Update: The Cavaliers’ victory over Golden State in the 2016 N.B.A. finals Sunday night ended the drought. Perhaps it’s finally time to scratch Cleveland off the list.



The Cleveland Cavaliers have a chance to end one of the most brutal losing streaks in American sports: their home city’s 50-year major-championship drought. But Cleveland’s fans aren’t the only ones seemingly living under a curse. Here, we rank the 13 worst-suffering sports cities, based on both data and less quantifiable factors, such as the misery of losing on a dubious referee’s call (we’re looking at you, Buffalo) or coaching decision. When the Cavaliers start the N.B.A. finals Thursday night, they’ll be doing so in another city on our list: Oakland.



We’ve come up with a few metrics to measure sports pain. One is the combined number of seasons since a city’s last championship, across the four major sports. Cleveland is now up to an incredible 147 title-less seasons since the Browns’ 1964 N.F.L. championship. Another measure is the percentage of seasons over the last 50 years that have ended with a title. For reference, 10 percent of Boston’s team seasons since 1965 have ended with a title. Most of the 13 cities on this list here don’t clear 2 percent. We also tell you how many close calls — which we define as unsuccessful appearances in a sport’s final four — a city has had. Sorry, Philadelphia.

For each city, we’ve listed a most painful loss, and we want to hear from fans if you think we’ve picked the wrong one. We invite you to tell us, via Facebook or Twitter, what your city’s worst loss of the last 50 years really was and why.

We give more details about our methodology at the bottom of this post. Now onto the Unlucky 13: