Tapp-ing Into The Numbers: Warriors Join Exclusive 60-Win Club
The Golden State Warriors this season won 67 games, the third straight season with 60 or more wins. They became the sixth team to win 60 or more games in three consecutive seasons and the first since the Chicago Bulls did it in 1996, 1997 and 1998. For the record the teams that have won 60 in three consecutive years were:
Milwaukee Bucks: 1971, 1972, 1973
Boston Celtics: 1980, 1981, 1982
Boston Celtics: 1984, 1985, 1986
Los Angeles Lakers: 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988
Chicago Bulls: 1996, 1997, 1998
Golden State: 2015, 2016, 2017
The Warriors were not the only team to win 60 or more games in the 2016-17 season; the San Antonio Spurs for the second straight year reached the 60-win mark with their 61 wins this season. The Warriors and Spurs also each won 60+ games in the 2015-16 season. With another 60-win season next year, the Spurs could join the above list, while another 60-win season next year for Golden State would make them only the second team in NBA history to win 60 or more games in four consecutive seasons.
Two teams winning 60 or more games in an NBA season has now been accomplished 22 times in league history. Here’s a few interesting stats regarding multiple teams winning 60 or more in a season:
- In 14 of those 22 seasons, the team that won the championship that year was a team that won 60 or more games.
- There have been three NBA Finals where both teams won 60 or more games in the regular season: 1985 (Lakers and Celtics), 1996 (Bulls and Sonics) and 1997 (Bulls and Jazz).
- In nine of those 22 season, a team that won 60 games in the regular season lost in the NBA Finals.
- In three of those 22 seasons, none of the multiple teams that won 60 or more games made it to the NBA Finals… 1995, 207 and 2011.
Jerry Tapp
Jerry Tapp is a freelance writer from Racine, WI with a major concentration on sports statistics and numbers that define sports teams and players. He began his foray into sports stats-focused writing as a regular contributor to the “Numbers” column in Inside Sports magazine in the mid-1980’s and then began writing a weekly “Stats on Tapp” column for the Racine Journal Times. That column was eventually nationally syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate. He later wrote sports stats items for the Washington Post under the “Stat of the Day” heading. After launching his blog, www.statsontapp.com in 2011, Jerry turned his sports stats attention to sports websites. He wrote regularly for Bleacher Report, BallHyped, football.com and Heavy.com. Today he keeps busy writing weekly columns of stats-centric articles for three sports websites, Today’s Pigskin (NFL), Today’s Knuckleball (MLB) and Today’s Fastbreak (NBA), and as a monthly contributor to the Milwaukee Brewers “GameDay” publication that is distributed to fans attending games at Miller Park.