As the Milwaukee Bucks enter the home straight of their 2019-20 season, a new franchise record for wins looks almost inevitable.
The Milwaukee Bucks are in the midst of a truly historic season and, for fans, the hope will be that the team’s achievements get no less historic over the upcoming months.
If the Bucks maintain their current standards, they’ll be an overwhelming favorite to pick up just the franchise’s second championship, while it’s also very much in play that they could become just the third team in NBA history to win 70 games in a regular season campaign.
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Even as those two lofty goals become increasingly realistic aims and possibilities for Milwaukee, though, there’s another slice of meaningful history up for grabs that’s plainly starting to look incredibly likely.
Racking up 60 wins last season marked the fifth occasion in Bucks history that the team had hit that rare threshold for total wins, and yet still one season stands comfortably above the rest as Milwaukee’s most successful when it comes to volume of victories.
Prior to going on to claim the franchise’s sole championship to date, the 1970-71 season saw the Bucks deliver a heady 66 wins, a mark that stands to this day as a club record.
That’s almost certainly going to change in the next six weeks or so, though, with Mike Budenholzer’s current squad in prime position to ascend to franchise’s peak in terms of regular season wins.
Boasting a 51-8 record to this point in the season, for Milwaukee to fail to surpass that 66-win total, they would need to lose as many games over their final 23 contests as they did in their first 59 matchups of the season.
Based on just how dominant the Bucks have been this year, the 16-7 record that would be required over the remainder of the season to make history seems like it should be something of a formality.
That, again, puts into focus the matter of just how many wins this Bucks squad can finish with. Although the merits of pursuing 70 wins as opposed to resting up for the postseason have been discussed at length already, that conversation only gets further complicated by referring to 1970-71.
It’s certainly worth noting that the Bucks’ only championship success coincided with the season where they racked up their most wins and were simply the NBA’s most dominant team. Winning is a good habit to develop, and winning at such a historic rate certainly doesn’t spell impending doom for the postseason.
On the other side of that coin, though, the only reason the Bucks are currently looking so likely to set a new franchise record for wins is attributable to how the 1970-71 squad wrapped up the regular season.
Without major lineup changes, or even a complete overhauling of the rotation’s distribution of minutes, the champion Bucks dropped five of their last six regular season games before entering the playoffs.
That tells us even a rough finish to this fantastic regular season shouldn’t spark panic but, given the incredible anxiety that has built up within the fanbase for the past 49 years, it certainly would be more comfortable for everyone if this year’s squad avoided such a skid at the finish line.