Bucks are case study at Harvard
Giannis says if team disappoints, staying here is ‘more difficult’
The Milwaukee Bucks — they’re not just about basketball anymore.
The long-sleepy NBA franchise, which finds itself with new owners with deep pockets, a shiny new arena in the middle of a growing entertainment district and a transcendent star who not that long ago was hawking sunglasses in Greece, now is enough of an item to attract the attention of Harvard University.
The franchise, its turnaround and its quest to retain the hugely important services of Giannis Antetokounmpo are the subject of a new case study at Harvard Business School.
The study is one of many designed to help mold today’s MBA students at the elite institution into tomorrow’s business executives.
But Bucks fans likely will be particularly interested in just a few sentences in the 13 pages of text — a passage where Antetokounmpo speaks more pointedly than he has elsewhere about the possibility, remote though it may be, of leaving the Bucks.
The bottom line for the team, which already has signaled it will offer its superstar a $253.75 million contract extension next summer: Win, or you may be sorry.
“We go into the field as Harvard Business School professors,” said Anita Elberse, a professor of business administration who wrote the case study after extensive research and interviews with Bucks owners, management and players. “So it’s not uncommon for us to get people to say things that they haven’t said anywhere else because these are in-depth interviews.”
“I was obviously happy to see him being open,” she said.
The business school’s famed “case” method turns students into theoretical decision-makers confronted by complex, real-life business problems — in this instance, how does a smallmarket team hold on to its most important player at a time when other superstars are jumping ship in search of championship rings.
The questions involved made for lively discussion last week at the Boston school, where Bucks President Peter Feigin and co-owner Jamie Dinan were on hand as Elberse guided MBA students wrapping their minds around the thorny issues involved.
“I’m biased, but I thought it went amazingly well,” said Dinan, himself a Harvard Business School graduate.
He was struck by the diversity in the classroom, the NBA savvy of some of the international students (“They knew Gregg Popovich; they knew Karl
Malone had never won a championship.”), and the group’s deep grasp of the Bucks’ business issues.
He said he and Feigin started taking questions toward the end of class.
“There were like 50 hands still up 15 minutes later,” Dinan said. “We could have easily been there for two more hours answering questions.”
Antetokounmpo answered questions too — last spring, when Elberse and Melcolm Ruffin, a student who is co-author of the study, traveled to Milwaukee to conduct interviews.
“I want the Bucks to build a winning culture,” they quoted him as saying. “So far, we have been doing great, and, if this lasts, there’s no other place I want to be. But if we’re underperforming in the NBA next year, deciding whether to sign becomes a lot more difficult.”
While that may be simple logic, it’s unusual to hear the buoyant Antetokounmpo speak that specifically about a dark — for Bucks fans — possibility.
Neither Dinan nor Feigin said the remark unsettled them.
“And you’ve got to keep in mind that they’re trying to create conflict in the case, because it’s designed to be a teaching caset,” Dinan said. “So there’s no case here if he’s like, ‘I’m a hundred percent signing next year.’”
“I wasn’t in the room when he said it,” Dinan added, “so I don’t know if they goaded him a little bit to kind of get some conflict.”
Feigin said Antetokounmpo has made clear that he wants both himself and the Bucks to keep improving.
“It obviously puts pressure on the organization and himself,” Feigin said. “His expectation is to win at the highest level and surround him with a championship team that can do that.”
Elberse said the gist of the case study was the Bucks’ “very successful turnaround” which, on the court, took them from the league’s worst record in 20132014 — just before the current ownership took over — to the best last season.
The turnaround has been so dramatic that Antetokounmpo “probably feels that he is in the best position” in Milwaukee, Elberse said. But if the organization were “to give indications that he’s not on a team that is primed to be winning, I can imagine that the winner in him says, ‘I would have to find a better situation for myself.’ I think it’s very consistent with his overall viewpoint and his character and the way he’s made choices in the past.”
Also to be considered are Antetokounmpo’s professions of loyalty to the Bucks and Milwaukee, and his famously down-to-earth lifestyle, focused not on big-city glamour and nightclubbing but on basketball and family. As Dinan said he told the Harvard students, this is someone who makes $25 million a year and lives with his mother and brothers.
“I said, ‘How many people in this room would want to (do that),’” Dinan recalled. “Nobody raised their hand.”
And anxious Bucks fans may want to know this: Last Wednesday, Antetokounmpo told national sportswriter Frank Isola that he gets goosebumps thinking about seeing his number hanging in Fiserv Forum.
“That’s the goal,” Antetokounmpo said. “Hopefully, I can see my jersey one day up in the rafters.”