From the window, Lake Michigan looked like a flat surface of polished metal under the May sun, with no visible edges on the horizon—the kind of body of water that, from a certain altitude, blends with the sky if not for its slightly darker shade. Milwaukee stretched westward from the shore with the orderly geometry of Midwestern cities: grids of streets, low roofs, and an occasional tall building downtown that made no attempt to compete with the landscape, but simply existed within it.
Aaron rested his forehead against the cold plastic of the window. He had been awake since before takeoff at LaGuardia and had spent a good portion of the flight looking outside without thinking of anything specific—a habit he'd had since childhood that worked better for him than forcing himself to focus on something specific when what he needed was for his thoughts to settle on their own.
The public address system clicked once before the flight crew's voice announced that they were beginning their final descent into Mitchell International Airport, instructing passengers to ensure their seatbelts were fastened and their seatbacks were in the upright position. Aaron straightened up in his seat, located the buckle, and fastened it with a metallic click.
Austin, in the aisle seat, had had his buckled for a while. He had an open folder on his tray table, still reading something with the same concentration Aaron had seen in the Manhattan coffee shop five days earlier. He didn't look up when the plane began pitching its nose downward.
Aaron looked out the window again. Milwaukee grew larger as they descended, the details of the terrain becoming sharper: the dark green of the parks, the highways filled with morning traffic, the lakefront with its docks and moored sailboats. It was a city he didn't know at all. That, too, was part of what today signified.
He thought about the workout. About what Walton had explained during the flight: a closed-door session, the Bucks' coaching staff present, Hammond observing. It wasn't a tryout in the formal sense, but something closer to a presentation—an opportunity for the franchise to see how he moved on the court in a real context, rather than through college game tape. Aaron had done thousands of training sessions in his life, but few with this specific type of audience, and he recognized the difference even if he didn't let it alter what he did on the floor.
The plane touched down with the usual jolt and began braking.
When they walked through the terminal with their luggage, Aaron pulled out his phone and sent a message to his mother: landed safely, everything's good, he'd talk to her later. He tucked his phone away before a reply arrived and kept walking alongside Walton toward the main exit.
The man stood before the automatic doors in a dark gray suit and blue tie, holding a printed sign that read AARON REED in capital letters. He looked to be in his nineties and held the posture of someone accustomed to waiting in airports. When he saw them approach, he tucked the sign under his arm and extended his hand.
"Mr. Reed, Mr. Walton. I'm Marcus; the Bucks sent me to pick you up." He took Aaron's suitcase before Aaron could say anything. "The vehicle is outside."
The vehicle was a black Cadillac Escalade with tinted windows, parked in the waiting area right outside the terminal. Marcus loaded the luggage into the trunk with the efficiency of someone who had executed that routine hundreds of times, then opened the rear door for both of them.
They exited the airport onto Highway 894 heading north. From the driver's seat, Marcus pointed out landmarks along the way without turning it into a guided tour, offering reference points to someone who would have to navigate a new city. The Bradley Center—the arena where the Bucks played their home games—appeared briefly between buildings before the highway turned. The lake remained visible from almost every elevated point in the city. The downtown area was compact and functional, lacking Manhattan's density or the horizontal sprawl of other Midwestern cities.
Aaron looked out the window without saying much. Walton, beside him, reviewed notes on his phone.
The Bucks Training Center was located west of downtown—a building with a discreet facade that announced nothing from the outside, but inside boasted the space and equipment Aaron expected from a top-tier professional facility. Marcus led them to the main entrance, where a receptionist asked them to sign the guest log, and guided them down a hallway lined with framed photographs of historical franchise players into a waiting room with couches and a coffee table.
John Hammond entered two minutes later.
He was a man in his sixties, of medium build, with the kind of face that communicated competence before he even spoke. He wore dress trousers and a polo shirt featuring the Bucks logo on the chest. He extended his hand to Aaron with a smile that wasn't the protocol smile executives offer when greeting someone they need to sell something to, but that of someone who had been wanting to have this conversation for a long time.
