The 1973-74 Milwaukee Bucks team currently remains the last squad in the team’s history to reach the NBA Finals. Their rise and subsequent dissolution makes them perfect for a Last Dance-style documentary.
Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of articles where we’ll take a closer look at teams, seasons, and moments in Bucks History that could make for a documentary in the vein of ESPN’s The Last Dance (more details to be found here). Check back on Monday each week for a closer look at the four candidates
In the history of the Milwaukee Bucks, only two teams have reached the NBA Finals. It so happens that they were three years apart from one another.
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The Bucks teams of the early 1970s reached the pinnacle of success in the NBA during the 1970-71 season, winning their first NBA title three years into their existence.
With players such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bob Dandridge and Oscar Robertson headlining their core and head coach Larry Costello pulling all of the strings, the Bucks looked set up to dominate the decade, given the presence of all four figures.
Milwaukee became the first-ever team to win 60 games in three straight regular seasons, starting from 70-71 to 1972-73.
However, the Bucks were unable to replicate their literal crowning achievement from 70-71 in the ensuing couple of seasons. The Bucks ran into the eventual 1971-72 NBA champions, the Los Angeles Lakers, during the Western Conference Finals, and suffered a heartbreaking first round collapse to the Golden State Warriors to end their 72-73 campaign.
Suddenly, this dominant Bucks team that many loudly proclaimed to be the future of the NBA at the start of the decade, was nearing a critical point in the franchise’s history entering the 1973-74 year. Although, no one at the time knew it yet.
So without further ado, let’s run through the 1973-74 Milwaukee Bucks season and why it’s such a captivating season in the history of the franchise.
Where they were in their run
The Bucks had reached the top of the proverbial mountain at the end of the 1970-71 season after casually sweeping the Baltimore Bullets and winning the lone title in team history.
Certainly, winning a title as the Bucks did that season would not have happened without a little luck, such as the coin flip to land Abdul-Jabbar or swinging a massive trade to bring in Robertson that immediately fortified the Bucks’ championship core from the 70-71 season onwards.
Thanks to their elite end-to-end dominance, Milwaukee ascended to the top of the league just as fast as they entered it back in 1968. So much so that Sports Illustrated proclaimed the Bucks to be “The Best Team Ever” back in November of 1971.
But the stinging feelings that generated from their playoff defeats in ’72 and ’73 provided ample motivation for the Bucks to improve upon the bitter defeat to the Warriors as Abdul-Jabbar told Sports Illustrated going into the ’73-’74 season:
"“We’ve got to be better. We can’t be any worse than we were last year.”"
As was noted further in the piece, Robertson entered the year in his lightest shape since college at 210 pounds and the ever-diligent and meticulous Costello was looking for new ways to make the Bucks an even-more imposing defensive team.
Those efforts to rejuvenate themselves in favor of better results were sorely needed. After 277 games played for three straight seasons starting in the championship-winning season in ’71, both in the regular season and playoffs combined, the wear and tear of heavy minutes and largely deep playoff runs had Milwaukee firmly in a race against time.
Shape of the Bucks’ roster
The big pieces of the Bucks’ championship-winning core, like Abdul-Jabbar, Dandridge and Robertson, were all still in place entering the 1973-74 season.
The same went for integral rotation players such as Lucius Allen, who was essential to keeping Robertson fresh in what was his age-35 season as he had 41,409 minutes under his belt going into the 73-74 year, and “Mr. Buck” himself, Jon McGlocklin, who maintained a complementary role at 30 years old.
But in a quest to get younger and add more size as this era of Bucks basketball went on, Milwaukee’s depth contributors didn’t offer up the same level of veteran contributors, in the vein of Bob Boozer or McCoy McLemore, that could rise up to the moment from that championship-winning season.
Only Dick Cunningham remained from the 70-71 season from a bench and depth perspective, and he only appeared in eight games during the 73-74 campaign due to injury.
To maintain the longevity of this window, the Bucks, under general manager Wayne Embry, did what he felt was right to put the best team out on the court. However, the fact that the Bucks didn’t essentially run it back with the championship-winning squad unsurprisingly rankled Robertson as he talked about in a Bucks.com feature centering on Boozer and McLemore following their respective deaths:
"“I could never figure out why the Bucks broke our team up after we won the championship,” Robertson said. “If they wanted to go big, they could have brought Boozer in, they could have brought McCoy McLemore in, they could have brought Dick Cunningham in. “I remember telling people we’d continue to win games, but we’d never win the championship again because they hurt the core of our team. When you win as a team, you should be allowed to play out until somebody beats you. We beat ourselves. I will always believe that.”"
Abdul-Jabbar echoed that sentiment in the same piece, though in his more stoic nature:
"“We were able to go to our second team and still be able to keep the offensive pressure on the teams that we played,” he said. “We were a pretty deep team that had a good defensive element to the way we played. That’s why we won that world championship. “That was so long ago that I guess that the great teams that have been around since then have kind of overshadowed that team. And unfortunately, that team was only together for a year. But that was a great team — one of my favorites.”"
