Two out of five experts are actually calling the NBA championship for the Knicks!

This has really surprised me and this as well as my incorrect guesses across the entirety of the championship has lead me to believe that the NBA finals could actually be really good.

While I am an armchair quarterback for the most part and base a lot of my decisions on both feelings and betting stats, the real experts get paid a lot of money to come up with more substantiated evidence of how it is that they feel that way.

5 experts were chosen for their opinion about who is going to be the 2026 NBA champions and I really expected 5-0 in favor of the Spurs or maybe one dissenter. I was surprised that two of them went that way.

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Kelly Iko (who is a man btw) chose the Spurs without hesitation. His reasoning is a couple of really big deals including their superior regular season, the fact the team is more youthful, and that this is not a "momentum run" which is what the Knicks appear to be on at the moment.

Dan Devine focuses more on the emotion and the single series vs the Thunder than anything else. He didn't hesitate to choose the Spurs

Tom Haberstroh took a minute to get there but chose the Knicks. He has some level of bias admitting he is an old-school Knicks fan but pointed to the fact that the Spurs beat an OKC team that was missing two of their better players in Jalen Williams and Ajay Mitchell - which is true for the most part. He did admit that this Knicks team seems unpredictable since they seemed to completely turn it on in the post-season in a way that was not exhibited in the regular season.

Ben Rohrbach didn't have much to say but acknowledged that the 11-win run the Knicks are on is impressive, but that they have not yet faced a team the caliber of the Spurs, the Thunder, or even the Timberwolves. He believes if the Knicks get worked over in game 1 that the season is over

Steve Jones pointed to historical statistical connections and I like that. He said the Knicks are only 1 of 5 teams EVER to score 11 wins consecutively in the playoffs and the ONLY team to ever have 3 wins in the same post-season series by 30 points or more. The biggest thing he stated was that their coaching seems to be able to identify weaknesses and solve those problems when they occur.

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It should be exciting and while I think that sport pundits always try to make any matchup seem as exciting as possible going into it because at the end of the day they work for the NBA in a roundabout way but they all make some really good points.

I tend to ID with Steve Jones the most and he out of all the pundits has the most experience actually playing and coaching the game, when he says that the problem solving is going to be a huge factor. The Knicks haven't faced a team this explosive in the playoffs and will be interesting to see what they are going to do when they are faced with it.

I also believe that the first game is extremely important. Win or lose that first game, the game needs to be kept close for morale purposes because that is such a huge part of basketball.

At the moment the Spurs are favored by 4.5 points in game one.