The NBA Cup has now been narrowed down to two teams, with the New York Knicks and San Antonio Spurs set to meet in the championship game on Tuesday night in Las Vegas. The Knicks beat the Orlando Magic in the semifinals to reach the title game, while the Spurs ended the Oklahoma City Thunder's 16-game win streak to advance.

The NBA Cup final doesn’t count. New York will enter with an 18-7 record. San Antonio will enter with an 18-7 record. And when Tuesday night’s game between the Knicks and Spurs is over, those

Every Monday, we catch you up on the happenings in the NBA. This week’s big story is Victor Wembanyama and his dramatic return. He took down an Oklahoma City Thunder team that has been invincible pretty much all season. It set up the marquee event of the week: the San Antonio Spurs taking on the New York Knicks in Tuesday’s 2025 NBA Cup final.

By making it to the final, the Knicks and Spurs already have secured $212,373 per player from the NBA Cup prize money pool. The losing team on Tuesday gets nothing extra. Players on the winning team get an additional $308,560 — pushing their Cup winnings to $530,933 each. Two-way players get half of what players on standard contracts get.

Timothée Chalamet has already had a full career in acting that has led to Oscar nominations and countless other awards, but some of the best memories of his life have nothing to do with the big screen.

Karl-Anthony Towns was recently asked about how the Knicks are approaching the Cup final, to which he says the team is using it as fuel to win the ultimate crown in June 2026.

By how the NBA defines pace, which is a bit of a flawed stat, the Knicks aren’t playing that much faster. They’re still bottom-five in that category. Their secondary assists and passes per game aren’t much improved, if at all.

No, the NBA Cup is not the same as the playoffs. But it provides the Knicks with an opportunity to gain more experience in playoff-like atmospheres.