"Aaron, welcome to Milwaukee," he said. "We've been looking forward to meeting you in person for quite a while."
"Thanks for the invitation," Aaron said.
Hammond greeted Walton as well, then invited them to follow him. The tour of the facility was unhurried but unforced. Hammond identified the spaces with the natural ease of someone who knew every corner of the building and understood what deserved attention and what didn't. The weight room was equipped with the latest in strength-training technology. The recovery area featured ice baths and physical therapy equipment. The video analysis room had several large screens and rows of chairs facing forward. Display cases along the main hallway held franchise awards and photographs of pivotal moments in its history—the most prominent being the 1971 championship with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the center.
Aaron paused to look at the photograph as he passed. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with the trophy, surrounded by the team, in the black-and-white print that made the image feel like a bygone era, even though not that many decades had passed.
"That remains the only championship this franchise has won," Hammond said from up ahead without turning around. "Forty-three years. That's a long time."
There was no reproach in how he said it. It was simply a fact Hammond carried with the clarity of someone who knew precisely what work lay ahead.
They continued down the hallway until they reached an area where the acoustics changed. The sound of footsteps on hardwood and the rhythmic thud of a basketball against the floor echoed from behind a door left ajar. Aaron heard it before Hammond said a word, his head turning in that direction almost involuntarily—the reflex of someone who had spent enough time on basketball courts for that specific sound to trigger a response.
Hammond noticed.
"Come on," he said, pushing the door open.
The court was regulation-sized, with the overhead lights on, though natural light filtered in through high windows on the far wall. On the left side, working alone with a ball, was a young player practicing drives to the rim from the right wing, starting from beyond the three-point line and covering the distance to the basket in an amount of strides that felt baffling for someone of his stature.
Aaron observed him for a couple of seconds without recognizing him right away. He was tall—of a height comparable to his own—though with a completely different build: thinner, almost lanky, with arms and legs disproportionately long relative to a torso that had not yet developed the muscle mass to balance that geometry. He wore a sleeveless Bucks practice jersey and was drenched in sweat, indicating he had been working alone for a while before they arrived. His feet were noticeably large, even for someone of that height, and he moved with the basketball with the somewhat unusual fluidity of someone whose reflexes were still running ahead of the body executing them.
Hammond walked over to the sideline.
"Giannis, I didn't know you were going to be here today," he said with a smile.
The player stopped dribbling, turned, and Aaron saw his face clearly for the first time.
Realization arrived a second late, bringing with it something Aaron hadn't anticipated: sheer bewilderment. Giannis Antetokounmpo. The name clicked immediately, but the figure standing before him didn't align with anything in his memory. The Giannis Aaron remembered was a absolute unit. Two hundred and forty pounds of pure muscle, broad shoulders, legs like pillars—a physical force that had taken years in the weight room to forge, turning him into a player no defender in the world knew how to handle. The Greek Freak. The MVP. The man who had won a championship and carried an entire franchise on his shoulders. That was the Giannis Aaron held in his memory.
This wasn't the Greek Freak. Not yet.
"I am training for next season," Giannis said. He still had a thick accent and a direct way of speaking that he wouldn't lose over the years. His eyes shifted toward Aaron with the natural evaluation players perform when crossing paths with someone new on a court.
"It shows," Aaron said. "You're putting in good work."
Giannis nodded, accepting the comment without overreaction.
"Aaron is one of the prospects we're evaluating for this year's draft," Hammond said, completing the introduction.
Something in Giannis's expression shifted upon hearing that: the evaluation became more explicit, more technical. It was the same shift any professional player underwent when they stopped viewing someone as a visitor and began seeing them as a competitor who might share the same floor.
