Longest Winning Streak in NBA History

The longest winning streak in NBA history is 33 straight games, set by the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1971-72 season. No team has come within five of it in the half-century since, and the closest total, Golden State’s 28, needed two seasons to reach.

That last point is the one most lists skip. A streak measured across seasons is a different thing from one built inside a single year, and the Lakers’ record is the tallest by either count.

The 1971-72 Lakers: 33 in a row

The streak ran from early November 1971 to January 1972, more than two months without a loss. Led by Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain, that Lakers side turned it into the best season the league had seen: they finished 69-13, then an NBA record for wins, and won the championship in June.

The run ended on January 9, 1972, when the Milwaukee Bucks and a 39-point Kareem Abdul-Jabbar beat them 120-104. It remains the longest winning streak in North American major-league sport, ahead of anything the NFL, MLB or NHL has produced.

Single-season versus across-seasons

The number that sits second on the all-time list, Golden State’s 28, comes with a footnote: it spanned the end of 2014-15 and the start of 2015-16. Split it where the seasons break and neither half beats the Lakers. Within one continuous season, the Warriors’ best was 24, the record for the best start to a year, which the Bucks also ended, on December 1, 2015.

This is why the framing matters. If a streak may cross a summer, you are stitching two teams’ schedules together, sometimes with roster changes in between. The Lakers’ 33 needs none of that stitching. It is the longest inside a single season and the longest overall, which is what makes it the cleanest record in the book.

The longest NBA winning streaks

Here are the longest streaks in league history, with the span noted, because a single-season run and a two-season run are not the same feat.

Team	Season(s)	Wins	Span
Los Angeles Lakers	1971-72	33	Single season
Golden State Warriors	2014-15 to 2015-16	28	Across two seasons
Miami Heat	2012-13	27	Single season
Golden State Warriors	2015-16	24	Single season (season start)
Houston Rockets	2007-08	22	Single season
Milwaukee Bucks	1970-71	20	Single season
Washington Capitols	1947-48 to 1948-49	20	Across two seasons
Atlanta Hawks	2014-15	19	Single season

Filter to single-season streaks only and the order barely changes at the top, but the Warriors’ 28 drops behind the Heat’s 27. The 2012-13 Heat, with LeBron James at his peak, hold the longest single-season streak of the modern era, and still finished six short of the Lakers.

Will the record ever fall?

Thirty-three straight requires two things at once: a genuinely elite team and a schedule that avoids a single off night for two months. The 2015-16 Warriors were arguably the best regular-season team ever, won 73 games, and still only managed 24 in a row. That is the strongest evidence the Lakers’ mark is close to a ceiling.

For the flip side of streaking, see the worst NBA teams ever and their record losing runs, and for the franchises that turned streaks into silverware, our guide to the NBA team with the most championships. The players who drove these runs feature in our ranking of the greatest NBA players. As of 2026 the 33-game streak has survived every super-team the league has produced, and nothing on the current horizon looks built to catch it.