The Milwaukee Bucks will open their home season at 3 p.m. on Oct. 23, which is not a normal time to play an NBA game. They moved it because the Brewers are hosting Game 1 of the World Series the same night and the Bucks were not going to win that fight.
Good. It is the correct read of the city and the only reasonable call available.
The Bucks are not the main event in Milwaukee right now
This is a strange sentence to write about a franchise that won a title in 2021, but it is true. The Brewers won 103 games, swept the two-time defending champion Dodgers out of the NLCS, and are going to the World Series for the first time since 1982. The city has waited 44 years for this.
The Bucks, meanwhile, traded Giannis Antetokounmpo and Bobby Portis to Miami in July, got back Tyler Herro, Kel’el Ware, Jaime Jaquez Jr., Kasparas Jakucionis, the draft rights to Nate Ament and multiple future first-rounders, and hired Taylor Jenkins in April to coach whatever comes next. They are also actively shopping Caris LeVert and Kevin Porter Jr. ahead of Saturday’s roster deadline.
A rebuilding basketball team scheduling itself against a World Series opener would have been a self-own on a historic scale.
A 3 p.m. tip has real costs
Let us not pretend this is free. A Friday afternoon tip means fans leaving work early or not coming, a national audience that is not available, and a home opener atmosphere that cannot possibly match an evening crowd.
For most franchises that would be a reason to dig in. For this one, it is the price of being the second-most interesting thing happening in your own building’s neighborhood on a given Friday, and Milwaukee’s front office clearly understood that an empty arena at 7 p.m. against the World Series is worse than a decent crowd at 3 p.m.
The scheduling collision was avoidable and nobody avoided it
The NBA set its calendar in August without knowing which teams would reach the World Series. MLB set the World Series dates the same way. The result is two leagues putting a marquee event in the same market on the same night and leaving the local team to sort it out.
This happens often enough that it should be solvable. The NBA knows in August which of its markets have baseball teams likely to play deep into October. Building a little flexibility into those specific home openers is not a complicated ask.
Instead the Bucks got to make the phone calls, and the team that just got rid of its two best players had to absorb the awkwardness.
The right call anyway
Milwaukee is a baseball town for the next two weeks and will go back to being a basketball town in November. The Bucks recognizing that and getting out of the way is a small, sane piece of franchise management in a year when not much else about the organization has been.
Game 1 at American Family Field is Friday, Oct. 23 on FOX, with start times not yet announced. The Bucks tip at 3. If you want to do both, you can, which is presumably the point.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.