With Taylor Jenkins coming, here are Bucks' head coaches in history

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With Taylor Jenkins coming, here are Bucks' head coaches in history

From Larry Costello to Doc Rivers, a look at the 18 head coaches to lead the Milwaukee Bucks in their history.

With Taylor Jenkins coming, here are Bucks' head coaches in history

From Larry Costello to Doc Rivers, a look at the 18 head coaches to lead the Milwaukee Bucks in their history.

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The Milwaukee Bucks appear to have just hired their 19th head coach with reports that Taylor Jenkins will be hired to replace Doc Rivers.

The former Milwaukee assistant was head coach of the Memphis Grizzlies and is still just 41 years old.

Here's a full rundown of Bucks coaches in the team's history:

Conference titles: 2 (1971 championship, 1974 runner-up)

One of the founding fathers of Bucks basketball was a player through the 1968 season but immediately transitioned to coaching when he was hired by the Bucks at age 37. He was a six-time all-star and NBA champion as a player, winning in 1967 with the 76ers.

As a coach, he was on the sidelines for the quickest expansion-to-title run in pro sports history, helped dramatically by the drafting of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1969. He posted a 37-23 record in the playoffs (.617), twice leading the Bucks to the finals (1971, 1974) and overseeing the 1971 NBA champion as a 39-year-old.

He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame and is one of 14 men to win an NBA title as a player and head coach.

More: The Bucks' title run of 2021 helps highlight a Hall of Fame push for former coach Larry Costello

You think Brett Favre to Aaron Rodgers was an amazing sequence of succession? What about this? Nelson eventually became the all-time winningest coach in NBA history (a mark surpassed by Gregg Popovich in 2022), and it got started with his decade of excellence in Milwaukee.

Like Costello, he went straight from a player at the end of the 1976 season (he won five NBA titles with Boston as a player) and directly entered the coaching ranks, joining Milwaukee as an assistant coach for one year. He was hired as the lead man at age 36 following Costello's resignation early in the 1976-77 season.

Nelson won NBA coach of the year in 1983 and 1985, but despite leading the Bucks to the conference finals three times and the conference semifinals nine times, his teams never broke through to the NBA Finals.

Nelson was inducted into the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame in 2012.

More: 'Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel' visits with former Bucks coach of the year Don Nelson, now a marijuana farmer in Maui

Harris was an assistant coach to Nelson in 1986-87 before taking the reins; it was his second stop as a head coach after four seasons in Houston.

He won only one playoff series during his tenure in Milwaukee but took the Bucks to the playoffs four straight years before he stepped down 17 games into the 1992-93 season to focus on his role as Bucks vice president of operations, though Harris was relieved of that role at the end of the regular season, as well.

Harris also earned induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2022.

Hamblen had been Harris's top assistant before he took over early in the 1992-93 season, but he wasn't asked to return as head coach after the season; he nonetheless remained with the team as an assistant coach for the next four years under Mike Dunleavy.

Though he spent four decades on NBA sidelines, he only served as a head coach one other year, filling in for Rudy Tomjanovich with the Lakers in 2004-05, but again had a long career as a Lakers assistant both before and after the appointment.

The former Bucks player and assistant coach had been head coach with the Lakers for two years before coming on board at age 38 as head coach and vice president of basketball operations, essentially the general manager role.

He was asked to surrender the head-coaching gig after four years but stayed on one more year as leader of basketball operations when Dunleavy and owner Herb Kohl couldn't agree on a buyout that would have allowed Dunleavy to leave the organization entirely, creating an awkward situation.

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