Aaron looked at the rim. He looked at the ball in Giannis's hands, then at Walton, who stood beside Hammond with his arms crossed and an expression that clearly signaled this was not on the day's agenda.
"Want to play a bit?" Aaron asked.
"Aaron," Walton said.
"Just a moment." Aaron was already taking off his jacket.
Walton didn't finish his sentence. Hammond, beside him, said nothing, nor did he make any gesture to stop him.
Aaron walked up to Giannis and extended his hand. Giannis, with an expression blending curiosity and something akin to accepting a challenge, tossed him the ball.
Aaron caught it, bounced it twice to feel the floor's rebound, and without further ceremony launched a pull-up jumper from the free-throw line. He watched as the ball left his hands, arced through the air, and dropped cleanly through the net.
Giannis stared at him.
"One-on-one," Aaron said.
Giannis retrieved the rebound, bounced the ball once, and nodded.
From the sideline, Hammond leaned slightly toward Walton.
"He's what I thought he'd be from watching the film," he said in a low voice. "But seeing him live is different."
"It usually is," Walton said, his gaze never leaving the court.
"What are our actual chances of landing him?" Hammond asked.
"That depends on what happens on the twentieth," Walton said, referring to the draft lottery taking place in two days. It was the key factor both held in mind, even if neither had brought it up out loud yet. "What are your actual odds?"
"A fourteen percent chance at the top pick," Hammond said, his tone neutral—that of a man who had learned not to invest emotionally in probabilities before they played out. "But we don't need the first pick to get what we want. It depends on how the teams ahead of us move." He paused briefly. "That's why we set this up today instead of waiting until after the lottery."
Walton nodded. That was precisely the rationale. If the Bucks came away on the twentieth with a high pick, they wanted the decision locked in before the results shifted everyone's perspective. And if the slot wasn't what they hoped for, the objective remained unchanged.
On the court, Giannis held the ball at the top of the key while Aaron guarded him chest-to-chest, feet shoulder-width apart, weight leaning slightly forward in a textbook defensive stance. Giannis exploded toward the left with a speed that was startling for someone of his size, but Aaron anticipated the drive and cut off the angle before he could finish.
Giannis halted, reset, and attempted to drive right. Aaron was there again.
Giannis forced an off-balance shot that hit off the back rim. Aaron hauled in the rebound.
Now holding the ball, Aaron backed into the low post—his natural domain—with Giannis behind him, trying to guess which way he would spin. Aaron bounced the ball twice, felt the contact behind him, and feinted left with his shoulder just enough to force Giannis to shift his weight in that direction.
He took the bait.
Aaron spun right, created a step-and-a-half of separation from Giannis, and finished with a soft layup off the glass that went in with the lateral spin typical of shots executed near the rim at the proper angle.
The swish of the ball passing through the net was the only sound for a second.
Giannis stood under the rim, staring at the spot where the ball had fallen through. It wasn't the expression of someone defeated, but of someone who had just learned something about how the game operates at a level he was still building toward. Aaron gathered the ball and flipped it back to him without saying a word.
From the sideline, Hammond let out a slow exhale. It wasn't a sigh of surprise, but the reaction of a man who had just seen a suspicion confirmed—something he had needed to witness with his own eyes to fully believe.
Hammond looked away from the court for a moment to meet Walton's gaze. The game film hadn't fully captured what he had just witnessed.
"Austin," he said under his breath.
"I know," Walton said.
Authors thought
If Aaron ends up with the Bucks, he'd form a tremendous duo with Giannis, similar to the Spurs' "Twin Towers"—like Duncan and Robinson—but they'd be even more dominant. Plus, if Giannis has already led the Bucks to a championship on his own, just imagine what he could do if he teamed up with Aaron?
Which team do you think Aaron will join? Let me know in the comments.
What did you think of today's chapter? Give me your opinions and thoughts.
For football fans, check out my other fanfic, *The Golden Standard*, and discover the story of Wyatt Sterling.
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