Biggest Upset In NBA History?
Mavericks: 67 regular season wins
Warriors: 42 regular season wins
The Mavericks had won the most games in the league and were led by the league’s MVP Dirk Nowitzki. The Warriors, in recent years, had been known more for playing stylish, yet unsuccessful. But Dirk was flustered by Golden State’s physical defense, and former Mavs’ coach Don Nelson, who was coaching the Warriors, used all of his experience to pull off one of the most surprising upsets in NBA history.
It was the first playoff meeting between the Mavericks and the Warriors.
The Warriors qualified for the playoffs for the first time since 1994, the second longest such streak in league history. However, the Warriors were heavy underdogs against the Dallas Mavericks despite sweeping the regular season series between the teams, as Dallas had one of the best records in NBA regular season history. Expectations of a short series were immediately dashed by Golden State’s Game 1 victory in Dallas, behind guard Baron Davis and his rather frantic style of play. The Mavericks came back to win Game 2 to tie the series at 1.
But when the series shifted to Oakland for the next two games, a new X-factor emerged for the Warriors: their home crowd at the Oracle Arena. The electric crowd, which was the highest paid attendance crowd for an NBA game in the history of that arena, gave the Warriors a huge lift as they blew out Dallas in Game 3, and edged out a close victory in Game 4. As the series shifted back to Dallas, the top-ranked Mavericks found themselves one game from seeing their record breaking season end prematurely. The Mavericks gave their all and staved off elimination in Game 5, but had nothing left in Game 6 in Oakland. The Warriors used a third-quarter 18–0 run, sparked by Stephen Jackson’s 13 straight points en route to a franchise playoff record seven 3-pointers, and an unexpected collapse from MVP candidate Dirk Nowitzki (2–13 from the field with 8 points) to finish Dallas and become the first #8 seed to win a best-of-7 series in the first round, and just the third overall in NBA history, following the Denver Nuggets in 1994 and the New York Knicks en route to the 1999 NBA Finals. The Warriors also won their first playoff series since 1991. The Mavericks also became the second team who had a 65+ winning record not to win a championship, the first being the 1972-73 Boston Celtics. To this date, they are the only one being eliminated in the first round.
Both 2006 NBA Finalists (Dallas and Miami) were eliminated in the first round. This was the first time since 1956 that this had happened.
(sources: www.wikipedia.org, www.youtube.com)
