Greatest non-Finals teams to never win the NBA title this century
5. 1999-00 Portland Trail Blazers
The turn-of-the-century Portland Trail Blazers were no superteam. A collection of above-average talent, they possessed five double-digit scorers, pushing their offense to No. 2 in the league along with a top-10 defense.
Diametrically opposite the Blazers was a Los Angeles Lakers team led by the captivating duo of Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. They only had three scorers in double figures. Two of them ranked inside the top-12 in scoring on the year, driving them to a league-best net rating 2.1 points better than the second-place Blazers.
Portland won 59 games, second-most in the league. LA’s top-level talent put them shoulders above the rest of the league with eight more wins than the Blazers during the regular season.
When the two met in the Western Conference Finals, it was your classic mismatch of star power that would presumably give the Lakers the edge. Through five games, that proved to be the case as LA took a 3-1 series led.
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With little at stake, the Blazers fought back enough to force a Game 7, even building a lead as high as 15 in the fourth quarter.
The script wasn’t supposed to be written this way, and yet there it was playing out before a stunned Staples Center crowd. The pieced-together underdogs were halting LA’s dynamic twosome, on the verge of taking out the NBA’s goliath expected to easily win the title.
What happened in the final frame remains one of the more captivating examples of potential big-market bias from the NBA.
An 18-4 free-throw disparity went in favor of LA — they were a +21 in free-throws throughout the game. Scottie Pippen and Arvydas Sabonis, the primary defenders in the middle of a masterful shut down of both Kobe and Shaq, picked up three fouls each to send themselves to the bench.
Both factors helped the Lakers to a 31-19 fourth-quarter edge to earn a five-point win that led to the first of three titles.
A 15-point lead is a 15-point lead. To this day, fans of that Blazers team will still tell you the chance to have a Los Angeles-based team in the Finals was too enticing for the league not to intervene. Much to the detriment of what could’ve been one of the more surprising championship runs in NBA history.