1998 NBA Finals: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 42
My current favorite NBA team is the Golden State Warriors and my current favorite NBA player is Lebron James. The Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers (James' previous team) recently played each other in
four consecutive NBA Finals. I was pleased when the Warriors won three times, but I wasn't entirely heartbroken
when James led the Cavaliers to victory in the 2016 NBA Finals.
The string of consecutive Warriors-Cavaliers Finals ended five years ago (2019) when the Warriors lost to the Toronto Raptors. The Warriors
lost all three of their home games in that series.
The Warriors weren't always my favorite team and James wasn't always my favorite player. I started following the NBA during the 1992-1993 season. The Chicago Bulls
had won the previous two championships and their leader Michael Jordan was considered to be the best player in the NBA. The Warriors was a losing team that year (34-48) and their best player (Chris Mullin) was nowhere near as
great as Jordan.
So, my favorite team at the time was the Bulls and my favorite player was Jordan. The Bulls won their third consecutive championship when
they defeated the Phoenix Suns in the 1993 NBA Finals. Like the 2019 Warriors, the Suns lost all three of their home games in the Finals. The Bulls
started
and ended their first "three-peat" by winning three road games in the NBA Finals.
Jordan continued to be my favorite player for the remainder of his career with the Bulls. His last game with the Bulls was Game 6 of the 1998 NBA Finals
against the Utah Jazz. The Bulls were up 3-2 in the series going into that game. After stealing the ball from Jazz forward Karl Malone late in the game, Jordan hit
the game-winning shot with 5.2 seconds left in Game 6 to
win the series for the Bulls. That shot is widely considered to be the greatest moment
in NBA history.
As mentioned, the 1998 NBA Finals lasted six games and there were many close games throughout the series. There was a game with a one-point differential (Game 6), a
two-point differential (Game 5), a three-point differential (Game 1), a four-point
differential (Game 4), and a five-point differential (Game 2).
One of the six games has not been accounted for: Game 3. What was the point
differential in that game? It was not 6, but a large multiple of 6: 42!! There have been over 400 games in NBA
Finals history and that's the
largest point differential! The Jazz lost 96-54. The 54 points are the NBA record
for the fewest points in a playoff game. Only Malone, Shannon Anderson, and Adam Keefe shot well for
the Jazz in that game: they scored 34 points on 13 of 19 shooting (68.4%). The remaining nine Jazz players
scored 20 points on 8 of 51 shooting (15.7%).
In summary, here were the point differentials for the six games of the 1998 NBA Finals: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 42 (!!).
The point differential for Game 3 was nearly three times the sum of the point differentials for the other five
games!
Largely because of Jordan's popularity, the 1998 NBA Finals happened to be the
highest rated and
most watched NBA Finals series in the United States. The series had an average television rating of 18.7. The 2019 NBA Finals that I mentioned earlier had
an average television rating of 8.8, less than half that of the 1998 NBA Finals.