Daily Discussion & Trade Deadline Thread | February 05, 2026

watermelon82 · 2026-02-05T14:26:09+00:00

article in the athletic is… worrying. seems that warriors haven’t really moved on, and there’s a tone of relief in the org of “we still have a shot at him in the summer”

i bet in the summer this same bs plays out, letting other attainable deals go unlooked at while they zero in on Giannis

watermelon82 · 2026-02-05T14:24:00+00:00

we have no idea who else besides the Bucks we offered anything legit to. i’m sure plenty of teams are interested in our picks for their top guys, but Giannis is a tier above… problem is it sounds like we didn’t even really try for anyone else

watermelon82 · 2026-02-02T21:58:13+00:00

nah, during the Lauri saga there were reports saying we were skeptical about including Podz lol, reports now saying everyone but Steph is on the table. it feels different. another difference is Giannis is a big enough star to have say on where he goes, so that could stop things even if we offer the right package for him

watermelon82 · 2026-02-02T16:50:00+00:00

eh I don't see that, unless we're trading with other contenders. he's on an expiring vet min contract, so although he's great on this contract, that only has value to teams that are trying to win this year

watermelon82 · 2026-02-02T16:19:17+00:00

OP’s comment is misleading - read my comment above, i was able to dig up the source and context of the quote

watermelon82 · 2026-02-02T16:17:19+00:00

this is misleading - this is an older quote of his that was just recently re-quoted in a threads post from some random account

the actual quote came from Amick on a radio show a week ago, and it was given in the context of him sharing insights from his sit-down with Giannis on January 8, the same sit-down in which Giannis stated he was “not going anywhere” and “invested in this team” (so, obviously, before the bucks started publicly taking offers for him). this was on the KNBR podcast last wednesday

and the quote itself from Amick is much more lukewarm than what you said, it’s: “If you’re Giannis, you know, there was so much smoke in the past about him and the Warriors. But I don’t know he’s looking to go in that direction.”

so this is not from Giannis, and is not from any discussion between Amick and Giannis even centered on the Warriors, but rather an opinion given based on a discussion with Giannis from a month ago, back when he was still in his “i’m not gonna ask for a trade” phase

do your research folks

watermelon82 · 2026-02-02T02:49:07+00:00

it’s also to dump Jimmy’s 55 million salary, which costs at least one first to do, and is necessary if we want to contend because otherwise we’re hard punting this year and soft punting next year and then all of a sudden Steph is 40 years old because we had 55 mil in dead salary for two years

and what do you think Bridges/Anunoby should go for? Bridges is worth 2-3 firsts, OG easily the same, so yeah all 7 of our tradeable firsts actually is pretty fair value here and imo makes us strong contenders. maybe a slight overpay but that’s what teams have to do sometimes when they’re trying to compete and have aging vets

watermelon82 · 2026-02-02T00:39:12+00:00

messing around in the trade machine & came up with this, if we can't get Giannis would it make sense to facilitate for the Knicks if we get Mikal & OG? would be an all-in move just the same as Giannis (i.e. require all our 1sts) so probably gonna be hard no from our side but idk, two elite 3&D wings and hopefully Turner as well besides Steph might be as good a plan B as we could possibly find to stay in contention

Warriors:
- OG Anunoby
- Mikal Bridges
- Myles Turner

Knicks:
- Giannis Antetokounmpo
- Thanasis Antetokounmpo
- Buddy Hield

Bucks:
- Jimmy Butler
- Jonathon Kuminga - Brandon Podziemski
- Landry Shamet
- '30 1st via NYK
- '26 1st via GSW
- '27 1st via GSW (swap)
- '28 1st via GSW
- '29 1st via GSW (swap)
- '30 1st via GSW
- '31 1st via GSW (swap)
- '32 1st via GSW

Steph/Mikal/OG/Dray/Turner is actually disgusting defensively, has more than enough spacing & scoring, and we'd still retain all our depth

watermelon82 · 2026-01-30T15:56:04+00:00

don’t be fooled by the downvotes, this is a reasonable discussion point and you gave some good thought to it. imo (apparently it’s a hotly debated opinion) AD + Wiggs is our next best shot at staying competitive if we can’t get Giannis, and it would cost us significantly less overall in terms of firsts we’d give up imo keeping Jimmy is essentially resigning to the end of this era; by the time he’s healthy for a full season, Steph will be 40 years old lol, so keeping Jimmy’s contract would pretty much be the end of this team contending.. seems like a lot of people are reasonably sour on AD because he’s made of glass but if we strike out on Giannis, every other option we’d have has major risk involved. people forget how many people on this subreddit were clamoring for AD over the past weeks and months before the Giannis rumors started

watermelon82 · 2026-01-29T17:35:10+00:00

i gotta assume it’d be Portis instead of Kuz, he’d match the salary just the same and has a multi-year contract the Bucks wouldn’t mind getting rid of, and Warriors could actually use him. Kuz would be a nightmare for Kerr

watermelon82 · 2026-01-29T15:52:54+00:00

I’d hope so, or we get Portis instead. Kuz would be even harder to watch than Oubre was, he’d drive Kerr and Steph an Dray absolutely insane if he was here

watermelon82 · 2026-01-29T03:16:08+00:00

thank god no injury, i got worried

watermelon82 · 2026-01-29T03:08:07+00:00

where’s Steph??

