Across two leagues and two very different sports, five teams currently share a quiet, statistical humiliation: they are losing more than they should be. The Brooklyn Nets, Sacramento Kings, New York Mets, Washington Wizards, and Los Angeles Angels all sit at or near the bottom of our cross-sport CURSD Luck Score rankings, a system that measures the gap between a team's actual results and what their underlying performance metrics say those results should be. Their records are ugly. Their underlying numbers are merely bad. That distinction matters.
The gap between "bad" and "historically unlucky" is where these five teams live.
1. Brooklyn Nets - NBA
The Nets finished 20-62. That is, by any reasonable standard, a brutal season. But Pythagorean expectation, which projects wins based on points scored and allowed, pegs Brooklyn closer to 26 wins. Six games doesn't sound like much until you remember that six wins is the difference between the league's worst record and something merely forgettable.
Brooklyn's CURSD Luck Index of -59 is the lowest figure in our current cross-sport model. The Nets were outscored on the season in ways consistent with a terrible team, yes, but they also lost a disproportionate number of close games. Their record in contests decided by five points or fewer was genuinely grim, the kind of coin-flip variance that compounds over 82 games into something that looks, from the outside, like organizational failure. Some of it was. Not all of it.
2. Sacramento Kings - NBA
Sacramento's 22-60 finish carried a cursed luck score of -56, just behind Brooklyn. Their Pythagorean projection also lands at roughly 26 wins, meaning the Kings and Nets were functionally similar teams who happened to finish with different shades of awful.
The Kings' case is interesting because their point differential, while deeply negative, contained stretches of competence that never translated into wins. Sacramento's offense had nights where it looked like a team capable of stealing games. It just didn't steal them. Over a full season, that pattern left four wins on the table, a gap that doesn't change the playoff picture but does change how you evaluate the roster heading into the offseason.
3. New York Mets - MLB
The Mets sit 34-43 at the midpoint of their season, one game south of their Pythagorean expectation of roughly 35 wins. That one-game gap sounds trivial. Their Luck Index of -53 is not.
The luckscore model accounts for more than just run differential. Sequencing, leverage, and bullpen timing all feed into the number, and the Mets have been on the wrong side of all three. They have scored enough runs and allowed few enough runs to be a .455 team. They are instead a .442 team. In a sport where the margin between contention and irrelevance is often three or four games in the standings, the Mets' inability to convert competitive underlying numbers into actual wins could define their July trade deadline posture.
4. Washington Wizards - NBA
Washington went 17-65. Pythagorean expectation says roughly 23 wins. That is a six-win gap, identical to Brooklyn's, on a team that won even fewer games. The Wizards' Luck Index of -49 reflects a squad that was genuinely one of the league's worst but still managed to underperform its own low floor.
Six phantom wins would not have saved Washington's season. They would, however, have spared them the indignity of finishing with the fourth-worst record in NBA history while playing like merely the eighth-worst team.
5. Los Angeles Angels - MLB
The Angels are 32-47, four wins below a Pythagorean projection of roughly 36. Their Luck Index of -37 is the mildest on this list, which is a relative term. Los Angeles has been outperformed by its own run differential for weeks, a pattern driven largely by lopsided losses inflating their runs-allowed column while close defeats suppress their win total.
The Angels are not good. They are, however, less bad than they appear.
What connects these five teams is not talent or geography or coaching. It is finishing variance, the tendency to lose the games that could go either way. Pythagorean models assume that run and point differentials distribute somewhat evenly across a schedule. For these five clubs, they did not. The underlying numbers say all five deserved better. The standings, as always, don't care.
