When the Kansas City Chiefs host Buffalo in Sunday’s AFC Championship Game (5:30 p.m. Eastern, CBS), it will mark their seventh consecutive season among the NFL’s last four teams standing.
How rare is that across all four traditional major sports? Put it this way: Storied franchises such as the New York Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers, Pittsburgh Steelers, Chicago Bulls and Boston Bruins have never done it.
BetMissouri.com, where we eagerly await the launch of Missouri sports betting, wanted to know how many teams have even been among the final four teams in the postseason as many years in a row as the Chiefs. Here’s what we found:
Team (League) | Last 4 Streak (Years) | Titles During Span |
Montreal Canadiens (NHL) | 21 (1949-69) | 10 |
Detroit Red Wings (NHL) | 20 (1939-58) | 5 |
Boston Celtics (NBA) | 13 (1957-69) | 11 |
Chicago Blackhawks (NHL) | 10 (1959-68) | 1 |
Toronto Maple Leafs (NHL) | 9 (1959-67) | 4 |
Los Angeles Lakers (NBA) | 8 (1982-89) | 4 |
Toronto Maple Leafs (NHL) | 8 (1938-45) | 2 |
New England Patriots (NFL) | 8 (2011-18) | 3 |
Kansas City Chiefs (NFL) | 7 (2018-Present) | 3* |
Houston Astros (MLB) | 7 (2017-23) | 2 |
Minneapolis Lakers (NBA) | 7 (1949-55) | 5 |
*With 2024-25 season final result pending
By next season’s NFL playoffs, sportsbooks are set to be up and running in the Show Me State and the best Missouri sportsbook promo codes will be right here at BetMissouri.com.
The Chiefs are two victories from being the first team to win three consecutive Super Bowls. The Packers won the first two Super Bowls, in the 1966 and ’67 seasons, and the NFL title in 1965, the year the Super Bowl began. Green Bay also captured three straight crowns from 1929-31.
The only NFL franchise that has made a conference championship game more years in a row than the Chiefs was New England, which made it to that stage for eight years in a row from the 2011 to 2018 seasons. In fact, their last appearance was the first year of Kansas City’s current streak – the teams met in the 2018 AFC Championship Game, with the Patriots winning 37-31 in overtime.
The Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl odds range from +200 to +225 at various major sportsbooks in neighboring Kansas. The Chiefs are favored by 1.5 or 2 points (again, depending on where you look) for Sunday’s game against the Bills. Folks in Missouri can’t wager legally on the game yet, unless they have accounts set up in a state with legal wagering or go to a retail outlet in those places. Missouri sportsbooks are scheduled to launch late in 2025.
Whether or not the Chiefs make it eight AFC title game appearances in a row next season, our Missouri NFL betting guide will give you the information you need to wager.
On our list of all-time longest streaks of last-four appearances across MLB, NFL, NHL and NBA, you might notice a pattern: There’s a lot of old-time hockey there.
From the 1942-43 season to 1966-67, the National Hockey League only had six teams, called “The Original Six” by hockey fans (not all of them dated to the league’s founding in 1917, and some franchises had folded in the meantime, but the name stuck anyway).
During that quarter of a century, four of the NHL’s six teams made the playoffs each year. In other words, to be among the final (only) four in the postseason, all a team had to do was to be the third-worst club in hockey.
That is not to discredit the team at the top of this list. The Montreal Canadiens made the playoffs 21 years in a row from 1949-69, and never as the No. 4 seed. The Habs qualified with a losing record only once and they won 10 Stanley Cups in that era. The Detroit Red Wings were among the last four teams standing 20 years in a row from 1939 to ’58. Three times at the start of that run, they won a postseason elimination round after finishing fifth out of seven teams. After the 1942 playoffs, the Brooklyn Americans went out of business, reducing the league to six teams and ensuring that any playoff team was automatically among the last four. That setup endured until the NHL expanded to 12 teams in the 1967-68 season.
When Missouri sports betting apps launch in 2025, stick with BetMissouri for more sports betting analysis and reviews of top operators in the state.
USA Today photo by Denny Medley
Author
Jim Tomlin is a contributing editor for BetMissouri.com. Jim brings 30-plus years of experience writing and editing stories about sports, gambling and the intersection of those two industries. He has worked at the Tampa Bay Times, FanRag, Saturday Down South and Saturday Tradition and now lends his expertise to BetMissouri.com, among other sites.
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