Get used to seeing Giannis on this stage, folks

Kirk Goldsberry (@kirkgoldsberry) is a professor and an NBA analyst for ESPN.

Giannis Antetokounmpo is dominating. The two-time MVP just became the fourth player ever to average 30 points, 13 rebounds, 5 assists and 60% shooting over a five-game span within a single postseason, joining Tim Duncan, Charles Barkley and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. But, unlike those other legends, Antetokounmpo is the only one who has done that during the NBA Finals.

Amazingly, just two weeks ago there were questions about whether the Milwaukee Bucks superstar would even be able to play in the Finals. He’d suffered a scary knee injury that kept him out of the final two games against the Atlanta Hawks, and he even said he thought his season was over. After looking shaky in his first game back, he has put an emphatic stamp on each of the past four games. As Antetokounmpo has rounded back into form, so have the Bucks, who have won three consecutive games after falling behind 2-0 in the series and are now just one home win away from their first title in 50 years.

The last time Milwaukee won it all, they had another pretty good young star on their squad. Antetokounmpo may not be Abdul-Jabbar, but they do have one big thing in common. They propelled their squads to wins with a simple formula: dominating the paint on both ends of the floor. And it’s a formula that, more often than not, portends repeated success on the game’s biggest stage.

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