82-0 Hockey
Almost every sport has to convert 82-0 into its own number. Hockey does not. The NHL regular season is also 82 games, which makes 82-0 literally correct for hockey as well as basketball — and it has never happened in either.
The coincidence that makes 82-0 work twice
The NHL has played an 82-game regular season since 1995-96, the same length as the NBA's. So when a hockey fan searches 82-0, no translation is needed: 82 games, 82 wins, zero losses, exactly as written. Every other sport needs its number changed — the Premier League to 38, the NFL to 17, MLB to 162.
Hockey adds a wrinkle basketball does not have, which is that the league spent decades recording ties and now records overtime losses in a separate column. A perfect hockey season is not simply 82-0 the way a basketball one is; it means never losing in regulation, in overtime, or in a shootout, across a schedule as long as the NBA's.
The NBA and NHL arriving at the same number was not coordinated. Basketball settled on 82 in 1967-68; hockey settled there in 1995-96 after decades of shorter schedules. Two leagues with different histories, different arena economics and different travel demands landed on the same figure, which is why 82-0 is the rare perfect-season phrase that does double duty.
How close the NHL has come
The best regular season in NHL history belongs to the 1976-77 Montreal Canadiens, who went 60-8-12 for 132 points — eight losses across the whole year, from a team that then won the Stanley Cup. That is hockey's equivalent of 73-9, and it is still a long way from 82-0.
The longest unbeaten run belongs to the 1979-80 Philadelphia Flyers, who went 35 games without a loss at 25-0-10. It remains the longest unbeaten streak in major North American professional sport, and it still covers a little under half a season. Nobody has come close to the whole thing.
Goaltending is the reason hockey's numbers look the way they do. A single hot goalie can steal a game from a clearly better team in a way that has no real basketball equivalent, and that possibility is present in all 82 games. Perfection would need the other team's best night never to arrive, eighty-two times running.
Playing 82-0 here
This page runs the basketball version: you draft five players from across NBA history and the engine plays all 82 games, weighting each pick by how those players actually performed rather than by reputation. The NBA has never managed 82-0 either — the record is 73-9 by the 2015-16 Warriors, ahead of the 1995-96 Bulls at 72-10.
If you want the hockey framing specifically, the site has a dedicated 82-0 NHL page covering the same 82-game season from the hockey side. And if you are here because you like the format rather than the sport, the same game exists at 38-0 for Premier League soccer, 20-0 for a perfect NFL run and 162-0 for a baseball season.
Either way the underlying idea is the same across every version on the site: real players, a real schedule length, and a simulation that decides whether your picks survive it. Only the sport and the number change.