NBA 2026/27 (M)

The league was born on 6 June 1946 in New York under another name — the Basketball Association of America — and a commercial idea rather than a sporting one: hockey-arena owners wanted something to fill the nights without a game. Professional basketball already existed in the National Basketball League, older and better played, but scattered across small Midwestern towns. The two merged on 3 August 1949, and today's name came out of it.

What followed was not a competition of shared-out champions but of dynasties. The Boston Celtics hold 18 titles and the Lakers 17 across Minneapolis and Los Angeles: two franchises own more than half the history. That concentration is the league's signature and its permanent tension, because every rule invented since — the reverse draft, the salary cap, revenue sharing — is written to make the next dynasty harder to build.

Today it is 30 teams playing 82 games each from October to April, before two months of playoffs. A regular season that long eliminates almost nobody: it exists to sort. And the sorting is all that whoever dominates from November to March gets to keep.

The New York Knicks won the 2026 title and ended a wait that had begun in 1973. In between sit two lost Finals from the Patrick Ewing era, 1994 and 1999, and three decades in which Madison Square Garden was better known for its bad nights than for its basketball. It is the franchise's third ring.

And they won it from the fifth-best record in the league: 54-29 in the regular season, behind Oklahoma City (64-18), San Antonio (62-21), Detroit (60-22) and Boston (56-26). They swept Cleveland 4-0 in the East finals and settled the Finals against San Antonio 4-1, taking the last game on the road 94-90. Jalen Brunson was Finals MVP.

The team that played best for six months never reached the last day. Oklahoma City won 64 games and fell in game seven of the West finals to a Spurs side that had won 62; the Spurs then lost their own first Finals in over a decade. At the other end of the table, the Washington Wizards finished 17-65.

The season starts on 20 October 2026 and the regular phase closes on 12 April 2027: 1,200 games across 160 nights, usually five or six at a time. New York defend the title, which is a sentence nobody has written since the seventies.

Across from them are the two who came up short. Oklahoma City return with last year's best record and the debt that losing a game seven at home leaves behind; San Antonio bring back the group that reached the Finals. Detroit won 60 games and surprise nobody any more. Boston keep a title roster, and Denver still have Nikola Jokic, which is the short way of saying no series against them is decided in advance.

And one trophy is handed out before the other: the NBA Cup, played inside the regular season, splitting December in half. Its group games count towards the record but the final does not, so a team can end the year with silverware in the case and the same 82 games on the sheet as everyone else.

Thirty teams in two conferences of fifteen, each conference split into three divisions. Nobody is relegated: it is a closed league, and the punishment for finishing last is not the drop but settling for better odds in the draft lottery.

Eight teams per conference reach the playoffs, but only six go straight through. Seventh to tenth play for the last two places in the play-in, permanent since 22 July 2022, and the draw is deliberately lopsided: seventh hosts eighth and the winner goes in as the 7 seed; ninth hosts tenth and the loser goes home; then the loser of the first game hosts the winner of the second for the eighth spot. Three games that can undo six months of work.

From there, all four rounds are best-of-seven, with home advantage to the better seed. It is the longest format in professional sport and the one that allows fewest surprises: to be champion you must win sixteen games against teams that also won sixty.