Has a Team Ever Gone 0-82?
No. No NBA team has ever gone 0-82, and no team has come within nine wins of it. The fewest wins in a full 82-game season is 9, by the 1972-73 Philadelphia 76ers, and the longest losing streak in league history is 28 games — about a third of a schedule.
This site exists because of the question’s mirror image, so it is worth answering the inverted version properly. Nobody has gone 82-0 either. The league’s two impossible records sit the same distance from the record book in both directions, and neither has ever been threatened.
How close anyone has actually come
| Record | Holder | Distance from 0-82 |
|---|---|---|
| Fewest wins, 82-game season | 9 (1972-73 76ers, 9-73) | 9 wins |
| Lowest winning percentage | .106 (2011-12 Bobcats, 7-59 in 66 games) | 7 wins |
| Longest losing streak | 28 (2023-24 Pistons; 2014-15/15-16 76ers) | 54 games |
| Worst start to a season | 0-18 (2009-10 Nets; 2015-16 76ers) | 64 games |
| Most losses in a season | 73 (1972-73 76ers) | 9 losses |
The 2011-12 Charlotte Bobcats hold the lowest winning percentage ever at .106, but that came in a 66-game lockout season, which is a smaller sample than 82 and therefore an easier place to post an extreme number. Both those seasons are compared directly in our breakdown of the worst record in NBA history.
The most instructive line in that table is the streak. Twenty-eight consecutive losses is the outer edge of what has ever been observed, and it covers roughly one third of a season. To go 0-82 a team would need to do that essentially three times over, without a single interruption, across six months.
The math on 0-82
Treat each game as an independent event with a fixed win probability. That is a simplification, since real seasons have injuries, trade deadlines and midseason teardowns that make outcomes correlated, but it sets a useful floor.
Give a team the worst win rate ever recorded, the Bobcats’ 10.6%. The chance of losing all 82 games is 0.894 raised to the 82nd power, which comes to about 0.0001, or roughly 1 in 10,000.
Give it the 1972-73 76ers’ 11.0% and the number drops to about 1 in 14,000.
Run it the other way and it gets clearer still. For a team to have even a 1% chance of going 0-82, its per-game win probability would need to fall to about 5.5%. That is a roster on pace for four and a half wins across a full season, roughly half as good as the worst team ever assembled and worse than any group of professional basketball players has ever been.
| Team’s true win rate | Implied season pace | Chance of 0-82 |
|---|---|---|
| 11.0% (1972-73 76ers) | 9-73 | ~1 in 14,000 |
| 10.6% (2011-12 Bobcats) | 9-73 | ~1 in 10,000 |
| 5.5% | 4.5-77.5 | roughly 1 in 100 |
| 2.4% | 2-80 | roughly 1 in 7 |
Those figures come from simple arithmetic on the binomial, not from a source, and they are illustrative rather than predictive. The conclusion they support is the durable part: the barrier to 0-82 is not luck. It is that no roster has ever been bad enough for luck to matter.
Why the floor holds
Three things keep the worst teams above zero.
Everyone on the floor is a professional. A rebuilding team’s 12th man was one of the best few hundred basketball players in the world last season. Across 82 games that roster will occasionally shoot well on a night when a good opponent shoots badly.
The schedule creates mismatches in both directions. Contenders play back-to-backs, rest starters in March, and travel. A bad team gets a handful of games a year against opponents who are not trying, and those are the games that break streaks. Look at the wins that ended the longest skids in our list of the longest losing streaks in NBA history: five of the ten came by three points or fewer, usually against beatable opposition.
Nobody is incentivised to lose all 82. Since 2019 the three worst records share identical 14% odds at the first overall pick. There is no additional lottery reward for being the single worst team, which removes the only rational reason a franchise might tolerate a truly winless season.
The inverse is just as empty
The best record ever is 73-9, by the 2015-16 Golden State Warriors. The worst is 9-73. Both stop exactly nine games short of perfect, which is a coincidence but a memorable one.
Nobody has gone 82-0 for reasons that are structurally different but numerically identical, and the full odds calculation for a perfect season walks through them properly. On the same simple model used above, a team winning 89% of its games, Golden State’s 73-9 rate, has about a 1-in-14,000 chance of running the table. That is the exact mirror of an 11% team’s chance of losing all 82: an 89% team avoiding 82 losses and an 11% team avoiding 82 wins are the same calculation, 0.89 raised to the 82nd power. The league’s two extremes are equally unreachable, from opposite directions.
That symmetry is the whole premise of this site. 82-0 lets you draft a five-player lineup and simulate a full era-accurate season to see where your roster lands. Most of them finish a long way from either end.
Frequently asked questions
Has any team gone winless in a shortened NBA season?+
No. The closest is the 2011-12 Charlotte Bobcats at 7-59 in a 66-game lockout season and the 1998-99 Vancouver Grizzlies at 8-42 in a 50-game one. Even a half-length schedule has never produced a winless team, which is a useful check on the idea that 0-82 is only a matter of enough games.
Has a team ever gone winless in another major North American league?+
Only in the NFL, where the season is short enough to make it reachable. The 2008 Lions and 2017 Browns both went 0-16. The NHL's worst season, the 1974-75 Washington Capitals at 8-67-5, still produced eight wins across 80 games. No MLB or NBA team has ever finished a season without a win.
Would a 0-82 team be allowed to keep playing?+
Yes. There is no relegation in the NBA and no mechanism for removing a team on competitive grounds. A hypothetically winless team would finish its season, enter the draft lottery with the same 14% top-pick odds as the other two worst teams, and return the following October.
Is 0-82 more or less likely than 82-0?+
More likely, though both are far outside anything observed. Teams can be constructed badly on purpose, and several have been; no team can be constructed well enough on purpose to guarantee 82 wins. The record book reflects that — the gap from 73-9 to 82-0 is nine wins, and the gap from 9-73 to 0-82 is also nine, but the bottom has been approached under deliberate conditions and the top has not.
Why does this question get asked about the NBA specifically?+
Because the NBA has no ties and a long schedule, so both perfect outcomes are arithmetically clean and easy to picture. Football has ties and a 17-game season; baseball's daily schedule makes long streaks in either direction almost impossible. Basketball is the sport where the extremes are conceivable enough to be worth asking about.