Sam Amick

Do they still have as much belief in this current team as they did back in August and September?

Because that's going to dictate how hard they potentially push for Giannis.

On the Milwaukee side,

It's been messy in terms of the ESPN report indicating that the two sides were suddenly talking about possibly party ways again, some pushback on that reporting from both sides, some gray area about like, yes, everybody knows that you're reaching this fork in the road that we've been

kind of inching towards for years now.

But it's just almost like nobody wants to be the bad guy here and say the thing, which is we're going to trade you or I want to be traded.

And so they keep doing this awkward dance.

He does.

You just again, we got to start with what does Giannis want?

He's not going to pull the curtain back and tell anybody right now.

But again, we already know the New York thing.

We need clarity on Atlanta because, yes, you know, in a vacuum or just kind of objectively, you can look at the Hawks and say that makes a lot of sense.

But every team that has Giannis interest will start with like it does not matter if he doesn't want to go there because it has now reached a point where he can opt out.

not this coming summer, but the next summer, there's a timeline-wise, it's a short enough runway that Giannis is in control.

If he doesn't want to come to your team, you don't want to do it because you're going to have to give up too much and then he's going to bounce at the first chance he has.

The Hawks thing, just in terms of additional context,

I don't know exactly what this means, but it's worth remembering that his agent, longtime agent Alex Saratsis from Octagon, interviewed for the Hawks GM position that ultimately went to Onsi Salah when he got elevated in his current role.

Now, my understanding is that Alex wasn't a finalist.

It was just a conversation.

But when that happened, there certainly were people assuming that if you're the Hawks, that part of that calculus was, you know, if we got...