NBA Playoffs 2020: 5 reasons the Milwaukee Bucks can win it all

5. 60 wins followed by 60 wins

In 1994, Major League Baseball began a season never to be finished. When play stopped, the Montreal Expos led not only the NL East but the entire league. The team featured Hall of Famers Pedro Martinez and Larry Walker, as well as All-Star caliber players such as Moises Alou, Marquis Grissom, John Wetteland, Cliff Floyd, Wil Cordero, Darrin Fletcher, and Rondell White. The conclusion to the 1994 season was the lack of a conclusion. In 1995, when play resumed, the Montreal Expos finished fifth in their division. The team that won the NL East that year was the Atlanta Braves. On a technicality, the Braves won fourteen division titles, but 1995 still stands as the only year in which the team brought home a World Series. The lessons here are somewhat trite — prosaic even — but talent does not promise sustainability and sustainability does not promise championships. The sport is different, as is the context for the stoppage, but the Milwaukee Bucks stand on a precipice, but on the precipice of what is impossible to determine.

While they have currently notched only 53 wins, this season’s Bucks are essentially a 60-win team for the second consecutive season. In the history of the league, eighteen instances exist where a franchise amassed at least 60 wins or held a 0.731-win percentage by season’s end in at least two consecutive seasons. More often than not those franchises also claimed NBA titles in those years. The times when winning a title did not occur were in 1949 and 1950 with the Rochester Royals, 2006 and 2007 with the Dallas Mavericks, 2009 and 2010 with the Cleveland Cavaliers, 2011 and 2012 with the San Antonio Spurs, 2016 and 2017 with the San Antonio Spurs, and in the late 1990s when the Utah Jazz amassed three consecutive seasons with at least 60 wins or a 0.731 winning percentage.

But the Royals won a title in 1951, and the Spurs won four titles prior to 2011 and a fifth in 2014. The Cleveland Cavaliers also ended up grabbing a title some years after those great 2009 and 2010 regular seasons (although it took an Odyssey like effort from LeBron to get there), and the Dirk Nowitzki-led Mavs eventually erased the memory of their 2006 and 2007 failures by shocking the world in 2011.

If the Bucks do not win a title this season (or in the near future), then the franchise would be joining the ranks alongside Karl Malone and John Stockton’s Utah Jazz as one of the only franchises to accomplish such great regular season feats without making good on that boastful promise in the playoffs.

In other words, the narrative and the numbers are, for the most part, on Milwaukee’s side.