NBA basketball is a zero-sum operation, which means there's only ever one true winner at the end of each season.
That's not quite the same as saying just one team deserved to win.
Every year, happenstance, injury, bad matchups, rotten timing and a litany of other factors influence the results. Sometimes, the team left standing gets universal recognition as the worthiest champ. But not always.
Most organizations have one title that got away.
We'll confine this study to the three-point era, which began in 1979-80, and we'll have to exclude a handful of franchises that never got close enough to a title to say they "should have" won anything.