Has an NBA team ever come back from a 3-0 deficit in the playoffs?

There's nothing in sports like an entertaining comeback. A team winning any given game or series after trailing is exhilarating. It looks like a particular game or series is over until, somehow, it isn't.

Part of what made LeBron James' NBA Finals win as a Cleveland Cavalier so phenomenal was the fact that his team had to come back from down 3-1 in the series to beat the Golden State Warriors. They looked done, until they weren't.

Coming back from a 3-1 deficit is incredibly hard and something few teams have ever done in the NBA. 3-0? That's even harder. In fact, not a single team has done it.

A 3-0 deficit in the NBA is as unsurmountable of a deficit as there is

According to WhoWins.com, 151 series in the NBA playoffs have seen a team take a commanding 3-0 series lead. All 151 of those series have seen the team that jumped ahead win the series. The team that got out to the 3-0 lead has a 92-59 record (.609 winning percentage) in Game 4 of that series, meaning they complete a sweep roughly 61% of the time.

Sure, it's not impossible for the opposition to extend the series by a game or two, but winning a series after losing three straight has statistically been impossible so far.

The NBA is a league built around its stars. It's still very much a team sport, but the best players in the league can carry a team on any given night. More often than not the most talented team wins in the NBA with very few major upsets. Teams that go ahead 3-0 are often much more talented than the opposition and there's no way, barring major injuries, that they'd then turn around and lose four straight.

This season alone we saw two teams, the Los Angeles Lakers and the New Orleans Pelicans, go down 3-0 in the first round of the NBA playoffs. The Lakers wound up finding a way to win Game 4, but then lost on the second crushing Jamal Murray shot of the series. The Pelicans wound up getting swept in Game 4 of their series.

Extending a series is not impossible in the NBA when down 3-0, but finding a way to win four straight has been impossible so far. Will anyone change that in the future? We'll just have to wait and see.