Long NBA Winning Streaks That ALMOST Happened

By winning 27 straight games in 2013 Miami Heat not only reached a second place on list of the longest winning streak in NBA history but they also reminded everybody about the difficulty of Lakers’ remarkable feat of winning 33 games in a row and received insurmountable amount of media attention because they were so close.
While the answer may seem obvious, was it really the best opportunity to break the record?

This is a story about forgotten heroes: the longest winning streaks in the NBA that ALMOST happened but because of couple untimely points here and there they didn’t so very few remember them.

My approach to find them was pretty simple, using all-time NBA schedule and results from basketball-reference.com I tried to locate multiple winning streaks next to each other interrupted by some close losses. Because I had history in mind I ignored potential streaks shorter than 18 games [only 9 such streaks really did happen] and to make it somewhat realistic all losses during them had to be by single-digits.

Such searching pattern surprisingly came up with 90[!] potential winning streaks. Some of them were literally one basket away from happening while others needed more to change but would have broken the record!

So let’s break them down starting with the ones single game away… [list is sorted by potential streak’s length]

 

Checking 2012-13 NBA Win Predictions & Projections

Just before every NBA season most basketball writers, bloggers and authors try to predict what will happen in the next year which is usually fun stuff to read and discuss. But I’ve always felt there’s a half of the picture missing – accountability for those predictions.
Recently pundittracker.com started to track single-winner picks which is great but I’d like to continue this blog’s “tradition” with comparing wins projected before the season to the actual ones after the season.
So which writer, blogger or author had the most accurate projections before the 2012-13 NBA season?

To answer this question I gathered predictions in early November from most popular sites and other googled sources [btw, it’s not a closed list so if you want to add your’s predictions let me know in the comments] and compared them to actual results by Root Mean Square Deviation which is essentially average difference between each prediction and result in terms of absolute value.
If you want to play with numbers or check any single entry just download NBA Predictions Accuracy 2012-13.pdf but if you are interested only in the results they are in the table below…

But please keep in mind two important notes:
1) don’t think or assume it’s all about the skills of people involved because randomness plays a part here… and it’s hard for the better example than Minnesota Timberwolves in 2012-13. Literally everybody thought they would be better this season but they were crushed by injuries and in the end the best prediction for this team turned out to be from… last years’ adjusted wins! So if someone predicted 45 wins for them his result was punished by bad luck more than someone who predicted 35 wins for them.
Well, unless someone can predict injuries…

2) in most cases entries next to each other are basically interchangeable in terms of accuracy because difference between them can be translated into “2-3 more/less wins in the right direction would flip them”.

Onto the table…