Back in 2016, the Warriors made history by finishing out a 73-win season. Though they lost in the Finals that same year, that regular-season record went down as the best in NBA history.
Of course, the record they had to beat belonged to the 1995-96 Bulls, who had won 72 games en-route to their fourth Championship win.
Beating that Bulls team in anything is no easy feat and, in fact, had the Bulls “known” the Warriors would win 73 games, current Bulls assistant coach Jim Cleamons says the team would have won even more games.
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Things like that are always easy to say in hindsight. With the documentary out, our minds are still fresh with feelings of awe about that Bulls team.
But going an entire season only losing 10 times is pretty tough — there’s a reason why it has only been done twice in the NBA’s 73-year history. A lot of variables go into winning a basketball game and to be good enough to win 72 of them in a single season is an experience very few teams have ever known.
So could they have actually won a few more games? Those Bulls scored 105.2 points per game and held their opponents to 92.9 points per game — the greatest season margin of victory of all time. Almost all of their ten losses either involved Jordan having a bad shooting night or the other team getting hot from the field and three of those ten losses were within a single possession.
With a few makes or misses in Chicago’s favor, things could have easily gone the other way. Alas, we’ll never truly know.
