Knicks-Spurs 2026 Finals — A Statistical Preview

The Knicks and Spurs face off in the 2026 NBA Finals, and there’s a ton of storylines and angles to base a series preview on. I could write about the Knicks’ improbable playoffs ascendency, the potential rise of the NBA’s next GOAT in Wemby, or even about how I spent my honeymoon watching the Knicks and Spurs face off in the Finals from the Bahamas. However, I thought my strengths lie in talking about this series from a purely statistical sense. Dean Oliver once noted that you have to understand the team first, before diving into the specifics of individual players, matchups, lineups, etc. I don’t know if he still follows that philosophical take on NBA analysis, but I do.

From a basic statistical standpoint, the Spurs are the clear favorites. They had the better regular season record and own home-court advantage. Their expected win percentage, a better indicator of team strength than wins, was 73.2% to the Knicks’ 68.3%. Plugging these values into Bill James’ Log 5 equation, which provides a basis for predicting the outcome of a game, gives the Spurs a 65% chance of winning a home game, and a 46% chance of winning a road game. It’s pretty easy to use Excel to run through a few thousand seven-game series, and after doing so, it seems the Knicks only win a championship 35% of the time.

Normally, that’s about where the strict analytical take would end. But what if we didn’t want to use the regular season as the baseline? What if we used the playoff numbers instead? The Spurs’ expected win percentage increases a tad, up to 77.8%, while the Knicks’ takes a Herculean leap to 92.9%. And running through the same calculations again, we find the Knicks winning the Finals in a landslide at a 95% clip.

Obviously, we shouldn’t ignore either the playoff data or the regular season data, but at what rate should we include each? If you think the regular season and playoffs should be weighted in equal portions, the Knicks win a ring 57% of the time. If you think you should just aggregate the two into a single season, then the Spurs are again the favorites at 59%. Playing around with the numbers, I found that with a ratio of 70% regular season to 30% playoffs, the odds evened out for both teams.

One “what-if” to consider here, is that if the Knicks had the home-court advantage, this would be a radically different series. Based on the regular season numbers alone, the Knicks would be a 59% favorite to win, a massive 24 point swing!

The numbers say that if the Knicks’ 2026 playoff team is the real deal, and what we will actually witness in this series, they are the clear favorite. Otherwise it’s a nail biter that could go either way.