The Greatest NBA Teams Never to Win an NBA Championship! - Updated for the 2007 Playoffs

Attention NBA fans, I have a New Number 1 teams on my list of "The Greatest NBA Teams Never to Win an NBA Championship!"

The 2006/07 Dallas Mavericks - 67-15 Regular Season Record.

I was Shocked, totally Shocked that this Upset happened. I believe that it was the combination of 2 very important occurrences. The first of course being that the Golden State Warriors with Don Nelson coaching were riding a tremendous hot streak entering the playoffs. They had, as I noted in my article on predicting the 2007 playoffs, won 9 of their last 10 games to qualify on the last day of the regular season. Secondly, the were matched against a Dallas Maverick team that they did match up very well with personal wise, plus playing a Maverick team that, for whatever reason had problems this series, playing their free-flowing style of game. Maybe it was simply the match-up of the two teams, or maybe it was Nelson's previous knowledge of the Mav's, most notably the coach Avery Johnson, who was Nelson's assistant when he coached in Dallas and Dirk Nowitzki, the odds-on favorite to win the Leagues MVP award. Or maybe it was simply the pressure of trying to get back to the Finals. For this entire series, with the exception of the end of game 5, Nowitzki just seemed to be totally dis-interested in what was going on, or he was so frustrated in the Warrior's defense on him that it just completely took him out of his game. Lets look at this series. In the 4 Warrior victories, they outscored the Mav's by an average of 15 points (105 to 90) in the 2 Dallas wins the average for Dallas was a 9 point margin (115-106). The Warrior's held the Mavericks to below 40% shooting in 3 of their wins, with Dallas shooting 44% in their game 4 loss.