Milwaukee Bucks schedule came out yesterday at 2:00 pm. People were waiting to see what type of schedule awaited the Milwaukee Bucks. The hype around the Bucks has never been higher. In 2002 after their Eastern Conference run, Milwaukee had some of the best attendance in basketball, but still, this trumps ’02 because everyone is still young plus they have the best player in the NBA. This will be a lightning rod of a year. Here are some things that stood out to me on first glance.

1. National Media Bucks – Milwaukee will play a stunning 24 games on ABC, TNT or ESPN. When you factor in NBATv, they’re playing over 40 percent of their games television. Milwaukee went from a team with no national media hype to having a good deal of it. I love that Milwaukee has a couple of Saturday Night ABC primetime games. That’s awesome. They’re the home team in both playing Golden State and Philadelphia. Both games will be very rowdy.

2. No long West Coast road trip – What’s nice about the Bucks schedule is they do not have a killer West Coast trip them this year. They travel out West a couple of times, but it’s not intense like it has been in years past. The hardest one though is the first one as they have to play Minnesota Timberwolves, Los Angeles Clippers, Utah Jazz, and Oklahoma City Thunder.

3. Bucks will need to be road warriors early – If you want to point out the one pain point for Milwaukee, it’s the 10 road games out of 15 to start the season. First of all, that sucks for Bucks fans. It takes a little bit of the excitement away from the start of the season. The other part of these road games are they face some of the best teams in the league.

4. Bucks could control East seeding in April – Milwaukee has an April schedule that will play perfectly for controlling their destiny in the Eastern Conference. They play Toronto twice, Philadelphia, Boston, and Brooklyn all in the month of April. That’s ideal for Milwaukee if there are tight races late in the year.

5. Home Opener is going to be a party – Bucks seem to have planned the home opener to be like a Brewers Opening Day. Hear me out. The game starts at 4:00 pm on a Saturday afternoon in late October. The weather could still cooperate and be able to have a ruckus outside of the Fiserv Forum. Add to the fact, Wisconsin plays Ohio State that day and people may be off the rails. It should be an awesome day in the city.

Charlie.