Five Longest winning streaks in NBA history
Dominant teams in the NBA seem to appear every once in a while and establish some tremendous runs of victories. Just last year, in the 2019-20 NBA season, we saw the Los Angeles Lakers and Milwaukee Bucks put up tremendously dominant performances.
The Lakers' won 24 of their first 27 games, while the Bucks started their year with a 46-8 record before the All-Star break, including an extraordinary run of 18 consecutive wins.
As impressive as the Bucks' run of 18 straight wins last year was, they only tied for 11th place in NBA history. Below, we will take a look at the five longest winning streaks in NBA history, and the list includes some all-time great teams that went on to win the title.
Most consecutive wins in the history of the NBA
The most recent team to go on an unbelievable run of consecutive wins in the regular season was the 73-9 Golden State Warriors, when they started the 2015-16 campaign with a 24-0 record after winning the 2015 NBA title.
In this report, we will tell you which teams constructed the biggest game-winning streaks in NBA history.
Without further ado, let us start.
#5 1948 Washington Capitols and the 1970-71 Milwaukee Bucks - 20 consecutive wins
Between the NBA's second and third seasons, when the league was called the Basketball Association of America (BAA), the Washington Capitols put together a run of 20 consecutive wins. At the end of the 1947-48 season, they won their last five games of the regular season before losing a Western Division Tiebreaker and falling out of contention.
The team then won their first 15 games of the 1948-49 season. That run of consecutive wins was untouched until the 1970-71 Milwaukee Bucks with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Lew Alcindor) and Oscar Robertson tied it with 20 straight wins between February 6th, 1971, and March 9th, 1971.
The Bucks, coached by Larry Costello, went 66-16 in the regular season and won the championship after sweeping the Baltimore Bullets in the NBA Finals. Abdul-Jabbar won his first regular-season MVP that year (as a sophomore) and also won Finals MVP.
#4 2007-08 Houston Rockets - 22 consecutive wins
The Rick Adelman-led 2007-08 Houston Rockets made it into the NBA history books after winning 22 consecutive games in the regular season. At the time, that streak was the second-largest in NBA history and only the second to surpass the Capitols and Bucks' previous record of 20 straight wins.
Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming were the best players on those Rockets and even though they each missed more than 20 regular-season games, they helped the Rockets achieve a 55-27 record, the fifth-best in franchise history.