The New York Knicks and San Antonio Spurs are all set to match up in the 2026 NBA Finals. It'll be a repeat of December's NBA Cup Championship, with the Knicks hoping they can produce a repeat of their winning results in Las Vegas.
The first two In-Season Tournament winners failed to win playoff series, but New York defied that trend by going on to win three. And several players on San Antonio's roster, in the wake of their Western Conference Finals victory over the Oklahoma City Thunder, were seen immediately discussing the Finals as an opportunity for Cup revenge.
Knicks and Spurs prove NBA Cup isn't cursed, it's just a mirror
It's important to look in the mirror. It's no guarantee, however, that you'll like what you see. Showing a willingness to accept that data, and a desire to use it to grow, is a winning trait in life — regardless of any round orange objects.
The NBA Cup has presented as a mirror, of sorts, throughout its short existence thus far. Teams have been successful in small sample sizes, but have allowed those victories to fuel complacency instead of positioning them to inform improvement. Neither the Knicks, nor the Spurs, allowed that to happen this season.
New York and San Antonio are arguably the two NBA teams that have changed their styles of play most from the start of the season to now. It's practically ironic that each squad emerged in December as the best their conference had to offer in the NBA Cup, and that both went on to undergo such drastic changes.
For the Spurs, that change mostly showed with the development of key young players like Victor Wembanyama and Dylan Harper. For the Knicks, however, it manifested in the deployment of their star talent, highlighted by revelations such as Karl-Anthony Towns' newfound playmaking prowess at 30 years old.
Either way, both of these teams proved important points over the remainder of the season. While their NBA Cup success certainly wasn't anything to be ashamed of, it was best served for these teams as information that could guide them to reaching their true ceilings (and even blowing past them).
Adam Mares and Marc Stein recently theorized on Monday's ALL-NBA Podcast livestream that the NBA's top brass is likely ecstatic about the Cup Championship repeat happening on the league's biggest stage. While the duo are likely correct, there are still 28 franchises out there that could see this as a lesson, instead of just a marketing opportunity for the league, going forward.
In short: take every game seriously.
You never know when the experience could wind up helping you. For the Knicks and Spurs, that'll apply quite literally as they'll each bring 48 additional minutes of experience matching up against each other to the table.
Only one squad has a "double agent" in Knicks buyout signing Jeremy Sochan, though.
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