Bucks Pursuing NBA All-Star Game
Hoping for 2025 or 2026. Weekend-long event would bring thousands of visitors to Milwaukee.
The 2020-2021 championship ring ceremony at Fiserv Forum. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.
The Milwaukee Bucks are seeking to have the NBA All-Star Game played at Fiserv Forum in 2025 or 2026.
The weekend-long event draws several thousand visitors. Last weekend’s game, held in Salt Lake City, generated 33,000 hotel room nights according to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver.
The annual event takes place in mid-February and includes rising stars and celebrity games that take place on Friday, a slam dunk contest, three-point shootout and skills challenge on Saturday night, a minor league (G-League) showcase game played Sunday afternoon and the actual All-Star Game on Sunday night. All of those events are nationally televised. A series of other events and parties are also held.
The Bucks and other local leaders bid unsuccessfully to host the 2022 or 2023 game in 2018, showing off the then-unfinished Fiserv Forum. The 2020 game was held in Chicago, the canceled 2021 game was to be held in Indianapolis (rescheduled for 2024), the 2022 game was held in Cleveland and the 2023 game was held in Salt Lake City.
But the NBA’s top employee previously said the game will be played in Milwaukee.
“We made the commitment when the shovel went in the ground for this building that we were going to bring the All-Star Game here,” said Silver in a 2018 interview with the Bucks in advance of the first regular game played at the arena. “So now we just have to pull out calendars and figure out what year makes the most sense.”
Milwaukee’s latest bid will be helped by a number of factors, including landing two major political conventions, a hotel building boom, an expanded convention center and a completed arena. The host city is expected to have 6,000 hotel rooms of four-star quality or better. Milwaukee likely still falls short of that benchmark, but is moving toward reaching it. The Trade Hotel and its 207 four-star guest rooms will open across the street from Fiserv Forum later this spring, one of several new hotels to have opened in Downtown. The $456 million Wisconsin Center expansion will be completed in 2024, in time for the Republican National Convention. Fiserv Forum drew international attention in 2021 when the Bucks won the NBA championship.
Milwaukee hosted the game once, in 1977. The game was held at what is now the UW-Milwaukee Panther Arena and was the first game held following the merger of the NBA and ABA leagues. No members of the Bucks appeared in the game, but the game featured former Bucks star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Marquette legend Maurice Lucas, future Bucks center Bob Lanier and the high-flying Julius Erving, who won the MVP award. The Bradley Center never hosted the game.
Giannis Antetokounmpo and Jrue Holiday played in last night’s NBA All-Star Game. Giannis partnered with Holiday and two of his brothers, Thanasis (Bucks) and Alex (Wisconsin Herd), for the skills challenge. The Antetokounmpo brothers also coached one of the teams in the celebrity game. Milwaukee native and WNBA star Arike Ogunbowale played in the celebrity game. Tyler Herro, a Greenfield native, and Tyrese Haliburton, an Oshkosh native, also competed in the three-point contest and the latter played in the All-Star Game.
Oklahoma City, Memphis, Sacramento and Portland have never hosted the game. Sacramento has a new arena (2016) and could bid. Detroit, which also has a new arena (2017) and hasn’t hosted the game since 1959, is also a potential bidder. Bids to host the game are done in two-year windows.
A Bucks spokesperson confirmed the team will be submitting bids. ESPN was the first to report the planned bid.
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