What The Celtics And Stars Are Trying To Do Is Special

The fabled 0-3 comeback remains one of sports' rarest achievements.

Sorry, Miami Heat and Vegas Golden Knights: Your tickets to the championship round are not punched quite yet.

Despite both teams holding 3-0 leads — over the Boston Celtics and Dallas Stars, respectively — their opponents are not giving up. The Celtics have battled all the way back to tie their NBA Eastern Conference final series at 3 games apiece, forcing an improbable Game 7 after one of the best and most mind-boggling finishes in playoff history. The Stars aren’t quite as far along the comeback trail yet, but they’ve won 2 straight and have a chance on Monday to force a Game 7 of their own.

The history of 0-3 comebacks in the major men’s pro sports reminds us just how special it is to pull one off. Through last fall, teams that led 3-0 in an MLB, NHL or NBA series had a collective record of 384-5, good for a winning percentage of 98.7%. The majority of those teams (63.8%) didn’t even let the series get to a Game 5, much less give the trailing team hope to build momentum through Games 6 and 7. (Only about 10% forced a Game 6 and 4% forced a Game 7.)

So in that sense, what the Stars and especially the Celtics have already accomplished is relatively rare.

But it does seem harder in some sports than others. Through last season, the NHL had seen four teams pull off the ultimate comeback in 204 tries, good for a success rate of 2.0%. Major League Baseball has seen just one team do the same — the fabled 2004 Boston Red Sox, who did it to the archrival New York Yankees in that year’s American League Championship Series — but when we factor in that only 40 MLB teams have ever even gone down 3-0 in a best-of-seven series, the success rate for 0-3 comebacks in baseball (2.5%) is actually higher than it is in hockey.

Among the Big 3 pro leagues, only the NBA has never seen an 0-3 comeback in its history. Pro basketball does have the lowest rate of teams down 0-3 bowing out of the series in a sweep (61.6%), slightly lower than the rate for hockey (62.7%) and far below that of MLB (77.5%). But comparatively few teams in that spot are able to force a Game 6 (9.8%) or particularly a Game 7 (2.4%), which helps explain why no team has ever been able to successfully summit the mountain Boston is currently climbing.

If Dallas wins again tonight, they’ll become the 10th NHL team to force a Game 7 after trailing 0-3 in a series; such teams are 4-5 all-time in the do-or-die finale, so it would really be anybody’s series to win at that point, with a trip to the Stanley Cup Final on the line. Meanwhile, Boston is already only the fifth team in NBA/ABA history to force a Game 7 from an 0-3 deficit. That’s pretty special, although history has not been nearly as kind to those teams in the past — they’re 0-4 all-time. Maybe the Celtics can follow in the footsteps of that other Boston team, however, and become the first in their sport to ever rally from the most insurmountable deficit possible.

Filed under: NBA, NHL