It started as a jaw-dropping one-liner from Tom Haberstroh: the NBA’s bottom 10 teams had collectively strung together a 40-game losing streak.
Within a day, Marc Stein updated the number, and made it even louder. Stein wrote that the league’s bottom 10 had now combined to lose 44 games in a row, a figure that captures just how often the same tier of teams is failing to convert winnable nights into wins as the regular season winds down.
The list Stein attached to the update reflected how widespread the slide has become, with losing streaks piling up across the group: Bucks (L4), Bulls (L1), Grizzlies (L2), Mavericks (L4), Pelicans (L2), Jazz (L7), Wizards (L6), Nets (L9), Pacers (L7), Kings (L2).
What makes the number feel less like random variance and more like a symptom is the draft context. As Stein noted, all but New Orleans in that group had control of their own first-round pick this June, meaning the standings pain translates directly into lottery odds and, potentially, franchise-changing outcomes. The race toward the bottom is tightening, and losses are piling up at incredible levels as teams jockey for position and probability.
This is also why the collective streak is such a useful snapshot: it doesn’t require you to accuse any one franchise of intentionally losing. The incentives can shape behavior without anyone ever saying the quiet part out loud. Front offices can prioritize development, sit veterans with “maintenance” logic, shut down injured players earlier than they might otherwise, and cycle through lineups that are more about evaluation than optimization, all while staying within the language of long-term planning.
The result, league-wide, is a familiar late-season ecosystem: “tank-offs” that distort the competitive balance, frustrate opponents fighting for playoff seeding, and create nights where the most predictable outcome is that a bottom-tier team loses again, even if the game is close at halftime.
