With his Toronto Raptors facing elimination and the daunting task of coming back from a 3-0 deficit in their first-round series against the Philadelphia 76ers, coach Nick Nurse made the case for his team to accomplish something no team in NBA history has done.
"I think it's a heckuva challenge, and somebody's got to do it," Nurse told reporters last month. "If it gets to 3-1, it's not 3-0 anymore. And 3-1's been done."
The NBA is an outlier. Four NHL teams have rallied from down 3-0 to win, most recently the Los Angeles Kings en route to the 2014 Stanley Cup, while MLB's Boston Red Sox famously completed a comeback from down 3-0 to the rival New York Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series on the way to their first World Series title since 1918.
It turned out Nurse's Raptors wouldn't be the team to change that. After staving off elimination for two games, they were blown out in the second half of Game 6 at home. Now, the Dallas Mavericks are in the same position in the Western Conference finals after losing Game 3 to the Golden State Warriors at home.
Let's examine why no NBA team has overcome a 3-0 deficit and why it's bound to happen eventually.
The history of teams down 3-0
Before this season, 143 teams in NBA history had fallen behind 3-0 in a best-of-seven series. Add the Raptors, Denver Nuggets and Brooklyn Nets, who all lost in the first round, and teams facing this deficit are 0-146 all time.
Maintaining belief doesn't seem to be the primary issue. Teams frequently rally to win Game 4, typically at home, and avoid a sweep. (Just 22 of the 146 teams to go down 3-0 had home-court advantage in the series.) Including this year's games, this group has collectively gone 56-90 in Game 4 for a .384 winning percentage.
Under the NBA's usual best-of-seven format, avoiding a sweep means heading back on the road for Game 5, and that's where the comeback often ends. Teams down 3-0 are 14-42 (.250) when they reach Game 5, meaning less than 10% of teams in that situation even get to a sixth game in the series.
Countering the notion that pressure shifts over time to the team unable to close out, the winning percentage for teams down 3-0 declines again in Game 6. Despite having won the previous two games to stave off elimination, they've gone 3-11 (.214) in Game 6.
And as you already know, all three teams that won three straight to force a Game 7 (the 2003 Portland Trail Blazers, 1994 Nuggets and 1951 New York Knicks) lost that game.
The math against teams down 3-0
In theory, coming back from a 3-0 deficit doesn't seem much harder to pull off than the comebacks from 3-1 deficits that are increasingly common. (There have been five of them since 2015, including the Nuggets pulling off back-to-back 3-1 comebacks in the 2020 bubble playoffs.)
For that matter, it's also seemingly not so different from going behind 2-0 in a series and rallying to win the next four games, something that happened twice in last year's playoffs -- the LA Clippers against the Utah Jazz in the second round and the Milwaukee Bucks in the NBA Finals against the Phoenix Suns.
Part of the difference lies in home-court advantage. By definition, a team down 3-0 must win at least two games on the road, usually including a deciding Game 7 in which home court offers an even greater edge. (Historically, home teams are 110-34 in Game 7s, though the home win percentage has declined slightly to 71% since 2000.)
In contrast, a higher seed down 3-1 or a lower seed down 2-0 can come back with only a single road win. Only the 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers (against the Warriors in the 2016 NBA Finals) in the past 25 years have rallied from 3-1 by winning twice on the road. At the extreme, the Nuggets' bubble turnarounds didn't require navigating any road games in a neutral setting.
The other factor that makes a 3-0 comeback much less likely is that the gap between the two teams is typically larger. Teams down 3-1 have won 38% of their games the rest of the series, as compared to just 34% for teams down 3-0.
Still, in nearly 150 series, it's something of a surprise that we've never seen a 3-0 comeback.
How a 3-0 comeback might happen
When we eventually see a team come back from down 3-0 in a series, odds are health will be a factor. Consider the way the 2016 Warriors wore down over the course of the NBA Finals against the Cavaliers, with Andrew Bogut sidelined for the final two games of the series after Draymond Green missed Game 5 due to a suspension.
It's possible we could have seen a 3-0 comeback earlier that same postseason had the Trail Blazers not won Game 3 of their first-round series with the Clippers. Even after dropping that game in Portland, the Clippers were heavy favorites to advance, until both Blake Griffin and Chris Paul went down with series-ending injuries during Game 4.
The Blazers won the remaining three games of the series against a depleted Clippers team and would have had a strong chance to win had they gone down 3-0.
As I noted last year, injuries have never been more common during the playoffs than they are now. The four years since 1978 with the most playoff games lost to injury by rotation regulars have all come in the past seven postseasons.
We'd also expect a shift in terms of shot-making, something that could benefit the Mavericks as they look to extend this series. Through the first three games, Dallas' effective field-goal percentage (treating 3s as 1.5 field goals to reflect their additional value) is 4.5 percentage points worse than expected based on the location and type of shots, distance to nearby defenders and ability of the shooters, according to Second Spectrum's quantified shot making (qSM) metric.
Meanwhile, the Warriors' shot-making is 4.1 percentage points better than expected. Second Spectrum analysis indicates Golden State has gotten slightly better shots, but not nearly by enough of a margin to explain the Warriors posting a 60% eFG thus far as compared to 50% for Dallas. Instead, we'd expect a more modest gap like we saw in the first two rounds, when the Mavericks had a 55% eFG and Golden State 56.5%.
The odds are that shot-making evening out still won't be enough for Dallas to win the next four games and the series. Eventually, however, it's inevitable that some team is going to come back from a 3-0 deficit and make history in the process.