Giannis Antetokounmpo exclusively on SPORT24: “I wanted to start this journey well, but God didn’t want it to happen like this”

If you grabbed him by the nose he would explode. The Bucks’ loss to the Pacers in the Final Four semifinals of the historic first NBA Cup hurt him. Giannis Antetokounmpo lives for competitive games, lives for accolades, builds his legacy, but the 128 points conceded by his team were a lot and showed – once again in these first weeks of the season – that Milwaukee’s defense is not at a good level. And as we know, offense wins cards, but defense wins titles.

Sportish mission to Las Vegas: Haris Stavrou

So the first title is gone, but life goes on and the Bucks need to put their heads down, work even harder and get organized. The Greek Freak explained that his team often doesn’t know what to do on the court and that the rants will be discussed inside and outside the organization over the next 24 hours. And it’s debated, because while Milwaukee’s leaders huffed and puffed in frustration at the team’s overall picture, there were some who felt like they’d done their job, gotten beat and just had to think about the next game.

We met Giannis after the semi-final, after his bath, after the press conference and as you will see in the video, his face told everything about how he was feeling.

– You seem to me to be the “craziest” of all. How badly did you want this trophy?

I don’t know if it was because I wanted the trophy. I like to win, I always want to give 100% for my team. Of course we could have played better and won the game, but ok… They played much better than us.

We weren’t good in the fourth quarter, we didn’t make a lot of shots, they got a lot of offensive rebounds. We can be better, I want us to be better. I want to look at my team and myself every day and know that we gave 100% and that we are getting better every game. The.

– You have extreme talent in attack, even if you need work. You’re not that effective on defense. Would you have expected things to be different this early in the season or is the situation more or less as you expected?

To be honest: I don’t expect anything. I try to live each moment individually. We can be much better in defense, we give teams 125 points. We’re not even in the TOP-20 in defense. As history has shown, to be among the best teams and win championships, you have to be top 5 in defense and top 5 in offense.

We have to get better defensively, we have to get better at defensive rebounding. They give us a lot of defensive rebounds. We certainly have a lot of talent offensively, with Lillard, with Middleton, with Lopez, with Portis, with everyone we have, but we also need to come together more as a team. We’ve only played 20 games together.

We’re fine, I definitely wanted to win this match and start this first trip to Vegas off right, but okay. God didn’t want it to be this way, we keep going, learning and improving.

– You saw the Final Four in the EuroLeague, you experienced the first Final Four in NBA history. What would you like to change? They played the Knicks 36 hours after the quarterfinals and people couldn’t even travel from Milwaukee.

Yes, to be honest, we left a day and a half ago. After the game against New York we left, we were on the plane for four and a half hours and got here at 2-3 in the morning and the next day we had 20 minutes of training to learn the field. We had no time, neither to rest, nor to film, nor to watch videos, nor to meet as a team. If we had another day it would be better.

And I can’t understand it… We were the first team in our group and Indiana had more days at the end. And it showed that we were many minutes away. I don’t know if you could understand it, I understood it. They were a little fresher than us.

– What do you think about the fact that the Final Four is being held on a neutral field?

Oh, that’s right… That didn’t cross my mind because I was so focused on what I can control, what I can’t control, what stadium we’re playing at. It would have been much better if we had played in Milwaukee because we also had four or five wins in a row. We played here, we didn’t play well, we lost.

– Next year.

Next year… That’s still a long way away. Tomorrow morning. Let’s rest, wake up well and train to be ready for the next game.