2004-2005 NBA Champions - San Antonio Spurs

The 2026 NBA Finals was the championship series of the National Basketball Association's (NBA) 2025–26 season and conclusion to the season's playoffs. The best-of-seven series ended when the Eastern Conference champion New York Knicks defeated the Western Conference champion San Antonio Spurs, four games to one. It was the Knicks' third NBA championship, and their first since 1973. The series ran from June 3 to June 13, 2026. New York's Jalen Brunson was named NBA Finals Most Valuable Player (MVP) for his performance, where in game 5 he recorded 45 points, tying an NBA Finals record with Michael Jordan for the most points scored on the road in a series-clinching game. The series was a rematch of the 1999 NBA Finals, which the Spurs won in five games, and of the 2025 NBA Cup championship game, which the Knicks won 124–113. It was the first NBA Finals to feature the finalist teams of the three-year-old NBA Cup. It was the NBA's eighth consecutive year with a unique champion, the longest such stretch in league history. New York won the first two games, a first in the Finals for the team. San Antonio won game 3 after the Knicks missed their final three-point attempt. In game 4, the Knicks rallied from 29 points down in the third quarter, and OG Anunoby won the game with a tip-in with 1.2 seconds remaining. The Knicks won game 5 by four points to clinch their first title since 1973. This was the first NBA Finals since 1995 in which a team won two straight road games to open the series; it was the first since 1993 in which the road team won the first three games. Game 4 saw the Spurs obtain the largest halftime lead of any visiting team in Finals history, then saw the Knicks overcome the largest deficit in Finals history to win. It was the first Finals series since 1975 in which multiple games were won by a single point. It was the first Finals ever in which the teams were within five points of each other in the final five minutes of each game. The average margin of victory was just four points. The Spurs built double-digit leads in all of these games, but lost four of them. Several media outlets called the series the best of the decade and the best five-game series of all time. It was the most-watched NBA Finals since 1998, with an average of 20.6 million viewers per game. This was also the first championship won by a New York City-based team in one of the four major sports leagues since the New York Giants won Super Bowl XLVI in February 2012.