The Del Harris era came to a quick end early on in the Milwaukee Bucks 1991-92 campaign.
The season: 1991-92
The record: 31-51
The postseason: N/A
The story:
Oh boy. This is where things start to go seriously downhill in Milwaukee Bucks franchise history. The Bucks were not as good as they used to be when the 1990s started, but this decade quickly devolves into the worst Milwaukee has seen since getting a professional basketball team back in the late 1960s.
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It starts quickly. Del Harris steps down as head coach after just 17 games. The Bucks almost went .500 in that stretch, but that’s not ideal for a franchise that spent the 80s winning roughly 50-plus games per season.
The 8-9 Bucks had one of the worst five defenses in the NBA, and the team wasn’t much better offensively. Nobody stepped up to be a leading scorer, as Dale Ellis led the Bucks with just 15.7 points per game that season.
Gone were the days of Milwaukee having multiple deadly scorers, and gone were the days of the Bucks defense being stout as well. The team added Moses Malone before the year, but at age 36 he wasn’t the defensive stopper he used to be.
Still, Malone put together a pretty nice season in Milwaukee. He averaged 15.6 points, 9.1 rebounds and 1.1 assists per game, and managed to suit up for all 82 regular season contests. The Chairman of the Boards’ career wasn’t over quite yet, but gone were the days when he routinely dropped 25 and 15 on other centers.
Jay Humphries and Alvin Robertson both stayed on, but neither of them was able to get past 14 points per game. The only other Buck able to put up more than 10 per contest was the Brick, Frank Brickowski, who averaged 11.4 points and 5.3 rebounds next to Moses.
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Without many of the players who had made the team great, or the head coach who had been tasked with taking over by the departing Don Nelson, the Bucks became essentially rudderless. A 36-year-old Moses Malone was probably Milwaukee’s best player at this point in time.
In case you didn’t put it together by now, the team did not snap into action after Harris stepped down. Frank Hamblen took over and things actually got much worse, as Milwaukee finished the season 23-42 under his care. Harris would go on to step down from his front office position later on in April because of the team’s lack of success.
At dead last in the Central Division with a 31-51 record, there was no shot of the Bucks sneaking into the postseason. For the first time since 1979, the Milwaukee Bucks’ season was over before the NBA Playoffs began.
Next: 49 years in 49 days: 1990-91 season
Unfortunately, 1991-92 was more of a harbinger of what was to come in the rest of the 1990s than it was an aberration, as Milwaukee now had no young star to pin the team’s hopes on going forward.