Steal A Taco
From 2016 to 2019, Taco Bell had a creative promotion regarding the NBA Finals: if a team wins a road game in the NBA Finals, then everyone in the United States
is entitled to a free Doritos Locos Taco during a certain time period.
That got me to thinking: how many times has a road team not won a game in the NBA Finals? I did some research and found that happened only once! During the 1955 NBA Finals between the Fort Wayne Pistons and Syracuse Nationals,
the home team won all seven games. Interestingly, the Pistons didn't play their home games in Fort Wayne for that series. The officials of the arena where the Pistons played
didn't believe that the Pistons would make it to the NBA Finals and they scheduled a bowling tournament during that time. So, the Pistons played their home
games in Indianapolis! The basketball Nationals (Syracuse) were involved in the only NBA Finals where the road team never won and the baseball Nationals (Washington) were involved in the
only World Series where the
home team never won.
In the final year of the Taco Bell promotion (2019), the first road win in the NBA Finals came when Golden State won in Toronto in Game 2. That was the start of a string of five consecutive wins by
the road team: Toronto won Games 3 and 4 in Oakland, Golden State won Game 5 in Toronto, and Toronto won Game 6 in Oakland. The five-game winning streak by
the road team was the longest such streak in the history of the NBA Finals. (The previous record was four: Games 2-5 of the
1990 NBA Finals and Games 4-7 of the
1974 NBA Finals were won by the road team.)
The Warriors moved permanently to San Francisco after the 2019 NBA Finals so the Warriors lost their final three games in Oakland!
The free taco giveaway was from 2:00 to 6:00 pm on Tuesday, June 18th. That day, I was scheduled to teach a calculus class from 1:00 to 4:30 pm at
Evergreen Valley College (EVC) in San Jose and a statistics class from 4:00 to 6:15 pm at De Anza College in Cupertino. (Unfortunately for me, there was a
slight overlap between the Spring 2019 quarter at De Anza (April 8 - June 28) and the Summer 2019 session at EVC (June 17 - July 25).)
I taught my calculus class at EVC and immediately drove to De Anza to complete my statistics class. (I had a substitute for the first hour of my statistics class.)
Sadly, I was unable to retrieve my free taco!