Mauricio Codocea
07/21/2021 12:44 AM
Clarín.com
sports
Updated 07/21/2021 1:11 AM
It happens in any sports championship. Even in many it happens with a much more "fierce" tendency: teams that dominate based on economic power. The NBA has some tools to try to somehow "prevent" this from happening. However, more and more stars are focusing on the "big markets." Well,
none of them was enough to beat the
Milwaukee Bucks, who added the second title in their history half a century after the first. And it is a balm for the "girl" franchises.
Every team that comes into the league in the early years finds it
very difficult
to cope.
It happened to the first to try, more than half a century ago, and to the last to join, such as the Toronto Raptors and Vancouver Grizzlies (the latter ended up moving to Memphis) in 1995 and the Charlotte Bobcats in 2004.
There is a reality: in the NBA, the heaviest franchises also dominate.
It is not for nothing that the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics have a whopping
17 titles each
and their pursuers, with the Golden State Warriors and Chicago Bulls at the helm, have no more than 6.
That is why this consecration of the Bucks takes on value, a franchise that, among the 30 in the league, Forbes magazine ranks it as the
twentieth
in terms of commercial value.
Its operating income is "just"
$ 28 million annually:
next to nothing compared to the
200
that Golden State has generated.
Milwaukee celebrates after 50 years.
AP Photo / Jeffrey Phelps
It makes sense.
With about 590,000 inhabitants, Milwaukee is the thirtieth most populous city in the United States, but far from the almost million or more that other NBA locations have such as San Francisco, Indianapolis, Dallas, San Antonio, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Houston, Chicago, Los Angeles or New York.
The last two mentioned are the capitals of American professional basketball - at least in economic terms - and the big stars have made it clear in recent times.
The
agglomeration of
cracks
in those cities has been total.
It is worth reviewing the great changes of the last decade, which were
even accentuated
in the most recent seasons.
Starting with LeBron James, who went from the Cleveland Cavaliers to the Miami Heat and then even higher, to the Los Angeles Lakers;
Chris Paul and Anthony Davis left New Orleans for LA as well (Clippers and Lakers, respectively);
Kawhi Leonard
left San Antonio and
Paul George
Oklahoma to play for the Los Angeles Clippers;
Carmelo Anthony
traded the Denver Nuggets for the New York Knicks;
Kevin Durant left the Oklahoma City Thunder for the Warriors and later the Brooklyn Nets;
James Harden left a life in Houston to also go to Brooklyn, the same destination that Kyrie Irving chose after a misstep in Boston after leaving Cleveland ...
Men of Honor
"Damn, I don't know why anyone would want to be a Navy diver!"
, in an already mythical scene from the film
"Men of Honor",
the master Robert De Niro
sings
when he refers to all the difficulties experienced by someone who surrenders to that body of the armed forces.
That script line could well be paraphrased to ask
why anyone would want to play for Milwaukee.
It is a small city, which is not even among the 30 most visited in the United States (where there are many of those that have teams in the NBA), in which it is cloudy for much of the year, where the cold punishes strongly, that it is
totally eclipsed
by Chicago, a place that, less than two hours away by car, is one of the five most chosen by local and international tourism throughout the country.
The Bucks stadium, nestled in an area that is re-emerging thanks to the team.
AP Photo / Morry Gash
But the Bucks
never stopped betting on themselves.
They were helped by their early success, largely thanks to fortune: a coin that allowed them to have the first pick in the 1969 draft to end up taking a certain Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (story told in this note) in to the detriment of ... Phoenix Suns.
Those successful years, crowned with the title in 1971, were followed by many
near ostracized
seasons
, beyond some eventual playoff qualifications.
Until 2014.
That year
Herb Khol
, a senator from Wisconsin who had bought the franchise in 1985 for "just" $ 18 million, sold it for $ 550 to
Wesley Edens and Marc Lasry
. A decade earlier, he had refused to sell the Bucks to Michael Jordan.
Khol can be questioned about the little sporting success that the franchise showed during his tenure, but not
the sense of belonging.
It was his arrival that ensured the team's permanence in Milwaukee and it was he who expressly demanded to sell it that he not move to another city.
Edens and Lasry accepted,
shortly afterwards Jamie Dinan and Mike Fascitelli
joined as partial owners
and endowed the team with total identification, making heavy investments that exceeded basketball.
In the heart of the city they built the
Fiserv Forum
, a stadium inaugurated in 2018 in a territory of
12 hectares that they considered vital to develop various ventures: there they gave life to what is now known as the
Deer District
("Deer District"),
a neighborhood that became a nerve center
for eating, drinking and enjoying different entertainment and that even It has the team's training center, so that both the players and the inhabitants of the city feel
a total symbiosis.
There, more than 65 thousand people celebrated on Tuesday night.
The Deer District in full, about to celebrate the title.
Photo Angela Peterson / Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel via AP
The rest was sports management.
Milwaukee was lucky: the history of draft choices in recent years does not have them as the most seasoned in the field, but with Giannis Antetokounmpo in 2013 they took out
a gem of those that appear every
so often, a la Abdul-Jabbar.
Where there were good moves was in the election of
Mike Budenholzer
, the coach who gave the team an imprint, and in the last and decisive move: the incorporation of
Jrue Holiday
, a base without as many lights as other stars of the position but of the highest hierarchy who it ended up being a differential.
With the Greek, his teammates, the coach and the operations offices
committed
, Milwaukee did it: it won the second title in its history and, above all, it showed the big markets that
you can compete from the small and without making too much noise. .
Look also
The great revenge of Giannis Antetokounmpo, the crack who left doubts behind and became MVP and NBA champion
Jrue Holiday, the man who only wanted a family, almost lost it and today celebrates with her being NBA champion
