Game Sevens in the MLB, NBA and NHL

by Jeff Zimmerman on Jun 16, 2009 2:05 AM EDT

I am not a huge hockey fan, but last Friday night I watched the Pens beat the Red Wings for the Stanley Cup. My wife asked why I was watching hockey and I said it was a game 7 and I hadn't seen a game seven in a while. So that got me looking into the number of game sevens in the 3 sports that play a best of 7 series for their finals. Here are the results of the finals since 1947 (which is when baseball, basketball and hockey each played a best of seven series).

	Basketball	Baseball	Hockey
Total Game 7s	16	25	13
Total Percent	25.4%	41.0%	21.0%
Average Length of Series	5.76	5.84	5.42
Average Series Length Last 20 years	5.45	5.3	5.6
Average Series Length Last 10 years	5.4	5.1	6.3
Last time Game 7 Played	2004-2005	2002	2008-2009

Hockey has been averaging between a 6 and 7 game series over the the last ten years, while baseball has just barely averaged over 5 games. These are contradictory to their historic trend where MLB has seen almost twice as many game sevens since 1947 as the NHL. The NBA Finals have maintain a constant ~5.5 game series over the 3 time frames examined.

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