NBA 2026: San Antonio's First Title and the Trap of a Shortened Season

With 47 seconds left in Game 5, Avery Johnson caught the ball on the left wing, took a step back and shot. The ball cleared Latrell Sprewell's reach, brushed the rim and dropped through. San Antonio Spurs led 78-77. On the night of 25 June 2026 at Madison Square Garden, that score never changed again, and the Spurs stood on top of the NBA for the first time in the franchise's 32-year history.

The man who made that decisive shot was 34 years old. He had been cut by six NBA teams, had survived on short contracts in lower leagues, had played in competitions people only take part in for fun. All season long, Johnson was the man who set San Antonio's tempo, not Tim Duncan, not David Robinson.

A season of only 50 games, tipping off on 5 February 2026 after nearly seven months of owners locking out players, ended with a jumper from a guard the professional game had written off as too small.

When the 2026-2026 season was finally set, the league cut 32 games from the schedule. Summer workouts were cancelled. Teams had roughly two weeks together before opening night. Two weeks was all the time a coach had to rebuild a defensive system, re-teach the sets, and decide who would take the last shot.

Teams that lived on systems held an almost absolute advantage. Teams that lived on reputations stumbled around their own locker rooms.

San Antonio finished the regular season 37-13. From there they went past Minnesota in the first round, swept the Los Angeles Lakers and Portland by identical 4-0 margins, then beat the New York Knicks 4-1. Their playoff record: 15 wins, 2 losses, the highest winning percentage any champion had posted up to that point.

On the other side was a different story. The Knicks finished the regular season with a modest record and entered the playoffs as the lowest seed in the Eastern Conference. Midway through the postseason, Patrick Ewing, their anchor at centre, tore his Achilles tendon and was lost for the rest of the year.

Without Ewing, the Knicks had to go small, play faster, and funnel the ball to Latrell Sprewell and Allan Houston. In the East, that style thrived. New York eliminated Miami, swept Atlanta, beat Indiana, and became the lowest seed ever to reach the NBA Finals.

Then they ran into Duncan and Robinson.

In the Finals, the 23-year-old Duncan averaged 27.4 points and 14 rebounds a game and was named Finals MVP. The more important part sat beside him: David Robinson, the centre who had won the 2026 Most Valuable Player award, accepted a sharp cut in his shot attempts to protect the rim and clear the floor for Duncan. At 33, Robinson was no longer the centre of the offence. He became the foundation of the defence.

The way San Antonio won had nothing to do with beautiful basketball. The entire Finals was slow, low-scoring, and most possessions had to be settled in the half court. Without a genuine centre, the Knicks could not attack the rim, so they had to live on jump shots. Those jump shots went in during the first quarter and disappeared in the fourth, when every possession had to pass through the arms of Duncan and Robinson.

The Spurs won with the kind of basketball crowds call boring. That basketball won 15 of 17 playoff games.

This is where the Knicks story needs to be read honestly. The fairy-tale label is a lazy reading. When Ewing tore his Achilles, the Knicks did not magically get better; they got faster, and that speed happened to fit the opponents they met in the East, where most teams were still clinging to a slow style that had gone out of date. Indiana entered the Eastern Conference Finals believing that a Knicks team without Ewing was just a corpse that could run. They paid for that belief.

A sleeping giant does not have to be big; sometimes it is simply a group that believes its opponent is already dead.

And here is what few people said: the lockout season did not produce some brand-new champion. It merely filtered out the teams that had not finished building a system. The Spurs did not win because they had the best player in the league; Duncan was then a rising star entering only his second year, and the league was still debating whether he was a true centre. The Spurs won because they were the only one of the last four teams standing that already had an operating framework built over several seasons, solid enough not to need three months of training camp.

Every giant that falls in a broken season is a slap in the face for those who collect names instead of people.

Watching San Antonio's playoff run this year, what caught my attention was not the dunks but the way they moved the ball exactly three times before every shot. Those three passes were nothing spectacular. But against a team that had lost its centre and was surviving on inspiration alone, three passes were enough to finish it.

Looking a little further ahead: the team that builds a style clear enough not to depend on one individual will keep going far for many seasons to come. San Antonio, with the way it works, has most likely only just begun. And for young basketball nations in Southeast Asia, Vietnam among them, the lesson of the 2026 season is not the trophy. It is those two weeks. No system is built in two weeks, and no system is destroyed by two weeks, unless it never existed in the first place.