Twins, Blackhawks and long playoff losing streaks in sports - ESPN

The Minnesota Twins have finally broken out of their postseason slump.

The team beat the Toronto Blue Jays 3-1 in the wild-card round of the MLB playoffs Tuesday, their first postseason win since 2004. A lengthy drought between wins isn't unusual, but what makes the Twins' run particularly galling is that they lost 18 straight postseason games. That's three straight losses in the 2004 ALDS, four 3-0 sweeps and losses in the 2017 wild-card sudden-death game and the 2020 wild-card round.

It's not the only such streak of playoff futility in American sports, but sadly for Twins fans, it was the longest. In fact, every other MLB team has won at least one playoff game since the Twins' last win, on Oct. 5, 2004. Now that they've finally notched a postseason victory, Twins fans can breathe a sigh of relief — and remember other teams from MLB, the NBA and the NHL who can relate to their struggles.

The latter half of the 1970s wasn't great for Blackhawks fans — though their team kept making the playoffs, they went four full postseasons without a single playoff win. They finally broke that streak with a sweep of the St. Louis Blues in the 1979-80 postseason… and were promptly swept by the Buffalo Sabres in the next round.

The Pistons took the Boston Celtics, who eventually won the title, to six games in the 2007-08 Eastern Conference finals. Unfortunately for them, that's the highest they've climbed since then. They were swept by LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers the next season and again in 2015-16, then fell to the Milwaukee Bucks in 2018-19. A rough decade-and-a-half for Pistons fans, for certain.

Though they made the Stanley Cup Final in 1993, the Kings fell to the Montreal Canadiens 4-1. That seemed to cause them to