Will The Curse Of The NBA Cup Come Back To Bite The New York Knicks?

The NBA’s third annual In-Season Tournament (the second Emirates NBA Cup) did not disappoint. Saturday will likely go down as one of the best games of the entire 2025-26 regular season, as Victor Wembanyama and the up-and-coming San Antonio Spurs pulled off a major upset against the juggernaut Oklahoma City Thunder. Then, on Tuesday, the New York Knicks finished the entire sweepstakes by besting the Spurs, winning the third-ever in-season trophy and securing a $ 530,000 prize for each of their players (the runner-up Spurs got over 212,000 dollars for each player).

However, the brief history of the cup suggests that winning this tournament does not come without a cost.

The Curse Of Winning The NBA Cup

As we said, there isn’t much precedent when it comes to winning the NBA Cup and how that correlates with success in the postseason. But the little information we do have does not bode well for the victor.

In 2023, the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Indiana Pacers in the NBA Cup Finals, only to fall to the Denver Nuggets in the first round of the 2024 NBA Playoffs. In 2024, the Milwaukee Bucks bested the Oklahoma City Thunder, and just like the Lakers, they ended up losing in five games in the first round of the following postseason (to the Pacers).

Are you seeing a trend here?

The team that won the NBA Cup ended up having that be the high-water mark of their season, while the losing team made a deep playoff run (the Pacers made it to the Eastern Conference Finals in 2024, and the Thunder won it all last season). The Lakers and Bucks were aging teams on the last leg of their current eras (Anthony Davis, Damian Lillard, and Khris Middleton are no longer with those teams). Meanwhile, the Pacers and Thunder were young groups who used the in-season tournament as a chance to announce to the rest of the league that they had officially arrived to the party.

When you look at the Knicks and Spurs, they aren’t too dissimilar to these two groups. The Knicks are a veteran-laden team (4th oldest in average age by minutes played), and the Spurs have missed the playoffs in each of the last six seasons, but they seem to finally have the pieces in place to end that drought.

Are The New York Knicks In Trouble?

If history repeats itself (as it often does), then the Knicks will lose in a first round gentleman sweep. This would be considered a colossal failure for a team with championship aspirations, and maybe, it would be the kind of loss that would cause ownership to question whether this current group is worth continuing to invest in. Fortunately, there is reason to believe that the Knicks are different than their predecessors.

When the Lakers and Bucks made their in-season runs, they were two teams that struggled out of the gates and were trying to use the tournament as an opportunity to ramp things up. After winning the NBA Cup, the Lakers were 14-9, with the 15th-best net rating in the NBA at the time, and the Bucks were 14-11 with the 14th-best net rating.

The Knicks, on the other hand, have come out of the gates looking better than ever. Head coach Mike Brown has successfully added the elements of pace, ball movement, and spacing that made his Sacramento Kings so good in 2022-23 to a Knicks team that is already loaded with offensive talent (2nd in offensive rating), and he also has them grinding on the defensive side of the ball (11th in defensive rating). As it stands, the Knicks are 18-7 and boast the fourth-best net rating in the NBA (1st in the Eastern Conference).

And while the Knicks are just as old as those Lakers’ and Bucks’ teams, they did get a nice boost from one of their young bucks. Injuries to Landry Shamet and Miles McBride have caused second-year point guard Tyler Kolek to be thrust into the rotation, and he responded by tallying 14 points, five rebounds, and five assists in their win over the Spurs. The Knicks were also a +14 in his 20.5 minutes of action.

In the past, winning the in-season tournament has been a death sentence for teams with hopes of making noise in the postseason (while being the runner-up has been a blessing in disguise), but this New York team feels different than those groups. They seem like the kind of group that won’t fall prey to the dreaded “Curse of the NBA Cup.”