What the New York Knicks pulled off in 2025-26 wasn’t supposed to happen yet — not according to the league’s timeline, and certainly not according to anyone who watched this franchise stumble through two decades of dysfunction. Jalen Brunson and his squad won the Emirates NBA Cup in Las Vegas on December 16, beating the San Antonio Spurs 124-113. Then they swept the Cleveland Cavaliers 4-0 in the Eastern Conference Finals. Then they took down those same Spurs 4-1 in the NBA Finals, clinching the franchise’s first championship since 1973.
First team in NBA history to win the in-season tournament and the Larry O’Brien Trophy in the same year. The film doesn’t lie.
Brunson took home Finals MVP honors after a playoff run that media outlets called one of the most dominant in NBA history — a 13-game postseason winning streak and a record victory margin of 19.4 points per game. The Finals series averaged 20.6 million viewers per game, the most-watched NBA Finals since 1998. Game 4 alone produced the largest comeback in Finals history, the Knicks erasing a 29-point third-quarter deficit before OG Anunoby tipped in the winner with 1.2 seconds left.
That historic double — Cup plus championship — has reignited a conversation the league has been wrestling with since the in-season tournament launched in 2023: does winning the NBA Cup actually mean anything if everyone treats it like a preseason trophy with better lighting?
A fan proposal circulating on r/nba this week offers one answer. The post introduces two concepts: the “Threeble” — a label for any team that wins the NBA Cup, its conference finals, and the NBA championship in the same season — and “Golden Season” status, a package of visual rewards designed to make the achievement impossible to ignore. Gold jerseys. Special uniform patches. Diamond-encrusted championship chains. The idea is to give teams something tangible to chase beyond the Cup’s existing prize money, something that carries weight the moment a player walks onto the court the following October.
The Knicks’ run gave the proposal its launching point. They are the first NBA Cup winner to reach the Finals, let alone win them. Before this season, no Cup champion had even advanced past the second round of the playoffs. The Milwaukee Bucks won the inaugural tournament in 2023 and flamed out in the first round. The Los Angeles Lakers took the 2024 edition and exited in the first round as well. The league’s three-year-old experiment looked, at times, like a December spectacle that teams forgot about by April.
Commissioner Adam Silver has consistently defended the tournament’s format, pointing to competitive group-stage games and rising television ratings as evidence that the product works. The 2025-26 Cup kept the same basic structure: six intraconference pools, single-elimination knockout rounds, and a championship final that doesn’t count toward the regular-season standings. Wikipedia’s season summary confirms the format remained unchanged from the prior year.
But the Knicks changed the narrative by doing what no one else had done — treating the Cup as a springboard rather than a finish line. Under first-year head coach Mike Brown, who replaced the defensive-minded Tom Thibodeau after the 2025 Eastern Conference Finals loss to Indiana, New York finished 53-29 and leaned on a deeper bench than Thibodeau ever allowed. Karl-Anthony Towns, Mikal Bridges, Josh Hart, and Anunoby surrounded Brunson with enough two-way firepower that the Cup final and the NBA Finals felt like chapters in the same book rather than separate stories.
The “Threeble” label and “Golden Season” concept aren’t league policy. They’re a fan’s wish list, posted on a message board, built on a real achievement that exposed the gap between what the NBA Cup is and what the league wants it to become. Silver doesn’t need diamond chains to close that gap. He needs more teams like these Knicks — ones that win the thing in December and refuse to stop there.
The Knicks proved the Cup can matter. Whether the league figures out how to make everyone else believe it is a different problem, and it’s still on Silver’s desk.
- Wikipedia — 2026 NBA Finals
- Wikipedia — 2025-26 NBA Season
- r/nba — Fan proposal: “The Threeble” and “Golden Season” status