To be fair, Boozer had retired after the title-winning season to end his 11-year NBA career on a high note. But the release of McLemore as well as the midseason trade of starting forward Greg Smith certainly reinforced Robertson and Abdul-Jabbar’s point in that regard.
Still, Embry’s mission to inject some more youth into the Bucks around this time couldn’t solve the core problems facing the durability of their core players like The Big O, who had suffered numerous groin and muscle-related injuries over his four seasons in Milwaukee.
Of course, Abdul-Jabbar remained as potent as ever, as evidenced by winning his third Most Valuable Player award in four years following the 1973-74 regular season, while Dandridge’s dependability and versatility was crucial.
And while many faces and names changed on the Bucks’ bench, they still held a variety of size, athleticism and some shooting to supplement their core players under the spotlight. The question would be whether the Bucks had the dependable depth they needed when the time mattered most.
The 1973-74 season
To say the Bucks entered the 1973-74 season with a bang would be an understatement.
Through the first month of the regular season, the Bucks stood with a 15-1 record and a 13-game winning streak by November 13, 1973. A three-game losing streak quickly followed, which the Bucks responded to with a 10-game winning streak from November 22 to December 11, 1973.
Milwaukee maintained their leading pace in what was an incredibly competitive Midwest Division, that featured three 50-win teams between the Bucks, the Chicago Bulls and the Detroit Pistons. Having to face the likes of the Bulls and Pistons six times a season surely made the Bucks more battle tested when the time came.
Robertson’s ongoing deterioration, though, gradually came into focus throughout the season. For his final year, Robertson tallied career-lows in points per game (12.7), field goal percentage (43.8 percent), assists per game (6.4) and minutes per game (35.4).
But Robertson’s decline opened up the door for Allen to play a significant role within the Bucks’ system.
Allen gave the Bucks the youthful, athletic ball handler they needed to go up against aggressive opposing defenses to preserve The Big O, and his interplay with Abdul-Jabbar, whom he had played with since their shared time at UCLA, proved to be a dynamite connection. It all led to a then-career year for the former Bruin as he averaged 17.6 points on 49.5 percent shooting from the field, 5.2 assists, 4.0 rebounds and 1.9 steals through his 72 appearances.
As Dandridge described to On Milwaukee back in June of 2014, Allen’s emergence as the Bucks’ third-leading scorer dimensionalized the Bucks’ offense to keep opposing defenses honest in the way they would look to defend Abdul-Jabbar at that time:
"“The big thing, more so than anything, he and Kareem had a relationship, a basketball relationship that oftentimes allowed Lucius to get easy baskets because they had been teammates for so long,” Bucks forward Bob Dandridge said. “It gave us different weapons so that Kareem could not be double teamed. That was the key. You couldn’t double team Kareem with Lucius in there.”"
One moment came to define the outcome of the Bucks’ season, though, as Allen went down with an MCL injury during a 93-89 loss to the Detroit Pistons on March 15, 1974, after he slipped on a warmup jacket that was left on the court when going up for a block attempt on the defensive end.
A mistake such as leaving a warmup jacket on the floor forced Allen to miss the rest of the season and left the Bucks without a significant contributor two weeks before the start of the 1974 NBA Playoffs.
For many Bucks players and coaches on that team, Allen’s injury was viewed as such as deflating moment for all involved as legendary Bucks announcer Eddie Doucette said in that same piece by On Milwaukee:
"“When something like that happens, obviously everybody is upset and disappointed, but the way it happened was really kind of a tragic thing,” Bucks play-by-play man Eddie Doucette said. “You take an important piece out and then try and fill in, that’s a huge loss. So, I think yeah, that let a little air out of the balloon.”"
Hall of Fame coach Hubie Brown, then a Bucks assistant coach under Costello, believed Allen’s presence would have made the difference in their second Finals trip in three seasons as he told ESPN in 2005:
"“We lost [guard] Lucius Allen to an injury before the playoffs,” Brown recalls. “With Lucius I think we would have won.”"
In spite of that, Milwaukee finished the season on a high note winning five of their final six games following Allen’s injury and finishing with a league-leading 59-23 record.
Now, the playoffs awaited and the Bucks were searching for redemption to return back to the promise land.
Falling short
As Sports Illustrated wrote at beginning of April 1974, the NBA Playoffs began with no true title favorite on either side of the ledger. Of course, Milwaukee was determined to return to the NBA Finals for the first time since winning their title.
First, the Lakers stood in the way of the Bucks to open up their playoff run in the Western Conference Semifinals.
Los Angeles was not the same team the Bucks had battled against up to that point in the decade. Hall of Famer Wilt Chamberlain had retired before the 73-74 season and Jerry West, like Robertson, was run down by a groin injury, which limited him to 31 regular season appearances and just one game in the playoff series.
The Bucks took the first pair of games in the series while the Lakers took Game 3 with a 98-96 win. Milwaukee promptly responded in Games 4 and 5 with back-to-back 22-point victories to finish out the five-game series and advance to the Western Conference Finals.
