Bucks' win vs. Heat comes after 'strange, long' New Orleans experience
01/24/2025 08:48 AM
The Milwaukee Bucks began their game Thursday against the Miami Heat colder than the winter air outside Fiserv Forum. They missed 11 of their first 12 shots on the way to falling behind 20-5 to the shorthanded Heat.
But there was a good reason for the icy start. The Bucks players had rushed off a plane a few hours before and had barely handled a basketball all week.
“It’s just (been) a strange, long couple of days,” coach Doc Rivers said after the game, in which the Bucks recovered from their abysmal start to blow out the Heat 125-96.
What began as a quick trip to New Orleans on Monday for a planned Wednesday game against the Pelicans turned into a madcap series of travel misfortunes that caused an NBA team to miss out on playing basketball for three straight days.
The Bucks had left snowless, bitterly cold Milwaukee for New Orleans a day early to get settled before a forecasted winter storm. The storm came, dropping 10 inches of snow in the city’s worst snowstorm in a century.
What would be a minor inconvenience in Milwaukee became a life-altering event, paralyzing New Orleans and making roads impassable, except to some opportunistic ice skaters.
The Bucks couldn’t leave the Four Seasons Hotel. Their game against the Pelicans got canceled Wednesday night. They couldn’t access area practice courts due to the impassable roads. So they just waited out the storm as a team with hotel staff, who also couldn’t leave and crashed at the hotel.
“We got to know each other very well,” Rivers said of the team and hotel staff. “It was the same group of people walking around the hotel for three days. There was literally nothing to do.”
Getting back to Milwaukee for Thursday night’s nationally televised game brought its own challenges. They got to the New Orleans airport, which wasn’t a guarantee, only to see their planned noon departure pushed back to 2 p.m. Rivers and his staff gave the players the game plan during the flight.
They landed in Milwaukee at about 5 p.m. Thursday. The league pushed back game time from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
“We landed, everybody got in their cars and we came directly to the arena and tried to get into our routines pregame,” Damian Lillard said. “We did what we could, you know.”
The Bucks locked in after going down 20-5, closing the first quarter on a 25-7 run before blowing the game open in the second quarter on the way to an easy win, their eighth victory in the last nine games. Lillard led the way with 29 points, 9 rebounds and 11 assists.
“That was as professional of a win as you can have,” Rivers said, noting the adverse circumstances. “I was really proud of our guys.”
Next up: the Clippers on Saturday night. The team plane was scheduled to depart Milwaukee for Los Angeles at 10 a.m. on Friday.
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