NBA FINALS PREVIEW

THE NBA FINALS, WHICH START WEDNESDAY, WILL BE A WHOLE NEW WORLD FOR MANY KNICKS AND SPURS

SAN ANTONIO (AP) — For a few hours on Tuesday, the San Antonio Spurs and New York Knicks held practices on a floor that had the NBA Finals logo painted at midcourt. They did interviews with the logo as a backdrop. They saw finals mentions basically everywhere they looked.

It might have seemed normal. It wasn’t.

This stage — the NBA Finals — is new to just about everyone on the Spurs and Knicks rosters, meaning very few players on either side can have any real idea of how the moment will seem on Wednesday night when the 80th title series in league history gets underway in San Antonio.

They have two big things in common: It’s going to be new, and it took them all forever to get here.

“Falling in love with basketball happened really early on in my life,” San Antonio star Victor Wembanyama said. “I mean, I have pictures of myself with a basketball at an age where I was not even old enough to have memories.”

More memories will be made over the next four to seven games, without question. The Spurs are seeking their sixth title and first since 2014; the Knicks are seeking their third title and first since 1973.

It’s a matchup that could have been dreamed up in board rooms: New York is the capital of the world, the Knicks are an iconic brand, the Spurs are a proven championship franchise and their best player happens to be a 7-foot-4 Frenchman who already has an enormous global following.

“The best player in the world,” Spurs guard Stephon Castle said of Wembanyama.

Knicks guard Jalen Brunson — the MVP of the Eastern Conference finals — had nothing but the highest of praise to offer to Wembanyama, the MVP of the Western Conference finals.

“Watching him as a player, it’s pretty unbelievable,” Brunson said Tuesday. “The things he’s able to do on both sides of the ball, people have never really seen before from a person of his size. So, it’s incredible to watch. … He’s pretty incredible.”

The Spurs got to the NBA Finals by winning 62 games in the regular season, getting past Portland in Round 1, Minnesota in Round 2, then going the distance in a seven-game classic that ended the reign of Oklahoma City as NBA champions.

The Knicks got here on the strength of an 11-game playoff winning streak — the last three of Round 1 against Atlanta, then sweeping Philadelphia and Cleveland. And the winning margin over those 11 games is like none other in any 11-game stretch in the NBA’s 80-year history.

“It’s a great team,” Wembanyama said. “It’s a great team of experienced guys who are not here by chance, but by relentless effort over the years. Very different career paths for all of them. They’re right where they’re supposed to be, in my opinion.”

The only players in this series who have started finals games in the past are the Spurs’ Harrison Barnes (for Golden State) and the Knicks’ Mikal Bridges (for Phoenix). Barnes typically doesn’t start for San Antonio, Bridges typically does for the Knicks, and that means nine of the 10 starters in Game 1 will be in unfamiliar territory.

“When you can prepare the right way, when you do your routines, you treat it like a normal game, it allows you to be as normal as possible,” Brunson said.

There are ties that players have to Finals past, even without playing in them. Spurs guard Dylan Harper’s dad is Ron Harper, a five-time NBA champion as a player. Brunson’s father — Knicks assistant Rick Brunson — played for New York in the 1999 finals, and Knicks guard Jordan Clarkson got birds-eye view of past Spurs championship parades. He grew up in San Antonio and his stepmother worked at a hotel that had a prime view of the parade route.

“Being able to take pictures and run up on players for autographs, I was definitely that kid,” said Clarkson, whose father used to detail cars owned by some Spurs players. “Seeing this energy and seeing how alive the city comes when the Spurs are in the finals and winning championships, it’s a great experience.”

When it’s all over, a new champ will be crowned. That team will be the NBA’s eighth different winning franchise in the last eight years — continuing a run like none other in league history. The Spurs are favored, and the Knicks don’t mind the underdog role.

“We’re here now, so there’s nothing more for us to say or talk about or to think,” Spurs guard Devin Vassell said. “We’re just going to keep doing what we’re doing and that’s been successful for us.”

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WHAT TO EXPECT FROM SPURS VS. KNICKS 2026 NBA FINALS MATCHUP

Welcome to the 2026 NBA Finals, a series that ultimately should determine an ending or a beginning — the end of the New York Knicks’ 53-year championship dry spell, or the possible launch of the second San Antonio Spurs dynasty.

There’s obviously much urgency and anxiety in New York, where an entire generation of fans have no idea what it’s like to witness a blue-and-orange ticker-tape parade down Broadway. There’s great anticipation that change is approaching, because the Knicks have won 11 straight postseason games and are peaking at the absolute right time.

There’s much to like and admire about these Knicks. First of all, they play with such precision and good knowledge of one another, they’re tough but not flagrant. Also, they’re easy to embrace; the personalities of the players are infectious and they’re taking this journey in stride.

