New home sweet home
Fiserv Forum is christened in style
Friday was the night the Milwaukee Bucks have been awaiting for years – their first regular-season game at gleaming new Fiserv Forum.
There were plenty of luminaries in the crowd. All of the team's majority owners were in attendance, as were Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and NBA commissioner Adam Silver. Even with the Milwaukee Brewers playing in Game 6 of the National League Championship Series across town, a sellout crowd of 17,341 roared the Forum to life.
On the court, the Bucks christened their new home with a bevy of dunks and a steady diet of three-pointers as they cruised to a 118-101 victory over the Indiana Pacers.
Milwaukee got off to an inauspicious start, missing its first seven shots and falling behind 8-0 in slightly more than two minutes. That was all the drama there would be, though, as once the Bucks got going they never slowed down.
After using an 11-2 run to take their first lead, the Bucks never gave it back. Milwaukee went on to lead by as many as 28 and never let the margin dip into single digits in the second half.
Giannis Antetokounmpo steadied the ship with a pair of early dunks. That set the tone for the rest of the night, with Antetokounmpo dominating the paint on the way to 26 points, 15 rebounds and five assists. He went 0 for 7 on threepointers, including a faux heave before the half. However, sinking those shots becomes less necessary when you go 12 of 16 from two-point range and can get to the bucket at will.
As a team, the Bucks followed Antetokounmpo's lead by looking to go inside often after a slow start from long range. They dropped in 54 points in the
paint, for the second successive game almost totally avoiding midrange shots in favor of high-efficiency looks from in the paint and beyond the arc.
Milwaukee's inside attack helped pave the way for cleaner looks from the outside and the Bucks weren't shy about letting those fly. With 47 threepoint tries, the Bucks set a new franchise record for attempts from long range.
Of those three-pointers, the Bucks made 17 (36.2%). Khris Middleton did most of the damage, going 5 of 9 from deep on the way to 23 points. Center John Henson, who was 1 of 13 in his career entering Friday, splashed his first two three-point attempts of the night, including beating the buzzer to end the third quarter, sending Fiserv Forum into a frenzy.
"Not in a million years, honestly," Henson said when asked if he ever thought he'd be spacing the floor like he did Friday.
With a 17-point lead heading into the final stanza, all that was left was waiting
for the confetti to fall.
TAKEAWAYS
ON THE RUN: One thing the Pacers wanted to avoid was letting Antetokounmpo and the Bucks get out in transition. Among many other parts of the night, that didn't go Indiana's way.
The Bucks put up 20 fast-break points on 12 shooting attempts, partly buoyed by the Pacers' 17 turnovers. Those giveaways led to 26 Milwaukee points.
SPEAKING OF TURNOVERS: For the second game in a row, Antetokounmpo's aggressiveness, which was a net positive, also resulted in a high number of turnovers. After givIng the ball away eight times against the Charlotte Hornets, Antetokounmpo was charged with six of the Bucks' 17 turnovers Friday.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS: Fiserv Forum didn't fill up for the Bucks' preseason tilts, but it did on Friday night. With a packed house, the Forum got very loud, with that noise reverberating throughout the arena.
The BMO Harris Bradley Center used to get rocking, especially during the playoffs, and even with fewer seats Fiserv Forum seems well set up to be a similarly hostile environment for opposing teams.