It's been done before, but history isn't on the Celtics' side after losing the first two games at home in the Eastern Conference finals.
The Celtics are in a spot that teams historically have struggled to overcome.
After losing Friday’s Game 2, the Celtics trail the Heat, 0-2, in the Eastern Conference finals. Of the 312 times that a team has gone down 0-2 in a seven-game series in NBA history, the team trailing has comeback to win the series just 27 times (8.7 percent).
Of those 27 teams to complete the comeback, only five of them went down 0-2 while holding home-court advantage in the series.
Narrowing it down it even more, three of those five have happened since the turn of the century. The 2021 Los Angeles Clippers were the last team to comeback from an 0-2 deficit after losing the first two games at home, going down 0-2 to the Dallas Mavericks in the first round before winning in seven.
In fact, one of those five instances involves a few of the main players in this year’s Eastern Conference finals. In the first round of the 2017 NBA playoffs, the Celtics lost their first two games at home and found themselves in an 0-2 hole against the eighth-seeded Chicago Bulls. That Celtics team featured Al Horford in a top role and had a rookie Jaylen Brown and third-year guard Marcus Smart playing off the bench.
The Bulls were led by none other than Jimmy Butler. The Celtics were able to flip the script on Butler’s Bulls, winning the final four games by double digits. Butler struggled in some of those losses, putting up just 14 points in a pair of those games.
Boston will certainly hope history will repeat itself in that regard. There is also precedent of teams coming back from an 0-2 hole and winning a title that season, with nine teams accomplishing that feat in NBA history. The 2021 Milwaukee Bucks were the last team to do that, doing it twice that postseason as they fell in 0-2 holes against the Brooklyn Nets in the Eastern Conference semifinals and the Phoenix Suns in the NBA Finals.
But Milwaukee was on the road for the first two games in both of those series. Of the nine times to come back from an 0-2 deficit and win a title, only one of those teams came back from that deficit after losing two games to begin the series. The one team to do that was the 1994 Houston Rockets, who came back from an 0-2 deficit against the Phoenix Suns in the Western Conference semifinals that season.
The 1969 Los Angeles Lakers are the only other team to make the NBA Finals after going down 0-2 in a playoff series while home-court advantage. They went down 0-2 to the San Francisco Warriors in the Western Division semifinals before two double-digit road wins helped them even the series. They eventually won in six, defeating the Warriors by 40 in Game 6.