Rising Suns???
Just gonna throw this out there …
All 83 times that a team has taken a 3-0 lead in an NBA best-of-seven playoff series, it has gone on to win the series.
But somebody is going to be the first to buck the trend. It happened for the first time in baseball with the Red Sox a few years ago, and inevitably it will happen in basketball, too.
And when would it happen? Most likely with a team that's basically as good as its opponent. That's a rarity in most of the series that started 3-0 -- but not in the Suns-Spurs series. The two teams finished only a game apart in the regular season, the Suns finished ahead in my power rankings, the scoring margin after four games is only five points, and the series would be even if not for the aforementioned Phoenix blunder at the end of Game 1.
I don't want to make too much out of this -- even if you presume the teams are dead-even and give the home team a three-point advantage each night, the fact that the Spurs have two home games in the final three and need to prevail only once adds up to a 94 percent chance they'll win the series. Most likely, San Antonio will be in the conference semifinals.
But this is one of the rare cases in which the team down 3-0 does still have a genuine chance of winning the series.
And if it happened, that would provide the ultimate surprise of this first round.
John Hollinger writes for ESPN Insider. To e-mail him, click here.
