Milwaukee Bucks: The time has come for the championship drought to end

After 49 long years, the 2019-20 NBA season gives the Milwaukee Bucks their best chance yet to end their championship drought.

The last time the Milwaukee Bucks won an NBA championship, the Vietnam War was still in full flow, touchstone events such as the moon landing and the break-up of The Beatles were still vivid and fresh in the collective consciousness and memory, and perhaps most pertinently, the NBA consisted of only 17 teams.

The year was 1971 and, in many ways, the world in which a Bucks championship was welcomed into bears little resemblance to the world in which Milwaukee hopes to welcome a second NBA title 49 years on.

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The wait was not supposed to be this long.

A team built around Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson represented what appeared to be a ready-made dynasty, even accounting for Robertson’s advanced years, and yet that squad made just one more Finals appearance, in 1974, before life without both of those stars became the Bucks’ new reality in 1975.

What followed hasn’t been all bad. The Bucks of the 1980s were routinely among the league’s best, although they always seemed to hit their ceiling before the NBA’s ultimate showcase games got underway.

The fact remains, though, that even those fond memories are now over 30 years old. For an entire generation of fans, the Bucks’ season routinely ends in misery. Not the kind of heartbreak that comes from near-misses, but the more deflating disappointment that comes from annual mediocrity, if not even worse than that.

It’s for that reason that the 2018-19 season was so important. A shiny new arena, an overhaul of the franchise’s brand identity, and even the emergence of a star talent on the roster can only do so much to change the mindset of a fanbase in a vacuum. Greater change, real hope, and renewed interest can only come from winning.

A 60-win campaign, a trip to the Conference Finals, and later an NBA Awards show that left the Bucks with the league’s Most Valuable Player, Coach of the Year, and Executive of the Year? That’s change fans can get behind. That’s buzz worth being generated.

With that step now behind the Bucks, with that vigor and energy in place, and with that hope restored, the parameters have now been reset. If recent decades for the Bucks have been about finding ways to win again, this season is about simply winning it all. That’s a much tighter focus, and they’re considerably loftier expectations, and yet the time is right.

On the one hand, this team in its current form has only come together over the past couple of seasons, and has only taken its most significant strides forward since the departures of Jason Kidd and Joe Prunty at the end of the 2017-18 season. On the other hand, this is a moment that Bucks fans, and the people of Milwaukee, have been waiting 49 years for.

In Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Bucks have not only the reigning MVP, but the favorite to win that award again this season. That’s the kind of talent that hasn’t graced the Cream City since Abdul-Jabbar.

In Mike Budenholzer, the Bucks have one of the league’s best coaches (voted top-3 by NBA executives as recently as this week), and comfortably the franchise’s best since Don Nelson. Not only is the head coach acclaimed, but his assistants, and the track record of development and the philosophies they put in place are equally storied.

Where for years the Bucks were behind the times in terms of the facilities and tools at their players’ disposal, between Fiserv Forum and the Froedtert and Medical College of Wisconsin Sports Science Center, Milwaukee basketball is now very much at the league’s cutting edge.

And beyond all of that, in an Eastern Conference where the competition has undeniably thinned out this summer, Milwaukee has added depth and may yet prove to be even better prepared for the challenge ahead of them this time around.

At this time of the year, it’s all too easy to overthink things, and it’s equally simple to get carried away on a wave of unwarranted euphoria.

I don’t believe picking the Bucks to win the title is necessarily a byproduct of either of those afflictions, and with the NBA season having just tipped off, that’s exactly the position I find myself in.

I’m picking the Bucks to win it all because they have the league’s best player, one of its very best coaches, and depth that is almost certainly the envy of all but one of two of their rivals. The Bucks endured what may ultimately prove to have been a necessary heartache last year, and the NBA landscape now seems set to give them an even better chance to make it to the Finals.

It’s not impossible to beat the Bucks four times in seven games, as the Raptors proved, but it’s not a feat that many can achieve either. Beating the Bucks twice in a row proved difficult enough for the league as a whole last year, and there’s little reason to believe it will be much easier now.

It’s been a long wait, but the Bucks are ideally positioned to assume the NBA’s crown once again. I’m picking the Bucks to win it all because, at long last, it seems as if their time has come.