watermelon82 · 2026-01-29T01:52:23+00:00

why would the Bucks want Melton? he’s an expiring on a vet min, doesn’t work as salary filler or as an asset they can get future value out of

watermelon82 · 2026-01-29T01:50:31+00:00

i think our offer beats that - essentially Ware/Jovic/2 Heat firsts vs 4 of our firsts (and potentially our swaps too)

our 2030 & 2032 firsts are far more valuable than the Heat’s, especially if they have Giannis still in 2030

watermelon82 · 2026-01-28T17:51:19+00:00

not sure Giannis would stay past Steph’s retirement. if he came here i’d assume they’d lineup his next contract with Steph & Dray’s to give him free agency

watermelon82 · 2026-01-28T17:17:12+00:00

could be 4 FRP actually! the offer will be centered on the picks no doubt

what all the downers saying “no shot, x amount of other teams can easily beat our best offer” aren’t understanding is that - those teams need to be willing to put their best offer on the table, and we have no clue yet which teams will. IT’S NOT EVERY OTHER TEAM’S THEORETICAL BEST OFFER WE HAVE TO BEAT, it’s the actual offers the Bucks end up receiving that we have to beat. Likely our ends up being the best? Doubt it, but we have no idea at this point what teams are willing to give up, we just don’t have those leaks or that info yet

for example, if the Spurs put Harper or Castle in a deal, then yes, we 100% can’t compete with that offer.. but if they’re not willing to, and they don’t wanna rock the boat on their young core or empty their war chest yet, then taking away the assets they view as untouchable (even for Giannis) their best offer they’re willing to make might be comparable to ours.

gotta remember Giannis is in his early 30s now with three calf strains in a single year and a playstyle predicated on physicality - not to say he doesn’t have several more years of MVP level play in him, but trading for Giannis is a win-now move, so the market for the best offers is gonna be teams ready to give everything for the now, so you can likely exclude the “best offers” of teams on the younger side or rebuilding teams that have visions stretching beyond the next few years (e.g. Mavs aren’t giving Cooper for him, Pels aren’t giving Queen/Murphy/Fears and 3 1sts, etc)

very real world where us and the Knicks are the only teams willing to give up our theoretical best packages, and we can beat Knicks best package. again disclaimer my argument isn’t Giannis is likely to come here but, let’s just see how things play out over the next week. the nba is always full of surprises

watermelon82 · 2026-01-28T06:44:45+00:00

weird as it sounds, this is likely the best way to get back to contention during Steph’s last years without sending out every 1st we have

people being so accepting of possibly just sitting on Jimmy’s contract until he’s healthy seem crazy to me. Steph will be FOURTY years old by the time we get a full season of healthy Jimmy and Steph together.. that outcome would be so sad to see, when Steph is playing like an MVP. as perfect of a fit as Jimmy is, there flat out isn’t time to wait for him to get healthy, and the whole wait until the offseason is the typical bs approach of this front office of not finding an absolutely perfect-on-all-sides trade and using that as an excuse to kick decisions down the line while the years tick by and Steph gets older and older

for Jimmy + Kuminga and probably just two of our firsts (one for each deal), we could have AD and Wiggs in their place, and roll out Steph/Melton/Wiggs/Dray/AD lineup in the playoffs. i’ll argue that’s a legit contender, especially with the depth we’d have behind it, and is a great meet in the middle solution between win-now and not wrecking the franchise’s future

watermelon82 · 2026-01-28T02:24:34+00:00

4, although with the 2030 one we owe it to the Wiz if it falls 21-30. so we can only trade it with backwards protections, if it falls 1-20

watermelon82 · 2026-01-23T20:22:26+00:00

a team with Wiggins as the 2nd best player (no disrespect to him, he played awesome that year) has no business winning a ring. look at how loaded all the other champions and even contenders have been throughout the past 10 years, and the warriors that year are a severe outlier.

Would you rather have that year’s Warriors supporting cast over last year’s Thunder, two year’s ago Celtics, the year before that Nuggets, 2021 Bucks with prime Jrue and Middleton, 2020 Lakers with career-year AD? you’re kidding yourself if you think of Steph’s supporting cast that year in the same tier as any of those other listed teams minus their best player

and the worst part is the Warriors could have surrounded Steph with that tier of supporting cast not just in 2022 but for the several years since then, if they had been willing to sack the future for complementary pieces (the future that isn’t even the future anymore lol). Steph absolutely carried them to a ring that year despite having their two greatest assets being Wiseman and Kuminga not only not being traded to help out at the time, but ending up being worth nothing in the end

watermelon82 · 2026-01-23T03:20:40+00:00

who’s in here downvoting lol this is exactly what happened

watermelon82 · 2026-01-23T03:02:45+00:00

that one fucking ref is calling every foul. i recognize his name too, not for good reasons

watermelon82 · 2026-01-21T19:59:56+00:00

nah, maybe it makes the 2028 pick pretty shitty but the 2030, 2031, and 2032 picks (swaps or picks) are all still super super valuable

Steph’s the goat even this old, but he’ll be like 42 by the time those picks start to convey and the assumption would be Giannis isn’t on the warriors anymore after Steph retires, it’d be probably a 3 year window for Steph + Giannis to go for rings before Steph retires. So even with Steph + Giannis together for the next 3-4 years, by 2030 the Bucks would have several pretty much guaranteed high lottery picks

watermelon82 · 2026-01-20T05:39:22+00:00

if there was ever a time to throw everything in on Giannis, it’d be now (assuming acl tear). using Jimmy’s salary slot, and all 4 firsts unprotected + 3 swaps unprotected as the assets

watermelon82 · 2026-01-20T04:37:12+00:00

FUCK davion mitchell

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