The Longest NBA Game Ever Played

The longest game in NBA history was a six-overtime epic on January 6, 1951, when the Indianapolis Olympians edged the Rochester Royals 75-73. It is the only game in league history ever to reach six overtimes, and more than 70 years later nothing has come close.

What makes the record even stranger is how few points were scored across all that time. With no shot clock in the early NBA, teams could simply hold the ball once ahead, and both sides did exactly that through the extra periods. Here is the story of the longest game ever played, the full list of the NBA’s longest games by overtime, and how one crawling marathon helped change the sport. All figures are as of the 2025 season.

The record game: Olympians 75, Royals 73

Tied 65-65 after regulation at Rochester’s Edgerton Park Arena, the two teams settled into a war of attrition. Each scored just two points in the first overtime and nothing at all in the second, as both coaches ordered their players to hold the ball and wait for a single good shot. The stalemate dragged on until the sixth overtime, when Indianapolis finally pulled ahead 75-73 to win.

Alex Groza and Ralph Beard led Indianapolis with 17 points each, while Rochester center Arnie Risen top-scored with 26. The plodding, foul-heavy nature of games like this one convinced the league that something had to change, and in 1954 the NBA introduced the 24-second shot clock, ending the era of teams freezing the ball.

The full list of the NBA’s longest games

The table below ranks NBA games by number of overtimes, the truest measure of length.

Rank	Overtimes	Result	Date
1	6	Indianapolis Olympians 75, Rochester Royals 73	Jan 6, 1951
2	5	Milwaukee Bucks 155, Seattle SuperSonics 154	Nov 9, 1989
2	5	Syracuse Nationals 125, Anderson Packers 123	Nov 24, 1949
4	4	Portland Trail Blazers 140, Denver Nuggets 137 (playoffs)	May 3, 2019
4	4	Chicago Bulls 168, Atlanta Hawks 161	Mar 1, 2019
4	4	Atlanta Hawks 142, New York Knicks 139	Jan 29, 2017
4	4	Detroit Pistons 147, Chicago Bulls 144	Dec 18, 2015
4	4	Chicago Bulls 156, Portland Trail Blazers 155	Mar 16, 1984
4	4	Boston Celtics 111, Syracuse Nationals 105 (playoffs)	Mar 21, 1953

One game stands alone at six overtimes, two share second at five, and a cluster of four-overtime games fills out the list across seven decades. The modern entries look nothing like the 1951 grind: with a shot clock in place, they are high-scoring shootouts rather than stalling contests.

The five-overtime games

Only two games have reached five overtimes. The Milwaukee Bucks’ 155-154 win over the Seattle SuperSonics on November 9, 1989, is the highest-scoring overtime game in NBA history, a run-and-gun contrast to the 1951 crawl. Four decades earlier, the Syracuse Nationals beat the Anderson Packers 125-123 in a foul-plagued 1949 game that set the combined-fouls record. Both came within one overtime of the all-time mark. For the scoring side of these marathons, see our leaderboard of the highest-scoring NBA game.

The longest playoff game

The longest playoff game of the modern era came on May 3, 2019, when the Portland Trail Blazers outlasted the Denver Nuggets 140-137 across four overtimes in a Western Conference semifinal. Damian Lillard and Nikola Jokic traded huge individual totals, the kind of night that shows up in our list of the most points in a game in NBA history. Endurance can also mean a long run of results rather than one long night, as in our leaderboard of the most consecutive wins in NBA history.

Why the record matters

The 1951 six-overtime game is remembered less for its quality than for what it forced the NBA to fix. Its stalling tactics exposed a flaw in the sport that the shot clock solved for good, so the longest game ever is also one of the most important in shaping modern basketball. That a low-scoring 75-73 contest could run 78 minutes is exactly why the game looks so different today.

The short version: the longest NBA game ever was the Indianapolis Olympians’ 75-73, six-overtime win over the Rochester Royals in 1951, still the only six-overtime game in history. Two five-overtime games sit behind it, and the four-overtime Blazers-Nuggets 2019 clash is the longest of the playoff era.