The Whiteboard: What would a shutout in the NBA look like?

The NBA has never seen a shutout, and it probably never will. But imagine if a team was held scoreless.

The least amount of points ever scored by a team in an NBA game is 18. The Minneapolis Lakers only managed to score 18 points in a whole basketball game in 1950, losing to the high-scoring Fort Wayne Pistons, who managed a whopping 19 points.

(An aside. George Mikan scored 15 of the Lakers’ 18 points in that game. That’s 83.3 percent of his team’s output. Mikan accounted for more of the Lakers’ points than Wilt Chamberlain did in his 100 point game (59.2 percent) and Kobe Bryant did in his 81 point game (66.4 percent). This is all to say that Mikan carried that team to a ridiculous degree.)

That Lakers final score was the closest any team has been to being held to zero points in an NBA game. No team has ever failed to score entirely. That makes sense – -even if a team somehow missed every jumper, lay-up, and dunk, it would seem they could at least add some points via free throws.

It’s highly unlikely that any team will ever be shut out. Since the 3-point line was introduced in the 1979-80 season, a team has managed less than 50 points just once (it was the 1998-99 Chicago Bulls, the year after their most recent title, after Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen both left).

Let’s suspend disbelief for a second, though. What if an NBA team was shut out during the 2018-19 season? It would have to immediately qualify as one of the most embarrassing feats in pro sports in the last century, and as a top petty moment of all time for the team that held their opponents absolutely scoreless.

Let’s face it — a team would have to try really hard to shut out an opponent for a full 48 minutes. They’d have to play extremely clean, to avoid giving up free throws. And they would have to be playing a team that just absolutely stunk.

I’m open to better suggestions, but here’s my pick for the most possible shutout: the Boston Celtics holding the New York Knicks scoreless for a full 48 minutes. Imagine this scenario: the Kyrie Irving to New York rumors are starting to build in advance of the 2019 trade deadline, especially because the Knicks and Celtics play in New York on February 1.

Brad Stevens rolls out a starting five of Kyrie, Jaylen Brown, Gordon Hayward, Jayson Tatum, and Al Horford, which he has previously reserved for closing games. They don’t exert much effort on offense but absolutely lock down the Knicks, not giving up a single point in a 46-0 victory. Kyrie laughs about the idea of leaving the Celtics to join a team they shut out after the game. The Knicks sign Marcus Morris to a $70 million deal that summer.

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