Make Hay While The Sun Is Shining, By Losing In Earnest While Giannis Is Injured

Giannis Antetokounmpo will miss the 2026 NBA All-Star game. He hurt his calf Friday night in a loss to the Denver Nuggets. Calf injuries are serious business, linked in a few prominent cases with catastrophic Achilles tendon ruptures, and this is Antetokounmpo's second already this season. He's going to be out for a while. This will be the second consecutive All-Star game he's had to miss due to injury, and the third in four tries, although in 2023 he made a brief ceremonial appearance, scoring one gimme bucket in 20 seconds of action.

Antetokounmpo will also fall short of All-NBA honors. The threshold for qualification is 65 games, and Giannis, who has already missed 14 games this campaign, would need perfect health and attendance after the break in order to make it to 58 games, which would already be the fewest he's ever played in his 13 NBA seasons. There are no automatic contractual consequences triggered by Antetokounmpo failing to make All-NBA, but it's significant anyway: He's made one of the teams every year since 2016, and has made the first team for seven consecutive seasons. As pointed out by Dan Feldman on the Dunc'd On podcast, that's the longest active streak and the seventh longest in history. And, because Antetokounmpo was producing perhaps the best individual season of his career, he was something like a lock to extend it.

Antetokounmpo will also miss the playoffs, also for the first time since 2016. It's not clear that he's quite grasped this reality. He's hoping to return by mid-March, by which time the Bucks will be moldering in a ditch. "I'm going to work my butt off to come back," he said Friday night. "That will probably be the end of February, beginning of March. Hopefully the team will be in a place that we can at least make the play-in or make the playoffs and just take it day by day, try to get better."