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If you're looking for information about the full NBA schedule, our benevolent SB Nation overlords have you covered. When does LeBron start his return in Cleveland, what's the Christmas Day schedule, who's got the most back-to-back games, who's on national TV the most, all that kind of stuff can be found if you click the link right there.
But for our purposes, we're interested in what the Milwaukee Bucks are up to, specifically when they're playing home games, and thereby occupying the BMO Harris Bank Bradley Center. Sure, we have an associated interest in the Knicks, 76ers, and Wizards for their associations with St. John's, Villanova, and Georgetown, but let's be honest: Marquette's home games are more important. So let's take a look first at what we can find out about the non-conference games that MU has already announced.
1) The exhibition against Wisconsin Lutheran on November 8 will be in the afternoon. The Bucks are hosting the Memphis Grizzlies at 7:30pm that night, so expect an early afternoon start for our first look at Steve Wojciechowski's in game coaching.
2) The Nebraska-Omaha game on November 22 will also be in the afternoon. That's due to a Wizards-Bucks game at the BC starting at 7:30, but that's not that surprising.
3) I have no idea what's at the Bradley Center on December 19th that's making Marquette play Alabama A&M in the Al McGuire Center. You see, the Bucks will be on a west coast trip on December 19th. They'll be in Phoenix on the 15th, Portland on the 17th, Sacramento on the 18th, and will wrap up the trip against the Clippers in Los Angeles on the 20th. Now, it's worth noting that last December, there were four Fridays, and the Admirals, Milwaukee's American Hockey League team, played a home game on three of them, and were playing in Grand Rapids on the fourth. In fact, the Admirals played games on all but three Fridays all season long, and one of those was the day after Christmas. The answer here might be as simple as "the Admirals have the building on Fridays and there's no one available on Saturday," or "Wojo doesn't want to play a Saturday game with North Dakota on the schedule for the following Monday." Based on last year, we're still a week away from finding out the AHL schedule, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Admirals games on the schedule that weekend.
That brings us to the Big East schedule, which I'm sure that Fox Sports 1 and the league office are already hard at work starting to finalize now that they know when the NBA arenas are in use. While there are lots of days in January and February that the Bucks aren't at home, what everyone wants is Saturday home games, and more importantly, Saturday night home games.
As we already addressed, the Admirals' schedule can throw a wrench into a lot of this, but right now, we know that the Bucks do not have home games on the following Saturdays: January 3rd, 10th, 17th, and February 14th, 21st, and 28th. That's A LOT of open days for Fox Sports to consider for marquee matchups. They have night games scheduled on the remaining three Saturdays in January and February, as well as on March 7th. For those of you who don't need to keep track of when the semesters start and end any more, I can tell you that MU's spring semester starts on January 12th. This means two things: 1) There won't be a lot of students at any home games before then, including those two open Saturdays, and 2) I would imagine that MU would volunteer to not have a home game on January 17th, which will be the date of the traditional yearly Snowball dance at the Alumni Memorial Union. A Google search of "marquette academic calendar" gives you the links to the schedules for the last two school years, and MU has played road games on each of the past two Snowball dates, both of which were overtime losses coincidentally.
Each of the last two years, the Big East schedule has been released on September 5th, so that means we've got just over three weeks to wait until the full 2014-15 schedule is in our greedy little mitts.