Their coach, Mike Brown, was fired four times before he took the New York job last summer and is an underdog. Much like his players, Brown doesn’t seem to sweat much.

The Spurs are young and hungry and obviously shattered the timetable given to them in terms of being a title contender. That’s probably wise, because in the NBA, tomorrow can never be taken for granted — even by a team featuring 22-year-old Victor Wembanyama, who is quickly developing into a generational force at both ends.

These teams met last December for the Emirates NBA Cup 2025 championship, won by the Knicks, yet each team will admit that was so long ago. Much has changed, for the better in each case. The Knicks have found their higher gear while the Spurs, fresh off erasing the defending champion Thunder, are bringing swaggy confidence.

One team is led by a 7-foot-4 alien, the other by a 6-foot-2 magician. Quite a contrast, which means the Spurs and Knicks might engage in a heck of a series.

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SPURS NOT LETTING LACK OF EXPERIENCE HOLD THEM BACK

SAN ANTONIO – San Antonio Spurs coach Mitch Johnson has given the age-inexperience topic considerable thought.

“Not to get into a rabbit hole,” Johnson began when asked Tuesday at NBA Finals Media Day about the Spurs’ youth.

But that’s exactly where Johnson went. It’s clear he had been there before. He had to.

It was imperative for him, considering his star player, Victor Wembanyama, is 22 years old, and other key players are 25 or younger, including Dylan Harper, 20; Carter Bryant, 20; Stephon Castle, 21; Julian Champagnie, 24; and Devin Vassell, 25.

Johnson wanted to make sure his team didn’t buy into the notion that it wasn’t ready for a deep playoff run or that, because most of its key rotation players had never appeared in a playoff game before this season, it lacked the experience necessary to win a championship.

Don’t let that be a reason for not doing something special.

The Spurs are the second-youngest team to reach the NBA Finals in the shot-clock era at an average age of 25.06 (average age weighted by playing time). That is just slightly older than the 1976-77 Portland Trail Blazers (25.03) and a half-year younger than the 2024-25 Oklahoma City Thunder.

A rabbit hole is a place to ferret out the truth. So he began explaining.

“I do think experience matters,” Johnson said Tuesday, a day before Game 1 of the NBA Finals against the New York Knicks. “I just think a lot of times we use the term ‘anticipated’ or ‘expecting’ not necessarily knowing how it’s going to be used. I draw upon a ton of experiences, not as a head coach in the NBA, but I’ve been around the game of basketball for 30-plus years.

“There’s a lot of things we talk about every single day more than experience.”

Why belabor that fact when there’s nothing you can do about it? From the start of training camp this season through Monday, Johnson said, “If we kept track of the amount of times we talked about – again I’ve said this, not to be redundant – habits, consistency, execution, fundamentals, attention to details, style of play, brand of basketball, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera … we’ve said all those words 100 times more than the word experience.

“It allowed us to anchor to those things when we have adversity or success or instability or different things that you go through that you can’t always control, you tend to anchor to something.”

Guard De’Aaron Fox was the only Spurs rotation player who had Game 7 experience prior to Game 7 of the Western Conference Finals against the Oklahoma City Thunder, a team that won two Game 7s in last season’s playoffs.

What role did playoff and Game 7 experience play in that game?

“It’s important to a certain extent, but like I said before, we have talent, we have dogs and we’re like, ‘at the end of the day, you got to roll the ball out there and you got to beat us four times,’ and that’s just the way that we approach it,” Fox said.

Throughout the season and playoffs, the Spurs have refused to use inexperience as an excuse, and what they accomplished during the season helped them see what was possible despite their age. They won 62 regular-season games, reached the NBA Cup Final, had two winning streaks of 11 games, excelled in the Western Conference Finals, beating the defending champion Thunder to reach the Finals.

The Spurs don’t believe it’s necessary to conform to a traditional notion of what a championship team looks like in order to win title. They have a season’s worth of evidence to support their claim.

“I don’t think that was ever a problem for us,” Spurs guard Stephon Castle said. “For us, that was all outside noise. In-house, we have nothing but confidence in each other. We take it game by game, try to walk this thing down. We got to this point, so …”

When you can’t lean on experience, you dig into the strengths you possess.

“Our consistency and togetherness just screamed great habits throughout our locker room,” Castle said. “With our leader being Vic, with how good he is, with how young he is, for him to not have any ego, it just fed great energy throughout our locker room.

“Especially early to start this year in January, went on that long run where we won I don’t know how many games in a row. Just that kind of confidence and that kind of groove coming into the playoffs is what you want. We hit our stride at the right time.

“Yeah, also we have the best player in the world on our team.”

Wembanyama, Castle, Harper, Bryant, Vassell and Champagnie on the NBA’s biggest stage trying to prove that youth is not wasted on the young.

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