Hypothetical Power Rankings: Miami Heat and losing winning streaks

Since the calendar flipped to 2017, one of the very best teams in the NBA has been the Miami Heat. No, mafioso Pat Riley has not managed to build a time machine and bring LeBron & Co. from 2013 into the present. After seeing their record drop all the way to 11-30 on Jan. 13, with an infirmary full of season-ending injuries, the Heat…just started winning. On Jan. 17 they beat the Houston Rockets, and they didn’t lose until last weekend against the Philadelphia 76ers.

Miami’s 13-game winning streak is the longest by any team at any point this season, and no team is currently mounting a serious challenge.

Things have been going so well for the Heat that they even worked out what has to be the most cordial roster cut in league history. After undrafted rookie Okaro White played his way into the rotation, all the available minutes for lottery-pick-turned-journeyman Derrick Williams up and vanished. Then Williams requested his release, then Riley granted him said release, then Williams thanked Riley on Twitter and now Williams is a Cleveland Cavalier. The sequence of moves is, somehow, a true win-win for everybody. The Heat have been so dominant that there are indeed more minutes available for Williams on the defending champions’ roster (22.8 per night) than there were for him in South Beach (15.1 per night, plus a healthy serving of DNP-CD’s).

Read More: Is Jahlil Okafor salvageable?

Besides, White fits with the new Heat so much better than Williams — the second overall pick of the 2011 Draft — ever could. A few short years after assembling the biggest-name team of all-time, Riley has woven this year’s roster together almost entirely out of the waiver wire — reading the Summer League like so many tea leaves. The current Heat roster (excluding the in-health-purgatory Chris Bosh) features as many undrafted players as first-round draft picks (five). Oh, and only one of those first-rounders was actually drafted by Miami: Justise Winslow. Oh, and Winslow’s season ended in December after tearing his shoulder.

The entire cast of Miami’s winning streak was, at one point or another, totally available for the signing.

None of this is really what makes the Heat’s winning streak historically notable. While Dion Waiters’ improbable buzzer-beater over the Golden State Warriors (game No. 4 of the streak) is historically notable, that’s also not what I’m thinking of. What made this winning streak notable is that the Heat are still not very good. Currently sitting at 25-32, the Heat aren’t just on the outside looking in at the playoffs. They’d have to leapfrog the Milwaukee Bucks in order to get into that not-so-exclusive party.

Going all the way back to the dank, dark 40s, there have been 263 times when a team has had a winning streak of 10 games or more. That list of 263 teams contains most of the serious championship contenders of, like, all time. There are very, very few teams who managed to win at least 10 games in a row — it’s a pretty huge chunk of the season by itself — while also managing to end the year at .500 or worse.* In fact, there were only three such teams, ever, and now Miami is the fourth.

*I did not count “wrap-around” winning streaks: streaks that started at the end of one regular season and continued on at the start of the next regular season. My apologies to the 1983–1985 Phoenix Suns.

3. 1977-78 New Orleans Jazz
Streak: 10 games (Jan. 14 — Feb. 1)
Record: 39-43

With the Jazz still floundering in their fourth year of existence, Pistol Pete Maravich was the gift that both giveth and taketh away. 1977-78 was the first season the league tracked turnovers, and his 5.0 giveaways per game that year has stood as a full-season record until this very year. However, the 1977-78 Jazz went 26-24 when Maravich played, and limped around at 13-19 during the 32 games he was sidelined with knee injuries. As this phenomenal highlight reel shows, Maravich was routinely slinging around passes that would still count as innovations today:

New Orleans’ winning streak started about a week after the team acquired Slick Watts in a trade from the Seattle SuperSonics, which — who knows? — may or may not have actually been the catalyst for the team. Two days after an unimpressive 142-99 loss to the Phoenix Suns, the Jazz got their streak started with a 118-111 victory over the Golden State Warriors. New Orleans got better as the winning streak rolled along, winning three straight games by more than 15 points.

Then Maravich got injured. Without Pistol Pete, the Jazz eked out a win over the Chicago Bulls for their 10th and final game on the win streak. Then the All-Star Break hit and, with Maravich still not healthy on the other side of it, the Jazz lost eight straight games to dip them back below .500 for good.

2. 1996-97 Phoenix Suns
Streak: 11 games (March 20 — April 10)
Record: 40-42

After trading away Charles Barkley in the offseason, Phoenix was going through some understandable growing pains with a young core that would have made the 1996 blogosphere drool (had the blogosphere existed). Among the players 26 and under: Robert Horry, Sam Cassell, Michael Finley and rookie Steve Nash. The young Suns quickly ran into their own Trust the Process moment by losing to the 0-7 Vancouver Grizzlies, 92-88, dropping their own record to 0-8. That got head coach Cotton Fitzsimmons fired and in came Danny Ainge, who was on the Suns’ roster about 18 months previously.

General manager Jerry Colangelo managed to bring yet another Hall of Famer into the mix at the trade deadline, bringing in Jason Kidd in exchange for Cassell, Finley and old man A.C. Green. Then the Suns really started to click. In the 33 games that Kidd played for the team — despite frequently coming off the bench behind Kevin Johnson — they went 23-10.

Just as important at the time: Colangelo also traded Horry to the Los Angeles Lakers in exchange for Cedric Ceballos, who would finish second on the Suns in scoring average. Thanks to this busy trade deadline, Phoenix went from 17-31 at the All-Star Break — or nearly the same winning percentage the Orlando Magic have now — all the way into the playoffs.

Phoenix rattled off their win streak when their window into the postseason had almost shut for good. After getting things started over the tanking-for-Tim-Duncan San Antonio Spurs, the Suns persisted through a brutally tough stretch of their schedule, beating the highly seeded Seattle SuperSonics and Houston Rockets (featuring Chuck Barkley) twice apiece.

1. 2007-08 Portland Trail Blazers
Streak: 13 games (Dec. 3 — Dec. 30)
Record: 41-41

It’s really hard to figure out what suddenly went right for these Blazers of a decade ago. Even though second-year Brandon Roy did increase his scoring average for the month of December, second-year LaMarcus Aldridge saw his scoring average dip for the month of December — plus he missed five games right in the middle of the streak anyway. James Jones was given more minutes and was basically on fire for all of December (31-of-56 on 3-point shots), but is that really enough to trigger a 13-game winning streak? The team made no notable transactions. Their schedule wasn’t even especially easy. The team was also dealing with the bad karma of seeing Greg Oden endure the first of his many seasons lost to injury.

I think the most likely explanation is a relatively mundane one: This very young team just played a whole lot better when they were at home. In this 13-game winning streak, only three of their games were on the road. During Portland’s 5-10 November, in February, when the team went 5-9 and started slumping out of the playoff race, half of those 14 games were at home and half were on the road. This year’s Heat were on the road for just five of the 13 games in their winning streak — including two trips to Brooklyn to greet the league-worst Nets. And both teams also had Josh McRoberts kind of sitting around on the bench (with his foot broken, in the case of the 2017 Heat).

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Each of these three teams had an All-Star on the rise who, for a time, put their team on their back. Considering how anonymous the Miami roster is, plus how far under .500 the team still sits, it’s an easy call: This has been the most bizarre and unprecedented winning streak in league history.