Obviously, choking away big leads is a concern of fans right now. We've seen very, very bad losses against the Cavaliers and Hawks, and an almost-blown lead against the Bucks recently. Interestingly, we've given up the biggest comeback both this year (30 points) and last (28 points).
So, is this something that just happens to all teams? Or, is it something unique to Boston? Here's one data point:
https://champsorchumps.us/records/most-nba-blown-leads-in-2024
Overall, we've blown eight leads of 10+ points, which frankly doesn't seem that bad. It means that of our 15 losses, we were up fairly big in over half of them.
But, how do we compare to our rivals? Looking at the top-12 teams by record, here's where they stand in terms of blown 10 point leads (resulting in losses) this season:
New Orleans - 12
Sacramento - 11
Boston - 8
Minnesota - 8
Cleveland - 7
Dallas - 7
LA Clippers - 6
Orlando - 6
Denver - 5
OKC - 5
Milwaukee - 4
New York - 3
Are there any conclusions to be drawn?
One thing that would be interesting is percentage of blown 10-point leads. I would guess we’ve had more opportunities to blow them in part because we’ve been up by at least 10 in all but a few games.
This nugget was in a recent ESPN piece republished today:
The frequency of 10-point and 15-point comebacks has increased as well. In 1997-98, teams that fell behind by double digits had an .181 winning percentage. That climbed to .250 a season ago and is at .229 this season, meaning nearly one in every four games in which a team takes a double-digit lead ends with the other team winning.
The inverse means that teams with 10-point leads have a .771 winning percentage in such games this year. I’ve got to imagine the Celtics are close to that, if not above it. My guess is, at least this year, we’ve blown a lot of 10-point leads because we’ve gotten a lot of 10-point leads, and the league trends make comebacks, and thus blown leads, more likely.
EDIT: Did the research — the Celtics are 51-8 in games in which they’ve had a 10-point lead at some point. That’s an .864 winning percentage in such games, which is actually very, very good. No other team is likely close to our number of games with 10-point leads, so it stinks when we lose them, and this year it’s more than half of our losses, but it really does seem that we’ve lost as many as we’ve had because we’ve just had more big leads to begin with. New Orleans, first on the list of big leads blown, is second to the Celtics in number of 10-point wins (30 to our 36), giving another datapoint to having a lot of large leads means you’ll blow more.
