Are NBA Finals Scores More Often Odd or Even? The Surprising Answer
I still remember that sweltering June evening in 2016, crammed into my friend's tiny apartment with seven other basketball fanatics, all of us screaming at the television as Kyrie Irving sank that legendary three-pointer. The final buzzer sounded, the Cavaliers had won 93-89, and amidst the chaos of spilled beer and flying popcorn, my friend Mark—always the statistician even when drunk—slurred, "Another even score! That's the third Finals game this series ending even!" His observation stuck with me long after the celebration died down, planting a seed of curiosity that would eventually lead me down a rabbit hole of NBA statistics. I found myself wondering, are NBA Finals scores more often odd or even? The surprising answer would eventually reveal itself through months of research, but the journey to discover it reminded me strangely of trying to master the mechanics in Donkey Kong Country Returns at my cousin's house last summer.
There's something beautifully frustrating about both basketball analytics and video game mechanics—they appear straightforward on the surface but reveal hidden complexities when you dig deeper. I spent an entire Saturday afternoon at my cousin's, determined to conquer that infuriating volcano level, armed with what I thought was the ultimate advantage: Cranky Kong's shop items. Even if you do make a pit stop at his shop, Cranky's items take some trial and error to learn their intricacies. For example, despite the name, the invincibility item doesn't actually make you invincible—you're still susceptible to spikes, crashes, and falls. The invincibility item effectively just adds five more pips to your health and gives DK a golden sheen, and once those are spent you go back to your regular lifebar. Graciously, this effect lasts through multiple lives, so if you lose one pip during a stage you'll start again with four. But the game doesn't explain that. If you want to be truly invincible, you'll need to own several items, stacking them to have multiple effects at once. Any that you don't use get returned to you so you're not wasting resources experimenting, alleviating some of the irritation of figuring out which items you need to stack to get the effect you want. This process of stacking advantages while understanding their limitations perfectly mirrors how I approached my NBA Finals scoring research—collecting data points, testing hypotheses, and realizing that what appears simple often has layers of complexity beneath.
Armed with coffee and spreadsheet software, I dove into seventy-five years of NBA Finals data, from that first 1947 championship between the Philadelphia Warriors and Chicago Stags to the most recent Denver Nuggets victory. The numbers told a fascinating story—of the 336 Finals games I analyzed (admittedly, my count might be off by a game or two, as tracking down some historical box scores proved challenging), 178 ended with even totals while 158 finished odd. That's approximately 53% even to 47% odd, a slight but persistent bias that held up across decades, rule changes, and scoring revolutions. I expected randomness, but basketball—like Cranky's items—follows its own hidden logic. The two-point field goal, still the most common scoring method in basketball despite the three-point revolution, creates natural even-number clusters. Free throws, typically taken in pairs, reinforce this pattern. Yet sometimes the math gets disrupted—a team fouls intentionally in the final seconds, a last-second three-pointer rattles in, or someone sinks one of two free throws to seal the game. These moments create odd-number outcomes, the statistical equivalent of Donkey Kong unexpectedly losing that final health pip to a stray fireball.
What fascinates me most isn't just the numbers themselves but what they reveal about how we perceive patterns in chaos. We remember the dramatic odd-number finishes—Ray Allen's corner three forcing overtime in Game 6 of 2013, Michael Jordan's "flu game" 90-88 victory—because they feel exceptional. The even-number conclusions, the workmanlike 100-91 victories and methodical 107-97 closers, blend into the background of championship history. I'm personally partial to the odd scores myself—they feel more dramatic, more human, as if the game refused to conform to mathematical expectations. There's a beautiful tension between basketball's structured scoring system and the chaotic human element that occasionally produces those magical odd-number results.
Watching Game 5 of this year's Finals, I found myself unconsciously counting points, tracking the score's journey from even to odd and back again with each possession. When the final total landed at 108-95, another even finish, I smiled—not just because my team won, but because the pattern held. Basketball, like video games, follows rules we can understand and patterns we can trace, even when they surprise us. The answer to whether NBA Finals scores are more often odd or even surprised me not because it upended my expectations, but because it revealed how subtle patterns emerge from apparent randomness. Both in pixelated jungles and professional basketball courts, we're all just stacking our advantages, learning the hidden rules, and occasionally witnessing something that defies the expected patterns.