WHY IS GIVING ANTETOKOUNMPO HIS 64-POINT BALL SO DAMNED DIFFICULT?

What should be a common courtesy — a memento to an all-time NBA great who breaks his franchise’s scoring record — became a mess when a Milwaukee security man took the real game ball … and what?

     As a gnarly game ended, the basketball was in the hands of an official, who handed it to a man arriving from the Milwaukee bench in team green. His name is Danny Carter, the assistant director of security for the Bucks. Why Carter didn’t explain this to Giannis Antetokounmpo is far beyond the NBA’s technological and spiritual minds.

     Instead, one of the sport’s most decorated big men was lost, irate and thinking a memento for his mother was heisted. So furious was Antetokounmpo, he raced up the tunnel to the Indiana Pacers’ locker room and demanded the game ball, thinking they’d kept it after his franchise-record performance of 64 points. A confrontation happened in the hallway involving several Bucks players, one of whom elbowed the Pacers’ general manager, Chad Buchanan, in the rib region. Another fracas took place on the court, where Antetokounmpo railed into the opponents’ best player, Tyrese Haliburton, and assistant coach Lloyd Pierce.

     Um, if Danny Carter had the ball, why wasn’t Giannis aware Wednesday night? On a day when the league issued an indefinite and vague suspension to Draymond Green, who can’t stop choking and slugging the enemy in an increasingly troubled career, commissioner Adam Silver might want to deliver another league-wide email: How a franchise and game officials should celebrate an all-time presentation. That should be easy enough, especially after Pacers coach Rick Carlisle finally saw a viral video of Carter taking the ball from the official.

     “Turns out their security guy had grabbed the real game ball used in the game initially,” Carlisle said. “They already had it.”

     Does the tape end the mess? Not according to Antetokounmpo, who doesn’t grasp why the Pacers say they grabbed a game ball for rookie forward Oscar Tshiebwe, who made a free throw in the fourth quarter that stands as his first regular-season point. Hmmm. Carlisle had rested his regulars with less than six minutes to play, as the Bucks led by 17, yet Antetokounmpo remained in action and scored 26 of his points in the fourth quarter. Giannis believes he is owed both balls, real and reserve, and isn’t sure what he has.

     “I have no idea," Antetokounmpo said. “I don't know. I really don't know. I have a ball, but I don't know if it's a game ball. It doesn't feel like a game ball to me. It feels like a brand new ball. I can tell. I played, what, 35 minutes tonight? I know how the game ball felt. The game ball I have, which I'll take, and I'll give it to my mom, for sure, but I don't know if it's actually the game ball.”

     Said teammate Cameron Payne, who joined him in the hallway: “Man wanted that ball. I’m following my team, helping my teammate out. It was just a lot of commotion, honestly. He just wanted his ball, man.”

     Before the video was shown, Carlisle seemed to think the Pacers had the real ball for Tshiebwe. The game was in Milwaukee, by the way, which means the Bucks should have handled the situation better before it became messy. Did Carter ever tell Antetokounmpo that he had the game ball? Did someone take it from Carter? Sports memorabilia tends to attract strange people. Where is the damned ball?

     “It was Oscar Tshiebwe's first official NBA point. We always get the game ball,” Carlisle said. “We weren’t thinking about Giannis' franchise record. So we grabbed the ball, and a couple of minutes later, some of their players ended up in our hallway. There was a big, I don't know what to call it, a fracas, a melee, whatever. I don't think any punches were landed, but my general manager got elbowed in the ribs by one of their players. He certainly has a bruised rib and who knows if it's anything more than that. Unfortunate situation. We don't need the official game ball. There's two game balls there. We could have taken the other one. It didn't need to escalate to that. Really just unfortunate.”

     Making matters worse, Antetokounmpo then said he wanted to give the ball to teammate Damian Lillard, who couldn’t have shared it with Giannis’ mother unless they had tradeoff sessions. In the game, Lillard nailed his 2,451st shot from three-point land, meaning he’d passed Kyle Korver for fifth place in the league.

     “Dame is fifth of all-time,” Antetokounmpo said. “I scored 60. At the end of the day, the ball they gave us, I offered it to Dame. I scored 60, he's scored multiple times 60, he's scored 70. He should have the ball. At the end of the day, I don't think it's fair. I understand when you score your first point in the NBA, you want to have the ball or whatever the case may be. But the end of the day, you're talking about the guy who just jumped over Kyle Korver on the list. I feel like we should all stop what we're doing and appreciate greatness.”

     I agree, as long as he realizes whether his mother or Lillard gets the ball. “No point commenting on it,” Carlisle said. “I think it’s pretty obvious what the answer is.” That would suggest the Bucks wanted Antetokounmpo to break the record on Indiana’s scrubs. That could be viewed as an insult to the Pacers, who, after all, just finished second to the Los Angeles Lakers in the league’s inaugural In-Season Tournament. Don’t slam the runners-up.

     “For some reason, he wanted to confront me. I was just standing out there,” Haliburton said. “Dudes were fired up. We beat them twice, so they wanted to come out and beat us. There was competition, just a lot of stuff going on.”

     Too much, actually, for an NBA game during the holidays. Appreciate the man and his accomplishment. Give him the real ball, please. “He's an unstoppable player. You can't guard him one-on-one. You've got really good guys surrounding him, but at the end of the day, it's all him,” Bucks coach Adrian Griffin said. “His talent. His ability. His will. He has an incredible will to win, and he'll do whatever it takes to win. I'm just coaching the game, and one of the coaches told me, ‘Yeah, Giannis has 50. I had no idea.’ But wow, what a great performance.”

     Everyone thought the Bucks had the Boston Celtics in their major gaze. Turns out the Pacers own their attention. “Things were heated with the competition and I understand all that," Carlisle said. “But for it to come into the hallway, it didn't need to happen that way. ... The words ‘unfortunate’ and ‘unnecessary,’ I keep repeating. I think that explains enough. Unfortunate and unnecessary.”

     And dumb.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.