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Has Any NBA Team Gone 82-0? The Real Records Behind the Perfect-Season Question

No NBA team has gone 82-0. The best record is 73-9, the best start 24-0 and the longest streak 33 games. The record book, and why the season is 82 games.

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Key takeaways

  • No NBA team has finished a regular season unbeaten; the best record is 73-9 and no team has started better than 24-0.
  • When you compare great seasons, use winning percentage as well as wins, because shortened seasons (50, 66 and 72 games) cannot be compared on totals.
  • Treat the 82-game schedule as a fixed denominator: the last two games now come from NBA Cup results, but the Cup Championship does not count in the standings.
  • To see why perfection is so rare, multiply rather than add: even a 73-in-82 (89%) chance per game compounds to roughly 1 in 13,800 over 82 games under a simple model.
  • Read any simulated 82-game record as a model's verdict on a roster, not as a prediction about a real team.

No NBA team has ever gone 82-0. The 2026-27 season, which opens on 20 October, is the league's 81st regular season, and in the 80 before it no team finished unbeaten. The best record on the books is 73-9, set by the 2015-16 Golden State Warriors. The same team owns the best start, 24-0, which means no NBA team has ever reached 25-0, let alone 82-0.

So "82-0" is a thought experiment rather than a record anyone has threatened. It is still a useful one, because the distance between 73-9 and perfection says a lot about what an 82-game season actually measures.

The marks that frame the question

Every honest answer to "has anyone gone 82-0?" comes back to the same handful of records. Each figure below comes from the league's own history pages, apart from the winning percentages, which are simple division.

Record Mark Season and team
Best regular-season record 73-9 (.890) 2015-16 Golden State Warriors
The record it broke 72-10 (.878) 1995-96 Chicago Bulls
The record that one broke 69-13 (.841) 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers
Best start to a season 24-0 2015-16 Golden State Warriors
Next-best starts 15-0 1948-49 Washington Capitols, 1993-94 Houston Rockets, 2024-25 Cleveland Cavaliers
Longest winning streak 33 games 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers

Three details in that table do more explaining than the numbers themselves.

The best start covers less than a third of a season. On NBA.com's list of the best starts, the 24-0 run stands alone and the next three all reached 15-0. Cleveland, the only one still unbeaten when that list was published in November 2024, lost its 16th game, at Boston, according to Basketball-Reference's game log. A perfect season needs that 24-game run more than three times over without one bad night.

The longest streak sat inside a season with 13 losses. The Lakers' 33 straight wins began on 5 November 1971 and ended when the Milwaukee Bucks beat them on 9 January 1972. That team finished 69-13, which was the best record in league history until 1995-96.

The best regular season did not win the title. The 73-9 Warriors lost the 2016 Finals. The 72-10 Bulls, whose record they broke, did win the 1996 championship. A regular season sorts teams for the playoffs; even the best one on record guaranteed nothing after it.

Why the season is 82 games

The step from 81 to 82

The 82-game schedule is younger than the league. In 1966-67 ten teams played 81 games each, according to Basketball-Reference's season summary. For 1967-68 the league added the Seattle SuperSonics and San Diego Rockets, and the league's own season review records that the NBA, "now a 12-team league, played its first 82-game schedule."

That review records the change without explaining why the number is 82, and we will not invent a reason. What the record does show is that the figure has stuck. Every season since has been 82 games except the four below: two lockouts, one mid-season suspension and one schedule announced at 72 games.

The seasons that came up short

Season Games per team What happened
1998-99 50 A lockout wiped out the first three months; play began in February 1999
2011-12 66 A lockout that began on 30 June 2011 lasted 149 days; the season opened on Christmas Day
2019-20 Suspended in March Play stopped on 11 March 2020 after a player's preliminary positive COVID-19 test
2020-21 72 The league announced a 72-game season in November 2020; it began on 22 December

The 1998-99 season was, in NBA.com's words, "the first time in league history that games were cancelled due to labor issues." It also matters for record comparisons: a shortened season can produce a high winning percentage on a low win total, which is why winning percentage, not wins, is the fairer measure across eras.

How the 82 are filled now

The modern schedule has one more wrinkle. The league now fixes dates and opponents for 80 of each team's 82 games when the schedule is released, and assigns the last two from the results of Emirates NBA Cup group play; for 2026-27 those two games fall between 4 and 10 December. Cup games count in the regular-season standings, with one exception: NBA.com's Cup explainer says the Championship "will not be counted as a regular-season game." The two Cup finalists therefore play an extra game, but their record is still out of 82.

Just how unlikely is a perfect season?

Going unbeaten means winning every single game, and probabilities of independent events multiply. Multiply a number slightly below one by itself 82 times and it collapses.

