heat, a super team with a Big Three and a Pippen (according to Jay Williams’ logic). Somewhere in that long sequence, Dirk ascended mountains—like actual mountains. Maybe it was the mountains. Maybe it was the overhauled roster. Maybe it was nothing more than patience and determination. Maybe it was Deshawn Stevenson riding sidecar, but Dirk eventually won his title. But is Dirk a Jordan or a Pippen? When did he become the one and not the other? When did Dirk quit being Dirk?

Individual legacies are complex because they are built from collective efforts. Collective efforts are difficult because they depend on individual efforts. Milwaukee doesn’t yet know the fate of its franchise, only that the franchise and the star young player share a goal and a chronology. What’s fascinating, however, is how the individual who is most responsible for a franchise’s stability is also the one who pushes it into chaos.

“Because the meltwater is warmer than the ice,” writes Macfarlane, “it transports thermal energy deep into the glaciers and melts more ice — so-called cry-hydrologic warming. It is now understood that the water can sometimes act as a lubricant, hastening the rate at which the ice slides over the rock beneath it, such that glaciers ride their own melting” (p. 357).

The Bucks are riding that melt now.

If Giannis stays in Milwaukee, Jefferson could compare him with Dirk (or even Duncan). And yet he plays nothing like either star. But, oftentimes, these comparisons have nothing to do with play—they are about results that can only be named in hindsight. They are Jordan as Jordan. But, if Giannis leaves—and depending on where he lands—, LeBron  James or Kevin Durant might be bantered about by some as the perfect analogues (especially if Giannis ends up in Golden State). But, probably, because we are all glaciers in retreat, we lack the referents for what we’re seeing in a given moment. We reach for our pasts in predicting the future. But the words do not fit. Our hot air is from some other era, and we are lost until Giannis finds his way.

“Ice, like oil has long disobeyed our categories. It slips, slides, will not stay still. It confuses concepts, it confounds attempts to make it mean,” explains Macfarlane. “In the 1860s, when glaciology was emerging as a science, the discourse of glaciers was riven by the dispute over whether ice should be classified as liquid, solid, or some other kind of colloid-like matter” (p. 379).

Until further notice, Giannis is not so much on thin ice — he is ice.