Milwaukee Bucks: Celebrating 50th anniversary of winning NBA title

April 30, 1971 is a day that will live infamy for the Milwaukee Bucks.

Friday marks the 50th anniversary of the Bucks winning their lone title in franchise history, which came upon sweeping the Baltimore Bullets in their 118-106 Game 4 victory at the Baltimore Civic Center to cap off the 1970-71 season.

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The victory was the culmination of what truly proved to be a star-crossed season for the Bucks in every sense of the word, especially after having made the landmark acquisition of Oscar Robertson after having fallen to the New York Knicks in the 1970 Eastern Conference Semifinals the previous year.

Robertson’s arrival fortified a Bucks team that already had a superstar in Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and a viable supporting cast between Bob Dandridge, Jon McGlocklin and Greg Smith. Along with that the Bucks’ front office made shrewd moves to prop up their bench unit with further offseason acquisitions like Lucius Allen and Bob Boozer in a trade with the Seattle SuperSonics.

With head coach Larry Costello having helped oversee such a historic and rapid ascent, the Bucks went from a good team to a great team in just one offseason and they immediately reaped the rewards when the season got underway.

The 1970-71 season remains the gold standard for the Milwaukee Bucks

Milwaukee immediately set the stage for a 16-game winning streak in the third game of the season, all of which set the dominant tone they played at all throughout the year. And with such a hot start to the season, the Bucks stormed to the top of the league while standing in the Midwest division after having been in the East the previous two years before another round of expansion.

That dominance propelled the Bucks as they enjoyed three separate stretches of double-digit win streaks all throughout the season. That includes a 20-game win streak from February 6, 1971 to March 8, 1971, the longest streak in franchise history, and propelled the Bucks to a 65-11 record with six games remaining in the season.

While the Bucks took it easy in what remained of the season, which prevented them from breaking the NBA record for most wins at the time set by the Philadelphia 76ers in 1966-67, the Bucks set their sights on rolling through the postseason.

Milwaukee did exactly that by tearing through both the San Francisco Warriors and the Los Angeles Lakers in the first two rounds of that year’s playoffs. Having blazed through such an easy path, the question fast became whether the Bucks would be able to overcome the New York Knicks, who the Bucks had fallen to in four out of the five games they faced against throughout the regular season.

The prospect of facing up against the reigning NBA champs in the playoffs and the Bucks’ regular season struggles against New York even befuddled Abdul-Jabbar as he remarked to Sports Illustrated in April of 1971:

"“I don’t know. Man, I just don’t know! Like the Knicks bring out the worst in us. They really do. The first two times we played ’em this year, we had both games won, and then we stopped playing in the last four or five minutes. Weird!”"

As fate would have it, the Bullets ended up shocking the reigning NBA champions in the 1971 Eastern Conference Semifinals in an incredibly hard-fought seven-game series. Going through such a battle depleted the Bullets of their best players and after going 42-40 during the regular season.

While the Bucks dismantled the Bullets and completed, the championship was a mark of firsts for the Bucks’ best players. It earned one of six championships that Abdul-Jabbar went on to enjoy over his legendary career, who stood as that year’s Most Valuable Player and one of two championships for Dandridge.

But the championship helped vindicate Robertson the most as he earned that elusive championship he sought while previously playing for the Cincinnati Royals. Dandridge even reflected on seeing ‘The Big O’ soak in the moments he had savored upon winning that title to Lance Allan of WTMJ 4 recently:

"“The joy and emotions that came out of Oscar Robertson, actually hugging some folks after we won Game 4,” Dandridge recalls. “The ‘Big O’ was usually stoic and about business and going about his task, but it was like the kid in him came out and he was able to silence his critics. He had achieved all those individual goals but now he had that World Championship.”"

All these years later, the Bucks’ 1971 NBA championship represents the last title that any Milwaukee sports team has won out of the four major North American sports. The Bucks made their second and most recent appearance to the NBA Finals in 1974 where they fell to the Boston Celtics in a hard-fought seven-game series.

While it’s been a long time since the Bucks have made that tough climb to the mountain top, going from worst to first in a span of three seasons in itself is an achievement that very few franchises could boast. And it was on this day where the Bucks and the city of Milwaukee reigned supreme.