Awaiting them was their I-94 rival in the Bulls, who had edged past the Detroit Pistons in a seven-game series the previous round. Milwaukee thoroughly dispatched the Bulls by knocking them out in four games and by a 57-point margin. Sidenote, but Abdul-Jabbar was incredibly dominant in the sweep as he averaged 34.8-19.5-3.8, along with two blocks and a steal over the Conference Finals.
That left the two best teams in the NBA that year, the Bucks and the Boston Celtics, to duke it out in a NBA Finals classic that is remembered to this day.
As both clubs traded games back and forth with one another, with the Celtics striking first with a 98-83 Game 1 victory at the MECCA, the series was a test of resilience for both the Bucks and the Celtics. That was reinforced by the pair of overtimes that occurred in Game 2, a 105-96 Bucks win, and a 102-101 double overtime Milwaukee victory in Game 6.
Game 6, of course, supplied all Bucks fans with one of the most iconic moments in Bucks history as it was Abdul-Jabbar’s magnificent skyhook with three seconds left remaining in the second overtime period that forced the decisive Game 7.
It was Abdul-Jabbar’s extraordinary talents and productivity that increasingly kept the Bucks afloat throughout the series.
Save for Dandridge, the Bucks’ hampered supporting cast, with injuries affecting both McGlocklin and Robertson, had doomed them and generated uncomfortable questions in light of their performance. Take this exchange that Abdul-Jabbar had with one reporter following Game 3 as Sports Illustrated reported on back in May of 1974 for example:
"“During his early years with the Warriors,” asked a reporter, “when Wilt Chamberlain was criticized for never winning championships, he used to defend himself by saying he wasn’t getting much help from his teammates. Do you sometimes feel the same way?” “You’re trying to get me to say that my teammates aren’t any good,” answered Abdul-Jabbar. “I guess so,” the reporter admitted. “I have no comment on that,” said Abdul-Jabbar.”"
After trading blow after blow, the Celtics turned to their fail-safe of doubling and triple-teaming Abdul-Jabbar extensively throughout Game 7. This time around, there was no miracle skyhook or unlikely savior as the Bucks were roundly defeated in a 102-87 loss on their home floor by the Celtics, who had won their 12th championship.
The exhaustion of such an intense series, and the preceding four years, left someone like Dandridge relieved that the series was simply over as he described to Jim Owczarski of On Milwaukee in June 2014:
"“At the end of a series like that, you’re just glad it’s over,” Dandridge said. “You know, you’re like, OK, it’s over, they won and you’re exhausted and you know you laid everything out there so let’s just go ahead and move on to the summer. It takes you, once you regain your juices and you’ve rested, then you reflect back on the pain of losing the game. For me, Boston won. They were the better team for that seven game series. Then it’s over.”"
For others, such as Jonny Mac, there was an unnerving, but unspoken sense that change was on the horizon:
"“I think we all knew it had a shelf life, but it’s not something you discussed,” McGlocklin said."
McGlocklin’s prescient words would quickly come to pass over the course of the 1974 offseason. The Bucks, as everyone knew them at the time, would soon be no more.
Why it would make for a great documentary
As it turned out, 1974 was very much a last dance for those great Bucks teams.
It proved to be the last season of Oscar Robertson‘s career, something which The Big O viewed as being forced upon him by the Bucks. Robertson signed a deal to be an analyst with CBS following a dispute with Bucks GM Wayne Embry over the exec’s refusal to put a no-trade clause in a contract offer. It’s fair to say Roberston’s time with the Bucks could have ended on better terms than it did, given he observed:
"“They don’t want me here any more.”"
Although it was the summer of 1975 before Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was ultimately traded away from Milwaukee, he put in a trade request with management in October 1974.
Abdul-Jabbar was poked in the eye by future Bucks coach and then Celtic Don Nelson in the preseason of 1975, which led to Abdul-Jabbar punching a stanchion in frustration, breaking his hand, and missing the first 16 games of the season. Milwaukee went just 3-13 in that spell.
Essentially, the Bucks’ rebuild started the moment the Celtics won Game 7 in the ’74 Finals.
In many ways, that makes this season a perfect juncture to imagine the cameras giving an all-access look at the Bucks.
Any look at this team would have to showcase, as an introduction, the whirlwind few years that included the foundation of the franchise, landing Abdul-Jabbar at No. 1, and winning a championship in 1971. But rather than focusing solely on those highs, this is the moment where there’s real, gripping drama.
This season proved to be the swansong for Robertson, one of the game’s all-time greats, highlights the final season where it could be said Abdul-Jabbar’s heart was fully in playing in Milwaukee, and it concluded with an all-time great Finals series which included Abdul-Jabbar making one of the NBA’s most iconic shots to force a Game 7.
Of course, it also comes with a major what if. What if the Bucks had won Game 7? Could Abdul-Jabbar have then been more open to staying in Milwaukee? Would Robertson have played on for one more year? Could the Bucks have gone on to win additional championships?
A documentary could almost certainly help us to answer those questions.