TODAY’S SPORTSTAT- Celtics are one W away from tying Lakers’ record
By JERRY TAPP
The Boston Celtics go for their 15th straight win tonight in Atlanta versus the Hawks. The Celtics are looking to become the 42nd team in NBA history to have a streak of 15 or more consecutive regular season wins.
This year’s team is also hoping to become the sixth Celtics team to win 15 straight. The 2008-09 Celtics won a team record 19 straight. They also won 15 or more regular season contests in 1981-82 (18), 1964-65 (16), 1959-60 (17), and won 15 straight over two seasons in 1956-57 and 1957-58.
It’s interesting to note that the ’09 and ’82 teams did not make the Finals that season. The 1960 and 1965 teams won the title that year; the ’57 team won the title and the ’58 team lost in the Finals.
If the Celts can win 15 straight for the sixth time in their history, they would tie the Lakers for most streaks of 15 or more wins by an NBA franchise with six. Following are the NBA franchises that have had regular-season winning streaks of 15 or more games two or more times:
6 (winning streaks of 15 or more): L.A. Lakers
5: Boston
3: Houston, Milwaukee, San Antonio, Washington
2: Golden State, New York Knicks, Phoenix, Portland, Utah.
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.