The best NBA Finals upsets of all time

The NBA Finals is supposed to go according to script. The best team in the league, loaded with stars, wins the championship. That is how it usually works. The regular season exists to separate the contenders from the pretenders, the playoffs exist to narrow the field further, and by the time two teams are left standing in June, the favorite almost always wins. The history of the Finals is largely a history of dominant teams doing exactly what everyone expected.

But not always. Every so often, a team walks into the Finals as a clear underdog and walks out as champion. Sometimes the upset is mild, a team that was slightly less favored winning a competitive series. Sometimes it is seismic, a group of role players dismantling a roster full of Hall of Famers in a way that nobody saw coming. The upsets on this list range from the surprising to the genuinely shocking, moments that forced the basketball world to reconsider everything it thought it knew about a particular team, a particular era, or the sport itself.

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What separates a real upset from a close series is the gap between expectation and outcome. A seven-game series between two evenly matched teams is drama, not an upset. An upset is when the wrong team wins, when the basketball logic of the moment points clearly in one direction, and history goes the other way entirely. Every entry on this list is that kind of moment. Some of them happened because the favorite fell apart. Others happened because the underdog was better than anyone gave them credit for. All of them are worth revisiting because they are the games and series that remind you why no outcome in sport is ever truly guaranteed.

The Blazers, led by Bill Walton, were a first-time Finals participant, facing a Philly team built around Julius Erving. Portland lost the first two games and then won four straight, with Walton completely taking over the series in the final stretch. It became one of the earliest classic comeback stories in Finals history and announced Walton as one of the truly dominant centers of his generation.

Seattle came into the 1979 Finals having lost to Washington the year before, carrying a year’s worth of motivation into a rematch most people still gave to the Bullets. Gus Williams and Dennis Johnson led the Sonics to a five-game series win and the only championship in franchise history. It is largely forgotten today, but at the time, it was a genuine statement from a team that refused to accept the previous year’s result as the final word.

The Magic had swept their way through the Eastern Conference and arrived in the Finals as the next big thing, with a 23-year-old Shaquille O’Neal facing Hakeem Olajuwon. Houston swept them in four games, with Hakeem averaging 32 points and nine rebounds and making Shaq look like exactly what he was at that point: a phenomenal talent who was not quite ready. It was one of the cleanest veteran-over-prodigy statements the Finals have ever produced.

Dallas led the series two games to none and was nine minutes away from a championship in Game 3 before Dwyane Wade took over entirely. Wade averaged 39 points in the closing four games, and Dallas collapsed as completely as any team has ever collapsed in a Finals. Miami took four straight to win the title in a turnaround that still feels surreal two decades later.

The Suns finished with the best record in the NBA that season and had Devin Booker and Chris Paul operating at peak level, making them heavy favorites heading into the series. Giannis Antetokounmpo responded with one of the greatest individual Finals performances in history, capped by a 50-point, 14-rebound game in the clincher. The Bucks won in six, and Giannis cemented himself as one of the all-time greats in the process.

The Lakers had re-emerged as a championship contender behind Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol, while Boston countered with Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and Ray Allen. The Celtics won in six, and it wasn’t particularly close, with Garnett anchoring a defense the Lakers had no answer for. By the end of the series, it felt less like an upset and more like a correction.

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4. Dallas Mavericks def. Miami Heat, 2011

LeBron James, in his first season with the Heat, surrounded by Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh and a roster built specifically to win multiple championships, arrived as one of the most hyped Finals favorites in years. Dirk Nowitzki made every big shot Dallas needed while LeBron averaged just 17 points on 48 percent shooting, one of the quietest Finals performances of his career. Dallas won in six, and the series became a defining moment in the ongoing debate about LeBron’s legacy.

Golden State had Kevin Durant, Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green, even if Durant and Thompson were both hurt for parts of the series. Kawhi Leonard was so dominant throughout the entire playoffs that calling the result an upset almost feels wrong, but the gap in star power on paper was undeniable. The Raptors won in six to give Canada its first and only NBA championship.

Golden State won 73 games that season, the best record in NBA history at the time, and took a 3-1 series lead against Cleveland. No team had ever come back from 3-1 down in an NBA Finals before, and LeBron and Kyrie Irving proceeded to win three straight anyway. LeBron’s chase-down block on Andre Iguodala in Game 7 remains one of the defining images in Finals history.

1. Detroit Pistons def. Los Angeles Lakers, 2004

The Lakers had Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, Karl Malone, and Gary Payton on one roster and were the heaviest Finals favorites in decades, while Detroit had no superstar and no household name. The Pistons won in five games, holding the Lakers to an average of 88 points per game through sheer defensive discipline and collective basketball. It is the biggest upset in NBA Finals history, and given how rarely teams assemble that kind of star power anymore, it probably always will be.

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