ESPN’s Brian Windhorst: Why Trading for Giannis Makes Sense for the Celtics

Brian Windhorst's view on whether the Celtics should trade for Giannis Antetokounmpo turns on a question Boston has not answered out loud yet. Are they still going to shoot the three?

The conversation started with what Windhorst saw on his TV the night Jayson Tatum went down. They called it a knee. Windhorst, watching the bench cam, saw Tatum touch the back of his calf with his thumb.

"As soon as I saw him touching the calf, I was thinking, oh, man, look out," Windhorst told Rich.

He stressed he had no proof beyond his eyes. But the people he has talked to who have lived through Achilles injuries describe vague calf and Achilles soreness as the only warning sign. The question Windhorst is now sitting on is whether Tatum's right calf was sore last year and nobody knew.

That sets up the actual structural question Boston has to answer. Tatum, Jaylen Brown, and Derrick White still have a real championship window if everyone comes back healthy. The question is how they get there.

Windhorst broke down the math the way Boston's front office does.

"In the NBA, one out of three on a three-point shot is considered acceptable," he said. The Celtics have led the league in three-point attempts for five consecutive years. In two of those years, they reached the finals. Joe Mazzulla poured gas on a strategy his predecessor had already built. Windhorst voted Mazzulla for Coach of the Year.

"Mazzulla is borderline defiant," Windhorst said. "You can say, Joe, why did you shoot 56 threes? And he said, we should have shot 57."

That is exactly why Giannis is the wrong target for this version of Boston. Antetokounmpo does not shoot threes.

"If you're still going to shoot the three, you're not trading for Giannis," Windhorst said. "The guy doesn't shoot threes. If you believe in your 40%, you're going to accept your 40%."

So the Giannis case for Boston, in Windhorst's read, only opens if the front office decides the three-point identity is the ceiling and they want a different ceiling. That is a deeper change than swapping a player.

The trade math also matters. The Bucks do not control their own draft pick for the next four years, having either traded them outright or sent the swap rights. A Giannis trade cannot return a rebuild. It has to return real players. That is the difference between Boston and a team like Houston or Toronto, where the core is too young to pair with a player in his thirties.

"Boston is a different story," Windhorst said. "The window with Tatum and Brown is comparable, I think, to the window with Giannis."

He landed on what he actually expects to happen, which is not a Giannis trade.

"I would wager on it's staying together," Windhorst said of the Tatum, Brown, and White trio. "But I don't think it's a no-brainer."

The Celtics, he added, do need to add real size. They traded Kristaps Porzingis. They let Al Horford walk. The big-man rebuild is a separate problem they have to solve regardless of what Mazzulla decides about the three.