Stat of the week

[RyNye]

I rather like random and pointless stats, as I am sure many of you do. All sports are wonderful in the way they can be simultaneously defined by stats as well as defy attempts to categorize them based on those stats. Basketball, I think, is the epitome of this phenomenon. You never know what's going to happen until it happens.

I think it would be fun for us to all have a thread where we just bring up random fun stats of the week. Not for serious discussion and arguing, but just for the sake of saying, "Hey! That's a cool stat!"

So, inspired by our 19-point beat-down of the Heat last night, I was curious ... what is the worst regular season loss for a team that would go on to win the championship? Unfortunately, it is REALLY difficult to find this data. So I just looked quickly through the regular season schedules for the past decade of championships. If anyone can correct me, please do so!

So, worst regular season losses for each championship team since 2002-3 season (I couldn't find a schedule for 2001-2002!):

2002-3 Spurs: lost by 24 points to the Sacramento Kings
2003-4 Pistons: lost by 21 points to the Seattle SuperSonics
2004-5 Spurs: lost by 36 points to the Dallas Mavericks
2005-6 Heat: lost by 36 points to the Dallas Mavericks
2006-7 Spurs: lost by 23 points to the Denver Nuggets (last day of the season, though...)
2007-8 Celtics: lost by 18 points to the Utah Jazz
2008-9 Lakers: lost by 17 points to the Portland Trail-Blazers
2009-10 Lakers: lost by 26 points to the Denver Nuggets
2010-11 Mavericks: lost by 28 points to the Los Angels Lakers

Of course, this isn't terribly meaningful, but it is interesting. So every championship team seems to get brutally shut out at least once during a season. Interestingly, I expected most of these losses to come in the last weeks of the season, when teams with high playoff seeding coast, but the losses were fairly spread out across the season. I forgot to write down the dates as I was writing this, and don't feel like going back to double-check, though.

So the worst in recent memory are the Dallas Mavericks handing out 36 point beat-downs to the Spurs and Heat in consecutive years. Pretty neat.

The Celtics and the Lakers are the only recent championship contenders to never lose by more than 20 points in a season. I was very disappointed to see that the Lakers beat us out by 1 point for the "least worst loss", but I take solace in the fact that our regular season record overall was better ... by 1 game!

[Roy H.]

An easier place to find data:  go to basketball-reference.com.  Navigate to the page of the team you want.  So, if you wanted the 2002 Lakers, go here: http://www.basketball-reference.com/teams/LAL/2002.html

Then, click on "Schedule and Results" to find all the team's results.  It's sortable by wins and losses, although not by margin of victory.

[letsgoblue86]

Lakers lost by 18 points three times during the 01-02 season, at the hands of these three teams.

Minnesota (KG dropped 32)
San Antonio
Boston (Paul dropped 33)