Giannis Antetokounmpo is scoring for an 0-2 Miami team; last season his salary bought 36 games of him
Giannis Antetokounmpo had 36 points, 12 rebounds and five assists on Friday night, and the Miami Heat still lost 128-111 to the Detroit Pistons at Kaseya Center, according to Yahoo's game report. It was his second game with Miami. The Heat are 0-2 and the Pistons are 2-0.
The Associated Press described the start as a split. His 71 points through two games match the most he has scored in the first two games of any season, and no Heat player has opened faster: LeBron James scored 63 over the first two games of 2011-12. It is also the first time Antetokounmpo has appeared in his team's first two games without a win.
The other half of that split is defense. Miami has given up 259 points in games against Minnesota and Detroit, a franchise worst for a season's first two games, the AP reported.
Friday showed how those points arrive. Detroit opened on an 11-0 run, led 22-5 at the 7:33 mark of the first quarter and led by double digits for the entire second half, per Yahoo. The Pistons shot 53% and went 18-for-38 from 3, while Miami shot 38.2% and went 15-for-51 from deep.
Detroit did it after losing Jalen Duren to a right thigh injury in the second quarter and Ausar Thompson to a right ankle injury in the third. John Collins led the Pistons with 23 points, and Paul Reed had 19 points and 11 rebounds with Duren out.
On Miami's side, Bam Adebayo fouled out in 23 minutes with four points on 2-for-6 shooting. One night is not a pattern, and the reporting offers no rotation detail that would show how the frontcourt is being used.
Antetokounmpo put the problem in team terms. "Sometimes when things don't go your way you get discouraged, your defense is not as good," he said, according to the AP. "But at the end of the day, I feel like once we are locked in and we trust one another in all levels, offense becomes easier, defense becomes easier. And right now, it's not where it should be, but we've got to keep on taking good things from the game."
Erik Spoelstra pointed to the calendar. "He really cares. He wants this to work. His teammates really want this to work," the Heat coach said. "We're going to get there. It's just not on our timeline right now, not exactly how we wanted to start the season."
The money side starts with what the reporting does not say. It does not say how Antetokounmpo came to Miami, what the Heat gave up or what he is paid this season. What the site can read is last season, which he played with the Milwaukee Bucks, and that sheet is mostly a story about games.
In 2025-26 he drew $54.1M, the 8th-largest salary of the 435 rated players. By the site's figures, his production ranked 79th, a season total built in 36 of his team's 82 games.
About $30.4M of that salary went to games he did not play. That is the mechanism behind his WAGE Score of 24 last season, Under Water on the site's scale, against 86 in 2024-25.
That score reads value for the money, not how well he played when he was on the floor, and nothing in these numbers shows his play falling off. His 36 games still came to 20% of his team's production for the season. A rank of 79th on that workload says more about the calendar than about the player.
I'd argue the question his money carries in Miami is availability before it is scoring. The first two games show the scoring. Only the length of a season can answer the other, because a season total near the top of a payroll's range is built by being on the floor for most of 82 games, and two games in October say nothing about that.
There is a real other side. Even a full season of Antetokounmpo does not on its own answer 259 points allowed in two games, and Spoelstra framed that part as a roster still forming: "Here we are. We're getting to know each other right at the beginning of the season."