Milwaukee Bucks

Team information

• Inaugural season: 1968
• Home arena: Fiserv Forum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• Owners: Wesley Edens and Marc Lasry
• Team colors: Good Land green, Cream City cream, Great Lakes blue, black, and white

Overview

The Milwaukee Bucks are a professional basketball team that plays in the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) Eastern Conference. The franchise was formed in 1968 as part of a wave of NBA expansion that saw the league add eight teams from 1966 to 1970. After posting the Eastern Conference’s worst record in their first season, the Bucks’ fortune literally changed with a coin toss when they won the right to draft center Lew Alcindor. Alcindor, who would later change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, became the NBA’s most dominant player, leading Milwaukee to an NBA title in 1971 and another trip to the Finals in 1974. After Abdul-Jabbar left the team, Milwaukee continued to be competitive and was one of the NBA’s best teams in the 1980s; however, their path back to the NBA Finals always seemed to be blocked by Eastern Conference powers Boston and Philadelphia.

During the 1990s and for much of the early twenty-first century, the Bucks experienced only brief periods of success. Except for one trip to the Eastern Conference Finals, their playoff appearances were over quickly. The situation began to change in the mid-2010s with the addition of forward Giannis Antetokounmpo. With the superstar Antetokounmpo in the lineup, Milwaukee once again became one of the Eastern Conference’s best teams, winning another NBA Finals in 2021.

History

Milwaukee had been home to a previous NBA team—the Hawks—that played in the city from 1951 to 1955. The Hawks left for St. Louis, Missouri, in 1955 and eventually ended up in Atlanta, Georgia. As the NBA began to grow in the late 1960s, a group known as Milwaukee Professional Sports and Services began organizing an effort to bring a team back to the city. In 1968, the group was awarded a franchise, and Milwaukee joined the NBA along with the Phoenix Suns. Team officials held a contest to select a franchise name and chose Bucks out of more than ten thousand entries. The name was meant to reflect the area’s outdoor hunting and fishing traditions. While the team’s original logo was a cartoon deer holding a basketball, over the years, the deer lost the basketball and was redesigned to have a more fierce appearance. A version of the logo introduced in 2015 featured a twelve-point buck in a semi-circle above the team name.

Milwaukee finished its first season in the NBA’s Eastern Conference with a 27–55 record, a typical result for a new team. The only record worse was the 16–66 mark put up by Western Conference expansion team the Suns. At that time, the NBA awarded the first overall selection in its annual draft to the winner of a coin toss between the worst teams in both conferences. At the coin toss in March 1969, Phoenix was given the choice of heads or tails and called “heads.” The flip came up tails, and Milwaukee won the first pick. The prize was a generational talent named Lew Alcindor who was a dominant college star at UCLA. The Bucks drafted Alcindor and the seven-foot-two center transformed the franchise into a winner. Milwaukee improved to a 56–26 record in 1969–1970 and made the playoffs.

Because of continued NBA expansion, Milwaukee was moved into the Western Conference for the 1970–1971 season. Prior to that season, the Bucks also traded for future Hall of Fame guard Oscar Robertson from the Cincinnati Royals. With Robertson’s combination of scoring and passing and Alcindor being a force under the basket, Milwaukee posted an NBA-best 66–16 record and breezed through the playoffs. The 1971 NBA Finals against the Baltimore Bullets was also no contest, as the Bucks swept the series 4–0, winning each game by ten or more points. After the season, Alcindor, who had converted to Islam in college, officially changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Milwaukee advanced to the Western Conference Finals in 1972 and made another NBA Finals in 1974, losing a hard-fought seven-game series to the Boston Celtics. With Abdul-Jabbar missing time with a broken hand, the Bucks struggled in 1974–1975 and missed the playoffs. Despite his career success, Abdul-Jabbar was unhappy with the small-market lifestyle of the Midwestern city and requested a trade. In 1975, Milwaukee agreed to trade their superstar center to the Los Angeles Lakers. Not surprisingly, the Bucks fell back to the pack for much of the late 1970s.

It was during this time that Milwaukee began laying the groundwork for future success. In 1976, they promoted assistant coach Don Nelson to the head coaching position. Nelson held that position with the Bucks until 1987 and would go on to set the NBA record for most regular season coaching victories with 1,335—a mark he still held as of 2020. By 1979, the team had also added several key players, including guard Sidney Moncrief who was selected fifth overall in that year’s NBA Draft. The Bucks won their division in 1979–1980, and at season’s end were shuffled back into the Eastern Conference. They kept up their winning ways, capturing division titles from 1981 to 1986 and winning fifty or more games each season until 1986–1987.

