01 / THE QUESTION
The question
The Celtics won 64 regular-season games in 2023–24. Raw wins are awkward to compare across these champions because the 2019–20 Lakers played 71 games and the 2020–21 Bucks played 72. I compared win percentage instead: wins divided by games played.
02 / THE EVIDENCE
Bars start at zero and use a common 0–100% scale. Percentages are calculated from each team’s regular-season wins and losses, then rounded to one decimal place.
03 / THE METHOD
The SQL method
I kept one row per championship team, with its season, wins, and losses. The query calculates the same measure shown above and sorts the results. The public sample ↗ runs this query against a five-row CSV in an in-memory SQLite database.
SELECT team_name, year,
wins, losses,
ROUND(
100.0 * wins /
(wins + losses), 1
) AS win_pct
FROM championship_teams
ORDER BY win_pct DESC,
year DESC;Season records: Celtics, Lakers, Nuggets, Warriors, and Bucks (NBA).
04 / THE TAKEAWAY
The takeaway
Boston had the highest regular-season win rate in this five-champion sample: 78.0%, compared with 73.2% for the next team, the 2020 Lakers. That is a descriptive result about these five seasons. The sample contains only champions, so it cannot establish what predicts a title or which team was strongest across eras.