82-0 NBA
82-0 is the NBA's impossible line: all 82 regular-season games, none lost. No team has ever done it. Build a five you think could, and the game grades the run against how the league actually behaves.
Why 82-0 is an NBA number
An NBA regular season is 82 games, so a perfect season is 82-0. Other leagues have their own version — the Premier League plays 38, the NFL 17, MLB 162 — but 82-0 is the one people say out loud, because basketball is the sport where a handful of players can carry a whole season, which makes 'could this five go undefeated?' an argument worth having.
It has never happened. The closest anyone came was the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls at 72-10, then the 2015-16 Golden State Warriors at 73-9 — and the Warriors lost the Finals that year, which is part of why the number still gets argued about.
How close has an NBA team actually come?
73-9 is the record. Before that it was 72-10, a mark that stood for twenty years. Go back further and the 1971-72 Lakers won 33 straight inside a 69-13 season — the longest winning streak in the sport, and still nine losses short of perfect.
The gap between 73 wins and 82 sounds small until you remember those nine have to come out of back-to-backs, road trips, injuries, and nights when somebody's bench guard cannot miss. That gap is what this game is about.
Playing the NBA version
You draft five players from across NBA history and the game runs the season. Every pick moves the odds — a lineup stacked with scorers gets punished on the nights it cannot get a stop, and a lineup built for defence has to survive the games it cannot score its way out of.
If you want constraints, there are modes for them: one franchise only, one decade only, no MVPs on the roster, or a cross-era draft where every pick has to come from a different decade.