In Spurs vs. Knicks, NBA gets dream Finals matchup

The NBA is about to complete its first season under its new U.S. media rights deal, which is worth a mere $77 billion over 11 years. 

It couldn’t be wrapping up on a better note, with a dream Finals featuring a potential heir to the GOAT-adjacent throne against a traditional franchise with global recognition and a somehow-underdog star. 

While the effects are still rippling through the league, this is the kind of thing the league’s partners were dreaming on when they agreed to a deal that saw media-rights revenues nearly triple from an already-healthy-seeming $2.67 billion annually to $7.7 billion. 

Since the NBA shares those revenues on a roughly 50-50 split with its players, it means San Antonio Spurs star Victor Wembanyama will be eligible to sign a five-year contract extension this summer that could pay the 22-year-old a cool $301 million.

He’s worth it to the Spurs, obviously. He might end up being underpaid. 

Wembanyama’s greatness has arrived ahead of schedule, bringing a young Spurs team along with him to the NBA Finals, which tips off Wednesday night. San Antonio is the second youngest Finals team in 50 years and a core of Wembanyama, Stephon Castle (23) and Dylan Harper (20) offers the promise of many more Finals appearances to come. 

But Wembanyama’s also well worth it to the NBA in general. 

With LeBron James (41), Steph Curry (38) and Kevin Durant (turning 38 before next season starts) at the end of their competitive windows, the league needs a marquee star or collection of stars to take over. 

It would be hard to design a better candidate than Wembanyama, the French phenom who is already instantly recognizable because, well, he’s seven-foot-five. 

He also gives every indication of being built for the spotlight and offers additional opportunity for global reach, with his European roots and African heritage (his father is of Congolese descent). And while big men are sometimes deemed less marketable or relatable, that Wembanyama delivers highlights ranging from impossibly elegant (for someone his size) perimeter moves, to driving dunks that originate somewhere just over halfcourt to blocks that seem to spring from the pages of a cartoon, the Spurs star should defy those paradigms.  

Most importantly, he is already hurtling along a trajectory reserved only for the all-time greats. He’s already joined Houston Rockets legend Hakeem Olajuwon as the only players in league history to average at least 23 points, 10 rebounds and three blocks during a playoff run of at least 10 games in their first three seasons. Wembanyama is a year younger than Olajuwon was when he did it 40 years ago. 

If this time a year from now Wembanyama is holding his second defensive player of the year award and his first regular-season MVP while chasing his second Finals MVP and second NBA title, will anyone be surprised? 

He has a chance to be the NBA’s long-necked Golden Goose and the cornerstone of the league’s next dynasty. 

That won’t be easy, and in league’s corridors of power, its power brokers likely couldn’t be happier about it. 

The Knicks in the playoffs is very good for NBA business. The Knicks in the Finals — for the first time since 1999 — is exceptional. 

This Knicks team, a likeable group led by a huggable star in Jalen Brunson that plays with an unselfish vibe and has the looks of a juggernaut, is a rocket booster for league business. 

With the exception of the Los Angeles Lakers and possibly the Boston Celtics, the Knicks are the NBA’s quintessential brand. The home team of the city game. When the NBA was fighting for relevance in the 1970s, before the holy trinity of Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and (a little later) Michael Jordan helped the league become a global cultural phenomenon, having great teams in New York City — the Knicks won the NBA championships in 1970 and 1973, lost in the Finals in 1972 and made it at least to the Eastern Conference Finals for five straight years starting in 1970 — helped the then-rickety league stay relevant.

As time has passed — the Knicks are looking for their first championship in 53 years — that era has been mythologized in New York, and by extension across the NBA, for the Knicks’ gritty defence and selflessness on offence. 

The phrase ‘those Knicks teams’ has always been synonymous with basketball played the right way. The decades of dysfunction and occasional disgrace the Knicks brought on themselves since their last Finals appearance have been shamed by comparison.

But this version of the Knicks seems to channel the spirit of those teams after galloping through the Eastern Conference bracket, racking up 11 straight wins and posting an NBA playoff record plus-19.8 point differential along the way. 

The league’s biggest market is giddy about the league’s most valuable franchise, with New Yorkers crowding the Manhatttan streets after wins, Knicks fans crowding opposing arenas on the road, celebrity fans crowding each other for camera time at Madison Square Garden and the mayor signing an executive order repealing bedtimes so kids can stay up and watch the games. 

Sure, but potentially soul-crushing if Wembanyama and the Spurs — strongly favoured by oddsmakers — end up ruining the Knicks’ dream season, sending New York’s best chance to win a title in six decades crashing to the floor in little pieces until they’re washed away in a river of kiddie Knicks fans’ tears. 

But the NBA? The league can’t lose. 

On one side of the Finals it has the Spurs and Wembanyama, with San Antonio in many ways the league’s model franchise given it won five championships and made the playoffs for 39 of its first 43 seasons, including a record stretch of 22 consecutive years under legendary head coach Gregg Popovich. 

The so-called Spurs way has always been considered the right way, spawning imitators across the league, with San Antonio’s influence being felt directly or indirectly in Oklahoma City, Charlotte and Washington, among other franchises.

Still, there’s plenty of irony that the Spurs’ unprecedented run of success has been due to some expert tanking, a strategy that helped the Spurs draft Hall of Famer David Robinson first overall in 1990 and then Hall of Famer Tim Duncan first overall in 1998 before they hit it out of the park, tanking wise, with their rebuild around Wembanyama, the first pick in 2023.

No one likes to talk about that part. 

NBA commissioner Adam Silver was so upset that so many teams have been trying to repeat the Spurs’ success in recent years — tossing away seasons, eroding the NBA’s competitiveness and upsetting the league’s new media partners who were rightfully frustrated about forking out billions to show games of teams who were trying to lose — that he spearheaded a rule change to prevent teams from tanking in the future. 

As a result, it will be impossible for a team to draft in the top five for three straight years (among other rule changes), the way the Spurs did in assembling their current roster of young talent that threatens to rule the NBA for decades. 

Ah well, dynasties are good for business, as the league learned when Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls collected titles annually in the 1990s. 

The league and its media partners would be right there alongside them for the ride, basking in exploding television ratings and record social-media engagement, thrilled at the prospect of a new generation of Knicks fans having a new championship standard to hold their team to for the next 50 years or so. 

Wemby’s world? The Knicks’ world? 

For the NBA, a Knicks-Spurs Finals is the best of both worlds.