Monday's Game 3 of the NBA Finals made it clear to me that every game of this year's championship series is an effective toss-up. While there's always a chance that one team lights it up from three-point range and blows the other out in this era of basketball, both the Knicks and Spurs are so solid on both sides of the ball that I think a run of blowouts (like we saw in Games 3-6 of the West Finals) is prohibitively unlikely.
Would I be stunned if the Spurs come back and win four in a row to become the first team to win the Finals after losing the first two games at home? No. And I also wouldn't be surprised if the Knicks win the next two and deliver New York its first NBA championship in 53 years.
Regardless of how the series turns out, New York's 13-game playoff winning streak from Game 3 of the first round to Game 2 of the NBA Finals is part of one of the most remarkable playoff runs in modern history. But it won't ultimately be a 16-2 run with a 15-game winning streak.
As the Finals continue, I wanted to take a look at some of the greatest playoff runs in history.
First, some ground rules. Obviously, a team has to win the championship to get on this list. Then, playoff dominance matters. The 1995 Rockets took down myriad Hall of Famers as a 6-seed, but also faced elimination five times before even making the West Finals. That's an impressive and resilient run, but not one of the league's greatest.
Competition matters, too. The 2023 Nuggets went 16-4 en route to a championship, but didn't beat a team with more than 45 regular-season wins along the way.
Let's countdown my five greatest playoff runs of all time from No. 5 to No. 1.
5. 1989 Detroit Pistons
Playoffs: 15-2, Finals: 4-0 over Lakers
The playoffs expanded from 12 teams to 16 in 1984, and from 1984-88, no Finals took fewer than six games to complete. Detroit in 1989 demolished a hobbled Lakers team in a sweep to complete the best four-round playoff run to that point in league history.
Isiah Thomas, Joe Dumars, and Vinnie Johnson combined to shoot a blazing 100 of 182 from the floor over the four games and retired Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the process.
Detroit trailed in a series once, losing Game 1 of the East Finals to the Bulls in Michael Jordan's first trip to the conference finals. I'm giving the Bad Boys a little bit of grace for losing a Game 1 to the GOAT at his statistical peak.
4. 1983 Philadelphia 76ers
Playoffs: 12-1, Finals: 4-0 over Lakers
This was the original unstoppable playoff team. For the first 35 years of NBA history, no team had gone through a playoff run with fewer than two losses, despite top seeds only needing to play a third series starting in 1967.
This run is famous for Moses Malone's declaration of "fo-fo-fo," predicting a sweep in all three series from the 65-win Sixers. 12-1 isn't quite a called shot, but it was pretty bold to predict all sweeps in this era when no team - even the 60s Celtics - had come within two games of doing so.
This also doubles as Julius Erving's first and only NBA title. I wasn't around in 1983, but I imagine that the celebration of Dr. J getting a ring supporting Moses was not unlike David Robinson reaching the pinnacle after Tim Duncan's emergence in 1999.
3. 1991 Chicago Bulls
Playoffs: 15-2, Finals: 4-1 over Lakers
I swear I'm not picking on the Lakers by selecting every time they got blitzed by an East team in the Finals during Magic Johnson's prime. It would have been defensible to pick the 1996 Bulls in this list, but the 72-10 Bulls had an extra playoff loss and were taken to six games in the Finals after Gary Payton manned up on Jordan starting in Game 4.
The first Bulls three-peat coincides with one of my favorite eras of basketball — where the pace of the game from the '80s meets up with the start of '90s crawl ball to make for some fantastic contrasts in style. Game 3 of the 1991 Finals is a game I watched from start to finish during the playoff-less spring of 2020 and is one of the best Finals games no one talks about.
In hindsight, we think of this 1991 Bulls run as a changing of the guard moment after the Bad Boys walked off the floor and Jordan defeated the Lakers in what would become Magic's last Finals. But with Magic completing his ninth straight first-team All-NBA season in 1991 at age 31, the NBA thought we'd see this matchup at least another time or two in the 90s. Of course, that didn't happen due to Magic's HIV diagnosis.
2. 2017 Golden State Warriors
Playoffs: 16-1, Finals: 4-1 over Cavs
This is the only entry on the list that happened recently enough for me to have a Sports Central column. The first month of that playoff run was so boring after Kevin Durant went to Golden State that I basically wrote a whole article on the Warriors' cap math while the second round was going on.
The West Finals that year were shaping up as a classic, and San Antonio had punched Golden State in the mouth early in Game 1 before Zaza Pachulia's closeout on Kawhi Leonard injured The Claw's ankle and made the series a laugher.
But even though the Warriors dropped a game in the Finals, they're on here in the No. 2 spot because of the championship series. The 2017 Cavs might have been LeBron's greatest offensive team, and K.D. basically broke them for a gentlemen's sweep. It felt completely unfair for one team to have all that shooting with Durant, Steph Curry, and Klay Thompson. It probably was unfair.
1. 2001 Los Angeles Lakers
Playoffs: 15-1, Finals: 4-1 over 76ers
I don't know where to start with the 2001 Lakers other than to say that you had to be there. Even more than the 2017 Warriors, this team was a complete wrecking ball. For starters, the Lakers swept through three 50-win teams for an 11-0 record in the West playoffs. The last two games in the West Finals over the best-record-in-the-league Spurs were 39- and 29-point blowouts, respectively.
At that point, with Shaquille O'Neal not yet 30 and Kobe Bryant becoming the league's best two-guard at 22, fans thought we could be in store for about five or six titles in a row from the Lakers.
A few weeks ago, Bomani Jones had J.A. Adande on his podcast to talk about the Kobe-Shaq Lakers dynasty, and Jones mentioned that fans of NBA history basically give Allen Iverson championship credit for beating the Lakers in Game 1 of the 2001 Finals.
If you were younger than 10 in 2001, that statement probably sounds absurd — but it's 100% accurate. The Lakers were that good and that unstoppable in the spring of 2001.
It takes one heck of a team to make this list, with an average of 62 regular-season wins among this group. This year's Knicks probably could have only snuck in at No. 5 had they completed the 16-2 mark. In reverse chronological order, some highly considered teams for the list included the 2007 Spurs, 1999 Spurs, 1996 Bulls, 1987 Lakers, 1986 Celtics, and 1982 Lakers.
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