However, the 1980s was also an era when the Eastern Conference was dominated by the Boston Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers. One of those two teams eliminated Milwaukee in the playoffs each season from 1981 to 1987; three of those losses occurred in the Eastern Conference Finals. The Bucks’ run of playoff appearances ended in 1991, and the franchise spent most of the next quarter century struggling to find success. In 2001, Milwaukee won fifty-two games and made it back to the Eastern Conference Finals, only to lose to an old nemesis—the 76ers.

In 2013, the Bucks drafted forward Giannis Antetokounmpo, a citizen of Greece born to Nigerian immigrant parents. Nicknamed the “Greek Freak,” Antetokounmpo developed into one of the league’s best players. In the 2018–2019 season, he led the team to the best record in the Eastern Conference and a berth in the conference finals, where they lost to the eventual champion Toronto Raptors. The Bucks were again dominant the following season, winning the Eastern Conference once more even as the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the entire NBA, but were upset in the playoff semifinals by the Miami Heat. The team finally broke through in 2020–21, with Antetokounmpo leading them to victory over the Suns in the NBA Finals for the franchise's second NBA championship.

Notable players

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played only six of his twenty NBA seasons with the Bucks but set many of the franchise’s all-time records. Entering the 2020s, he remained first in points scored with 14,211; first in points per game average with 30.4; and first in rebounds with 7,161. Abdul-Jabbar won the 1970 Rookie of the Year Award and the NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP) Award in 1971, 1972, and 1974. He was also named MVP of the 1971 NBA Finals. The bulk of Abdul-Jabbar’s career was played with the Lakers where he won three additional NBA MVP awards and five more championships, solidifying himself as one of the greatest basketball players of all time. For his career, Abdul-Jabbar scored 38,387 points, setting an NBA record, and stood in the top five all-time in rebounds with 17,440 and blocked shots with 3,189. He was a nineteen-time All-Star and inducted into the National Basketball Hall of Fame in 1995.

Oscar Robertson, Abdul-Jabbar’s teammate on the 1971 championship team, is also considered to be one of the best players in NBA history. Robertson spent ten seasons with the Cincinnati Royals before finishing his career with the Bucks from 1970 to 1974. He made two of his twelve All-Star teams with the Bucks from 1960 to 1970. Famous for his versatility on the court, Robertson’s 26,710 career points was twelfth in NBA history, and his 9,887 assists was sixth all-time. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1980.

One of the key players in the Bucks’ success in the early 1980s was forward Marques Johnson, who played in Milwaukee from 1977 to 1984. During this time, he was a four-time All-Star and fourth on the franchise rebound list with 3,923. Forward/guard Paul Pressey played in Milwaukee from 1982 to 1990 and set the franchise record for assists with 3,272. The team’s best player during that era was Sidney Moncrief, who was with the Bucks from 1979 to 1989. Moncrief made five All-Star appearances with Milwaukee and was named the NBA Defensive Player of the Year in 1983 and 1984. His 11,594 career points and 2,689 career assists put him in the top five in team history. Moncrief entered the Hall of Fame in 2019.

Forward Glenn Robinson made two All-Star teams with Milwaukee from 1994 to 2002. He was second in franchise history with 12,010 points scored entering the 2020s. Guard Ray Allen was drafted by the Bucks in 1996 and made three All-Star teams with Milwaukee before being traded in 2003. Allen would go on to make seven more All-Star appearances with Seattle and Boston and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2018. Khris Middleton became another star for the Bucks after being acquired in 2013, working his way into the franchise's top ten all-time lists for assists, steals, three-pointers, and minutes played.

Even by relatively early in his career, Giannis Antetokounmpo earned comparisons to Abdul-Jabbar and Robertson as one of the greatest ever to play for Milwaukee or even in the NBA as a whole. Antetokounmpo made the All-Star team five times in a row from 2017 to 2021, won the NBA MVP Award in 2019 and 2020 (becoming the third player after Abdul-Jabbar and LeBron James to claim that honor twice before age twenty-six), and won NBA Defensive Player of the Year in 2020 (joining Michael Jordan and Hakeem Olajuwon in winning that award and the NBA MVP in the same year). He was instrumental in winning the team's second-ever NBA championship in 2021, for which he was named Finals MVP. Antetokounmpo quickly worked his way into the Bucks' top-ten all-time for points scored, rebounds, assists, and several other categories.

Bibliography

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