You’ve heard the cliché: “It’s not over till it’s over.” But in the NBA playoffs, going down 2-0 in a series is pretty much as close as it gets to over… although there are some exceptions for fans to cling onto heading into Game 3.
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Since 1956, 463 playoff series have begun with one team taking a 2–0 lead. In 429 of those, that team finished the job. That’s a 92.7% success rate. Only 34 teams have ever pulled off the comeback, or roughly 7.3% of the time.
It’s rare. But not impossible.
Which NBA teams have come back from 2-0 at home in the playoffs?
The history books do, therefore, hold a few defiant examples. And if you’re wondering how often teams come back after losing both of the first two games at home – the hardest version of this feat – the answer is: just five times in nearly 70 years.
The first to do it was the 1969 Lakers, who bounced back in five games against the Warriors. The next team needed 25 years to repeat it: the 1994 Houston Rockets, who dropped two at home to the Suns but recovered to win in seven… and kept winning until they lifted the NBA title.
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Dallas did it in 2004, Boston in 2017, and the Clippers in 2021, when the road team won the first six games in a surreal back-and-forth with the Mavericks.
What about 2-0 down in the NBA Finals?
If we’re talking about NBA Finals comebacks from 0-2, the list is just as short.
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Only five teams in NBA history have ever done it in the Finals:
- Boston Celtics (1969) – in Bill Russell’s final season, they roared back to beat the Lakers in Game 7.
- Portland Trail Blazers (1977) – down 0-2 to Philly, they won four straight to take the title.
- Miami Heat (2006) – behind Dwyane Wade’s scoring blitz, they took four straight from Dallas.
- Cleveland Cavaliers (2016) – the most famous one. LeBron James helped Cleveland erase a 2-0, then 3-1 deficit against the 73-win Warriors.
- Milwaukee Bucks (2021) – Giannis Antetokounmpo went beast mode to flip the series against the Suns.
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