Somebody on the internet went and counted every NBA champion since 1947 looking for the letter S, and here’s the thing — the genius was right.
Four teams. That’s it. Four out of 78 championships won by franchises whose name doesn’t contain the 19th letter of the alphabet. The 2006 Miami Heat. The 2012 Miami Heat. The 2013 Miami Heat. And now the 2025 Oklahoma City Thunder.
That’s the whole list. Every other banner ever hung — Celtics, Lakers, Bulls, Spurs, Warriors, Pistons, Rockets, Bucks, Cavaliers, Raptors, Nuggets, 76ers, Knicks, Trail Blazers, Bullets, SuperSonics, Hawks, Royals, Mavericks — every single one rocks an S somewhere in the team name.
You can go down the whole wall at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and check yourself. Philadelphia Warriors in ’47, S. Baltimore Bullets in ’48, S. Minneapolis Lakers, S. Syracuse Nationals, S. St. Louis Hawks, S. It never stops. Seventy-four of seventy-eight champions, letter S present and accounted for.
Then Pat Riley’s Heat break the seal in 2006. Dwyane Wade puts on one of the great Finals performances anyone’s ever seen against Dallas, and Miami lifts the trophy with a five-letter nickname that wouldn’t pass a spelling bee. LeBron James, Chris Bosh, and Wade do it twice more in 2012 and 2013, and suddenly the Heat own three of the four S-less titles in league history. The other 29 franchises with an S in their name have to sit there and think about that.
Nineteen years pass. Then Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the Oklahoma City Thunder roll through the regular season at 68-14, dismantle the Minnesota Timberwolves in the Western Conference Finals, and outlast the Indiana Pacers in seven games to claim the 2025 championship. Thunder. T-H-U-N-D-E-R. Seven letters, zero S’s. The franchise’s first title since relocating from Seattle — where, wouldn’t you know it, they were the SuperSonics. S and all.
Now here’s where it gets fun. The Pacers — Indiana Pacers — also have no S. Had Haliburton not torn his Achilles in Game 7, we might be talking about five S-less champions instead of four. The 2025 Finals was the first championship series in which both teams lacked the letter. One of them was going to add to the list no matter what.
The other near-miss? The 2014 Finals. Miami Heat versus San Antonio Spurs. The Heat were going for a third straight, which would have made it five S-less titles. Kawhi Leonard and the Spurs put a stop to that in five games. Sometimes the letter wins.
None of this means anything, of course. It’s a parlor trick, the kind of thing a stats intern finds at 2 a.m. and posts for laughs. Correlation without a whisper of causation. The Heat didn’t win because they lack an S. They won because Wade was unguardable, because LeBron was the best player on the planet, because Riley built rosters that could defend and score. The Thunder won because Gilgeous-Alexander averaged 32.7 points, because they went 68-14, because they were 12.9 points per game better than their opponents — a margin that broke the league’s all-time record.
But four out of seventy-eight. That’s a 5.1% hit rate for teams without an S. The other 94.9% of NBA history belongs to the letter. You can argue spacing, coaching, roster construction, salary cap management, and load management until you’re blue in the face. Or you can just spell your team name right and call it a day.
The Thunder already proved that much.
Sources:
- Basketball-Reference.com — NBA & ABA Champions
- Wikipedia — 2025 NBA Finals
- Wikipedia — Miami Heat
- Wikipedia — List of NBA Champions