The most cursed NBA teams
Every Halloween, NBA fans argue about which franchise the basketball gods have truly forsaken. This is our power ranking of the cursed β measured in decades, droughts, and drafts gone wrong.
What makes a team cursed?
One bad season is luck. A curse is a pattern: decades of futility that survive new owners, new coaches, new arenas, and new stars. The five franchises below didn't just lose β they lost in ways that felt scripted by something with a sick sense of humor.
5. Phoenix Suns β twice at the altar
The Suns reached the 2021 Finals, led Milwaukee 2-0, and lost four straight. Fine β heartbreak happens. Then in 2022 they won 64 games, earned the West's top seed, led Dallas 2-0 in the second roundβ¦ and lost Game 7 at home by 33 points. Two consecutive years, two 2-0 leads vaporized. That is not a slump. That is a hex.
4. Charlotte Hornets β the 7-59 season
Under Michael Jordan's ownership, the 2011-12 Bobcats went 7-59 in the lockout-shortened season β a .106 winning percentage that remains the worst in NBA history. Two decades of ownership produced exactly zero conference finals appearances and a museum of draft misadventures. Charlotte fans don't fear ghosts; they fear lottery night.
3. LA Clippers β the collapse artists
Half a century without a conference finals appearance, and when the end of the drought finally arrived β up 3-1 on Denver in the 2020 bubble, one win from the all-LA Conference Finals β the Clippers lost three straight, including a Game 7 they led by double digits. The Lob City years before that ended with Chris Paul and Blake Griffin injured in the same playoff series. The franchise's highlight reel is basically a horror film.
2. Sacramento Kings β sixteen seasons in the fog
From 2006 to 2023 the Kings missed the playoffs sixteen consecutive seasons β the longest drought in NBA history. Along the way they nearly lost the team entirely in the Seattle relocation saga of 2013, then drafted Marvin Bagley III one spot ahead of Luka DonΔiΔ in 2018. A cursed team doesn't just lose games; it loses the parallel universe where everything went right.
1. New York Knicks β fifty years of waiting
The mecca of basketball hasn't won a championship since 1973. In that time the franchise has burned through eras of dysfunction that other fanbases could not imagine: the Isiah Thomas front office, the Carmelo-era roster math, a decade of coaching carousel. New York's curse is the loudest in the league because the market never lets anyone forget it.
Honorable mentions
- The Process Sixers β years of intentional losing that produced one MVP but far more scars.
- The 73-win Warriors β the greatest regular season ever, crowned by the only 3-1 Finals collapse in history. A cursed night, not a cursed franchise.
- Seattle β not cursed but vanished: the 1979 champion SuperSonics left for Oklahoma City in 2008, and their ghost still haunts the league.
Want the haunted-hotel side of NBA horror? Read NBA Ghost Stories: the haunted Skirvin Hotel next β Derrick Rose once fled his own room there.