It was the year of the long winning streak in the NBA.
There were five instances of teams winning 11 or more games in a row during the recently completed 2024-25 regular season: three by the Eastern Conference’s Cleveland Cavaliers, two by the Western Conference’s Oklahoma City Thunder, and it’s no surprise those two teams earned the No. 1 seeds for the 16-team playoffs that tip off this weekend.
It was the first time since 2017-18 that there were five separate winning streaks of 11 or more games in a season; there were a record 10 in the league that season.
Cleveland, which had winning streaks of 16, 15 and 12 games, became the second team in NBA history to have three streaks that long in the same season. The first such team was the 2006-07 Dallas Mavericks.
There was a flip side as well, those being losing streaks. The Washington Wizards had a pair of 16-game slides, the first NBA team have two of those in the same season since the Charlotte Bobcats had runs of 0-for-16 and 0-f0r-23 in the 2011-12 season.