Zaza Pachulia Buys Milwaukee Bucks Bradley Center Floor for Georgian Basketball Academy

The Milwaukee Bucks announced about a year ago that they would be replacing their Bradley Center court with a new, throwback-style floor. Not wanting to let the current floor go to waste, Zaza Pachulia came up with a brilliant idea: He would purchase it and ship it over to the Republic of Georgia – where he's from – to replace a deteriorating floor at one of the country's basketball academies.

And therein began a year-long process that required more wheeling and dealing than Pachulia ever could have imagined. "Honestly," Pachulia told Grantland, "I thought it was going to be an easy process." 

Not so!

First, the team's then-owner, Senator Herb Kohl, decided he was going to sell the team. So Pachulia had to wait for the new owners – Wesley Edens and Marc Lasry – to take over and settle in. Once they did, he still didn't want to pester them with what he imagined was not a prime concern for the two men, so he sat back and waited for them to approach him.

"They had so many transactions to look at, so much legal stuff," Pachulia said. "We had a coaching change all of a sudden. So many things happened. I just tried to be patient and stay professional. The floor was not a priority, and that's fair. The hope was always there that I would get it one day."

Finally, his persistence paid off, and the new owners gave him the green light. But that still wasn't the end of it.

Next up, Pachulia had to get clearance from the NBA to bring the court – which bore the league's intellectual property – into a non-NBA venue. Plus, both the NBA and Bucks didn't love the idea of handing over the court so soon, just in case anything happened with the new one.

Still, Pachulia stuck with it, and now he's ready to send an amazing – and quite unique – gift to the youth in his native land.

"Seeing that floor and seeing something from the NBA –– the motivation for a young player can be so huge," he says.