1948–49 Washington Capitols season

The 1948–49 BAA season was the Capitols' third season in the NBA/BAA. They became the first team to win 15 straight games to start the season, which was both a BAA record and then an NBA record at the time, which would since be tied 45 years later by the Houston Rockets in 1993 before Golden State Warriors surpassed it in 2015. The Cleveland Cavaliers would later tie this mark as well in 2024. After ending their previous season with a surprising tiebreaker exit from playoff contention, the Capitols would return to the kind of greatness they had in their first season of play with a 38–22 resulting in them having the best record in the Eastern Division (though not the best overall record this time around), which led to them making it all the way to the 1949 BAA Finals, where they ended up losing to one of the new entrants of the league, the NBL-turned-BAA's Minneapolis Lakers (who were led primarily by superstar center George Mikan), 4–2. With the Capitols later folding on January 9, 1951, they would end up joining the Chicago Stags in 1947 and last season's champions in the original Baltimore BulletsABL/BAA/NBA franchise as the only three BAA/NBA teams to have folded operations after making it to a BAA/NBA Finals championship series.

Following the conclusion of the final BAA season before it merged with the National Basketball League (NBL) to become the NBA, legendary head coach Red Auerbach would quit his role as head coach of the Capitols due to team owner Mike Uline refusing to adhere to Auerbach's demands of having a multi-year contract with the team following Uline's prior problems with multi-year contracts with previous teams he had owned in the past, which led to the Capitols replacing Auerbach with player-coach Bob Feerick as the new head coach of the team for the next season. After briefly being an assistant coach for Duke University, he would return to be the head coach for the Tri-Cities Blackhawks for most of the 1949–50 NBA season before later coaching the Boston Celtics for the rest of his tenure, eventually winning nine NBA Finals championships with them.