2024 NBA Playoffs: Why is it called a sweep when a team beats its oponent 4-0?
The Denver Nuggets are back in Los Angeles tonight with a chance to sweep LeBron James and the Lakers in Game 4 for the second straight year.
Whether we’re talking about baseball, basketball, hockey or even football, it’s the thing that no team wants to experience. Yet, just what is a ‘sweep’ in sports and where does the term come from? Let’s take a look.
Nuggets up 3-0 in LA
The Denver Nuggets are in LA for Game 4 of the first round of the playoffs, and have a chance to sweep the Los Angeles Lakers for a second straight year. Last year, Nikola Jokic and the Nuggets wiped out the Lakers in four games to advance from the Conference Finals to the NBA Finals. Tonight, history has a chance of repeating itself. Denver has taken care of business through the first three games of the series, winning both of the opening two games at home and dropping the Lakers in LA for their 10th straight win since the end of 2022. If the Nuggets win Game 4, LA will be the first eliminated team in the 2024 playoffs, and it could mean the end of the LeBron James era in the City of Angels.
The origin of the term “sweep”
As you probably know most North American sports use the best of seven format to determine the victor when it comes to the playoff end of their yearly campaigns. Whether we’re talking the MLB, NHL or the NBA - the NFL just has a straight knock out format - the principle is the same: win four games and you advance or become champion. Needless to say, if you manage to win four consecutive games without taking a loss, that’s both a serious affirmation of your team as the better of the two and an even more severe condemnation of the opponent as inferior.
Yet, where does this term come from? Simply, the term stems from the figurative language of “cleaning out” or rather “to make a clean sweep” of something. Quite literally, when one sweeps a surface, the dust/dirt is moved in the direction that you sweep in. Between the momentum of your sweeping action and the whiskers of the broom, the dust goes where you want it to. That’s to say, it’s an action which is completely dominant in nature as it leaves the dust with no option but to be moved. Similarly, when it comes to sports, that’s essentially what one team does when they “sweep” the other. They “never missed a spot” and therefore fully cleaned the floor. So, to be clear, to sweep a team is two win a series against them without losing one game. The first sweep in the NBA occurred in the finals of 1949, when the Boston Celtics swept the then Minneapolis Lakers to win their second title.