Milwaukee Bucks

The Milwaukee Bucks are a professional basketball team based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They play in the National Basketball Association (NBA). The current franchise owner is U.S. Senator Herb Kohl.

The Milwaukee Bucks were formed in January 1968 when the NBA awarded a franchise to Milwaukee Professional Sports and Services, Inc. (Milwaukee Pro), a group headed by Wesley Pavalon and Marvin Fishman. In October, the Bucks played their first NBA regular season game against the Chicago Bulls before a Milwaukee Arena crowd of 8,467. As is typical with expansion teams, the Bucks' first season, 1968–69, was a struggle. Their first victory came in their 6th game as the Bucks beat the Detroit Pistons 134–118; they would win only 26 more games in their first year. The Bucks' record that year earned them a coin flip against their expansion brethren, the Phoenix Suns, to see who would get the first pick in the upcoming draft. It was a foregone conclusion that the first pick in the draft would be Lew Alcindor (who became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1971) of UCLA. The Bucks won the coin flip, but had to win a bidding war with the upstart American Basketball Association to secure him.

While it was expected that Alcindor would make the Bucks respectable almost overnight, no one expected what happened in 1969–70. They finished with a 56–26 record—a nearly exact reversal of the previous record. This was good enough for the second-best record in the league, behind the New York Knicks. The 29-game improvement was by far the best in league history—a record which would stand for 10 years until the Boston Celtics jumped from 29 wins in 1978–79 to 61 in 1979–80. They defeated the Philadelphia 76ers in five games in the Eastern semifinals, only to be dispatched in five by the Knicks in the Eastern finals. Alcindor was a runaway selection for NBA Rookie of the Year.