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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. more...

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History

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. On April 30, 1971, the Bucks won Game 4 of the NBA Finals over the Baltimore Bullets in Milwaukee 118-106, to win the NBA Championship. The championship was won faster than by any other expansion team in professional sports history (3rd season). In 1972, the Los Angeles Lakers had their record 33-game winning streak snapped by the Bucks during a nationally televised game, and in 1973 the Bucks recorded their third consecutive 60-win season, the first NBA team to do so. However, the Bucks pulled a mega-trade by sending Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to the Lakers for Elnore Smith, Junior Bridgeman, Brian Winters, and David Meyers.

After the mega-deal, the Bucks brought with them several seasons in transition, but later on, most of these players would bear fruit. After being sold to cable television executive Jim Fitzgerald in 1977, the Bucks would enter in another era of greatness. It began with coach Don Nelson. In the 1977 draft, the Bucks drafted in Marques Johnson, Kent Benson, and Mark Grumfeld. Johnson would become a staple in the Bucks for years to come. Rookie Sidney Moncrief made his debut in 1979. In 1979, the Bucks also brought in veteran center Bob Lanier to fill in the hole left by the departure of Kareem-Abdul-Jabbar. They then won the Midwest Division title in 1980. After losing to Seattle in the Semifinals, the Bucks moved to the Eastern Conference's Central Division. There, they would win 6 straight division titles and have .500 seasons for the next 11 years. Within those years, the Bucks became perennial Eastern Conference contenders, primarily due to the strong play of Moncrief, Paul Pressey, Craig Hodges and the arrival of Terry Cummings, Ricky Pierce, and Jack Sikma from trades with the Los Angeles Clippers and Seattle respectively. Notable players who played for the Bucks in this era were Larry Krystkowiak, Randy Breuer, Paul Mokeski, among others.

In 1985, Milwaukee businessman (and now U.S. Senator) Herb Kohl bought the Bucks after fears that out-of-town investors could buy the team and move it out of Milwaukee. (In 2003, after considering selling the team, Kohl announced that he had decided against selling the Bucks to Michael Jordan and would "continue to own them, improve them and commit them to remaining in Wisconsin.")

In the 1988-89 season, after 20 years at the 11,052-seat MECCA (Milwaukee Arena, now U.S. Cellular Arena), the Bucks moved into the new 18,700-seat Bradley Center, located directly across the street from the MECCA in downtown Milwaukee. The Bradley Center was one of the first arenas in the country to be built with luxury suites. The Bradley Center was privately financed from a $90 million donation from Milwaukee businesswoman Jane Bradley Pettit in memory of her father.

Read more at Wikipedia.org