In the last blog we went down memory lane on the football field and chatted about four impressive comebacks. Football isn’t the only sport with some hard to believe comebacks. Both the NBA and College Basketball leagues have produced some barnstorming results. Here are a few to demonstrate why your half time head to head bet is never a lock.

Utah Jazz vs. Denver Nuggets, November 27th, 1996: The Jazz were cruising along early in the NBA 96-97 season and were on a seven game win streak leading up to them hosting the Nuggets. Were they complacent? Who knows, but they did find themselves down by 34 points at the halftime point. That quickly extended to 36 in the third quarter.

Whatever was said or taken at half point had some effect though with the mailman Karl Malone starting to swing the momentum back into the favor of the Jazz. By the end of the third quarter they’d closed the gap to 13 points at 72-85. That was enough to scare the Nuggets and they couldn’t keep their composure with Karl Malone draining a game high of 31 points and Jeff Hornacek 29 for a final score of 107-103 to the Jazz for their eighth successive win.

Golden State Warriors vs. Boston Celtics, March 1st, 2015: In today’s NBA scene who would you want in your team to help orchestrate a massive comeback? Stephen Curry is up there of course. Deep in the 2015 season Curry’s GSW found themselves 26 points down early in the second quarter. That’s a massive deficit so early in the game, but as Celtics coach said, “Twenty-whatever we were up in the first half felt like three to me”. That’s how good this team was.

By halftime they had cut the deficit to a very manageable 16 points. Curry scored 7 of 9 consecutive points early in the third to make the game three scoring plays difference and it was all on from there. The result was still in the balance with less than 12 seconds to go, but GSW were poised and secured a  106-101 victory with Curry scoring 37.

What did Steve Kerr, coach of the NBA leading team say about the victor? “This was a fun challenge for us”. It pays to be good.

Nevada vs. New Mexico, January 8th, 2017: With 67 seconds to go and 14 points down (90-76), Nevada had resigned themselves to losing having pulled their top scorer from court a couple minutes earlier.

What happened next was a whirlwind. Nevada were taking every opportunity to foul the New Mexico players to maximize the clock time. New Mexico were fouled five times making only 4 of 10 free throws. That would normally be enough to close out the game still but Nevada were nailing three pointers in their possession and with lead point scorer Marcus Marshall back on court they nailed six three pointers to send the game into overtime.

Nevada were down 104-102 with eight seconds on the clock this time. However they were never going to give up and when Jordan Caroline drained a 3-pointer the fat lady could finally sing.
Gosh sport is good, isn’t it?