Neither Championship Sweep Happened. (BOY, Did They Ever Not Happen.)
Blowout Game 4 wins for the Mavericks and Oilers were as emphatic as any we've seen from teams down 0-3.
Last week, with both the NHL and NBA Finals sitting at 3-0 leads — held by the Florida Panthers and Boston Celtics, respectively — I dug into the history of championship-round sweeps in the major men’s pro sports that play series. What I found was that, after getting about as many sweeps as we would expect based on the matchups at hand throughout the 1990s and most of the 2000s, we mysteriously stopped seeing championship sweeps as much from about 2008 onward.
In that context, a historically rare double-sweep in 2024 would have come completely out of nowhere. But instead, we saw both sweep attempts get rejected in historic fashion.
First, the Dallas Mavericks won Game 4 of the NBA Finals over the Celtics by 38 points on Friday night. That margin of victory challenged all kinds of all-time NBA marks for lopsided wins, including being the third-biggest rout in Finals history. But for our purposes here, the most pertinent one was that Dallas absolutely obliterated the record for point margin by any team facing an 0-3 deficit going into the game, topping the Phoenix Suns’ 26-point win over the L.A. Lakers in Game 4 of the 1980 West semis:
Just among games in the NBA Finals, Dallas improved on Seattle’s 21-point win over the Bulls in Game 4 in 1996 by 17 points. (If that gap was its own margin on the list above, it would rank eighth!)
Meanwhile, over in hockey, the Edmonton Oilers shellacked the Panthers 8-1 to avert a sweep of their own on Saturday night. That seven-goal margin was tied for the second-most lopsided in a Stanley Cup Finals game — and it was tied for the biggest margin by any team in a Game 4 while trailing 0-3 in a series:
Just in the Finals, the Oilers’ win shattered the record for biggest win by a team down 0-3. They are the first team to even win by three goals in that scenario, much less seven.
The big question might be, how do we compare the sweep-averting wins by Dallas and Edmonton?
Luckily, there is a method for comparing score margins across sports based on how many points/goals/runs/etc. it takes to add a marginal win in each sport. In the NBA, the conversion of points per win is about 30 points, so we can say that a 38-point win was equivalent to 1.27 “win units”. In the NHL, that conversion is about 5.5 goals per win, so a 7-goal win in hockey is equivalent to… 1.27 win units!
That means the Mavs and Oilers basically had identical blowouts in terms of the quality of the wins they had to stave off a sweep. Both tied the NHL’s overall record, but were far and away the most impressive wins in the major men’s pro sports by teams down 0-3 specifically in the Finals:
(We can also throw baseball in here, using the familiar 10 runs per win conversion that you may have seen before. But, interestingly, no team down 0-3 in the World Series since 1990 won Game 4 to avert the sweep.)
When I found those matching 1.27 win-unit values, I have to admit I felt like I was in a simulation. The odds of two teams in different leagues, both facing 0-3 deficits — potentially ending an odd slump for streaks if they lost — but instead winning their Game 4s in record-blowout fashion, and those margins being literally identical in magnitude when we equalize across sports? It boggles the mind.
But this is also why we love sports. By emphatically putting the brooms away, both the Oilers and Mavs have suddenly made their Finals a lot more interesting — could we actually see a reverse-sweep?? — and, win or lose, added a dominant and bizarrely coincidental note to the history books.
Filed under: Statgeekery
...or, have we seen the old saying come true once again that the bulb burns brightest before it burns out?