Here is a deliberately simple illustration. Take a team exactly as good as the best record ever, one that wins 89% of the time (73 out of 82), and pretend every game is an independent 89% chance:

  • 24 straight wins comes out at about 6%, or roughly once every 16 seasons.
  • 82 straight wins comes out at about 0.007%, or roughly once in 13,800 seasons.
  • For 82-0 to be a coin flip, the team would need to win each game about 99.2% of the time.

That model is wrong in useful ways. Real games are not identical coin flips: opponents differ, and schedules, travel and availability change from night to night. Its only job is to show the shape of the problem. A 24-0 start is what a great team's hot stretch can look like; 82-0 asks for that hot stretch to last six months. Understanding probability in sports simulations works through why season length, more than team quality, makes perfection so rare.

Where basketball teams have gone unbeaten

Perfect seasons do happen in basketball, just not over 82 games. NCAA.com's history, published in February 2026, counts seven men's college teams that won the national championship with an undefeated record. The most recent was Indiana in 1975-76, which finished 32-0. The same history lists Gonzaga's 24-0 regular season in 2021 as the most recent unbeaten regular season; that team then lost the national championship game.

Run the same toy model over a 32-game season and an 89% team comes out unbeaten about 2.4% of the time, against 0.007% over 82 games. Season length is doing most of the work.

Chasing a perfect record in a simulation

The question also comes up in basketball management games, which let you play a whole season out yourself. In Pro Basketball GM Franchise, you draft a roster from a pool built from real players' careers, rated with the game's own estimates, then take it through a full 82-game season and the playoff race.

Whatever record that season produces is the simulation's verdict on your roster under the game's own assumptions. It is not a prediction about any real team, and an unusually good run tells you about the model and your team-building, not about basketball's record book. How a basketball draft simulator works covers reading a season result without over-reading it, and how sports simulation engines work explains how ratings become results. If you would rather chase records from inside one career, Basketball Career Sim tracks awards, records and a legacy score across a fictional player's career.

More basketball explainers are collected on the basketball hub, and the full set of management and career games is under sports GM games.

Good to know

Frequently asked questions

Has any NBA team ever gone undefeated?
No. No team has finished an NBA regular season unbeaten, and no team has even started 25-0. The best start is 24-0 and the best full-season record is 73-9, both set by the 2015-16 Golden State Warriors.
What is the best record in NBA history?
73-9, by the 2015-16 Golden State Warriors, a winning percentage of .890. It broke the 72-10 mark (.878) set by the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls, which had itself broken the 69-13 record of the 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers.
What is the longest winning streak in NBA history?
33 games, by the 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers, from 5 November 1971 to 7 January 1972. The Milwaukee Bucks ended it two nights later. The Lakers still lost 13 games that season and finished 69-13.
When did the NBA start playing 82 games?
In 1967-68, when the league expanded to 12 teams and played its first 82-game schedule. The season before, ten teams played 81 games each. The number has held since, apart from the lockout-shortened 1998-99 and 2011-12 seasons, the 2019-20 season that was suspended in March 2020, and the 72-game 2020-21 schedule.
Is it possible to go 82-0?
Nothing in the rules prevents it, but the arithmetic is brutal. A team that won 89% of its games, the rate of the 73-9 record, would go 82-0 about once in 13,800 seasons if every game were an independent 89% chance. That is a simplified model, and real games are not independent coin flips, but it shows why nobody has come close.

Sources

  1. Top Moments: Warriors set record with 73-win season (opens in a new tab)NBA.com — accessed
  2. Top Moments: Bulls set NBA record with 72-win season (opens in a new tab)NBA.com — accessed
  3. Looking back at the best starts in NBA history (opens in a new tab)NBA.com — accessed
  4. Trending Topics: What stands out about Lakers' 33-game win streak? (opens in a new tab)NBA.com — accessed
  5. 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers Schedule (opens in a new tab)Basketball-Reference.com — accessed
  6. 2024-25 Cleveland Cavaliers Schedule (opens in a new tab)Basketball-Reference.com — accessed
  7. Season Review: 1967-68 (opens in a new tab)NBA.com — accessed
  8. 1966-67 NBA Season Summary (opens in a new tab)Basketball-Reference.com — accessed
  9. Season Review: 1998-99 (opens in a new tab)NBA.com — accessed
  10. Season Review: 2011-12 (opens in a new tab)NBA.com — accessed
  11. Coronavirus pandemic causes NBA to suspend season after player tests positive (opens in a new tab)NBA.com — accessed
  12. NBA announces structure and format for 2020-21 season (opens in a new tab)NBA Communications — accessed
  13. NBA announces schedule for 2026-27 regular season (opens in a new tab)NBA Communications — accessed
  14. Emirates NBA Cup 101: Rules, format and how it works (opens in a new tab)NBA.com — accessed
  15. How every undefeated college basketball team has performed in the NCAA tournament (opens in a new tab)NCAA.com — accessed

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