The NBA Finals and the League's Great Dynasties
Where the Finals Came From
The NBA traces its history to the Basketball Association of America, which began play in 1946 and crowned its first champion, the Philadelphia Warriors, in 1947. In 1949 the BAA absorbed the rival National Basketball League and took the name National Basketball Association. The league's first true dynasty arrived almost immediately: the Minneapolis Lakers, built around 6-foot-10 center George Mikan, won five championships in six seasons between 1949 and 1954, and the franchise carried the Lakers name with it when it moved to Los Angeles in 1960.
Professional basketball in those years was a regional business with small arenas and little television exposure. What turned the championship series into the NBA Finals as fans know it today was a rivalry, and the two franchises at the center of it still sit atop the all-time standings.
Boston: Russell's Celtics and the Bird Era
The Boston Celtics own 18 championships, the most in league history. Eleven of them came in a 13-season stretch from 1957 to 1969 with Bill Russell at center, including eight consecutive titles from 1959 through 1966, a streak no team in any major American sport has equaled. Coach Red Auerbach built the roster around defense, rebounding and the fast break, and Russell served as player-coach for the final two titles in 1968 and 1969.
Boston returned to the top in the 1980s with Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish, winning in 1981, 1984 and 1986 and playing the Lakers in three memorable Finals. The Celtics added a championship in 2008 with Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen, and their 2024 title, led by Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, broke a tie with Los Angeles and gave Boston sole possession of the record.
Los Angeles: Showtime and the Kobe Years
The Lakers have 17 championships. The franchise reached the Finals repeatedly in the 1960s but kept losing to Boston, and it did not win in Los Angeles until 1972. The golden age was the 1980s, when Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and coach Pat Riley produced the fast-breaking "Showtime" teams that won five titles in 1980, 1982, 1985, 1987 and 1988. The 1985 series was especially sweet for Los Angeles, its first Finals win over the Celtics.
A second dynasty formed around Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant, who won three straight championships from 2000 to 2002 under Phil Jackson. Bryant then led the team to two more in 2009 and 2010. The most recent Lakers title came in 2020, when LeBron James and Anthony Davis won inside the pandemic "bubble" at Walt Disney World in Florida.
Chicago, San Antonio and Golden State
Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls won six championships in eight seasons, with three-peats from 1991 to 1993 and 1996 to 1998, and they never lost a Finals series. Jordan was named Finals MVP all six times, a record, and the 1995-96 club went 72-10 in the regular season. The only reason the streak has a gap is that Jordan spent most of two seasons retired, during which Hakeem Olajuwon's Houston Rockets won in 1994 and 1995.
The San Antonio Spurs represent a different model of sustained success. With Tim Duncan and coach Gregg Popovich, San Antonio won five titles spread across 15 years: 1999, 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2014, an unusually long window built on continuity rather than a single burst. The Golden State Warriors then defined the 2010s. Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green won in 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2022, though their 73-9 team of 2015-16 lost the Finals to LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers, who became the first team to come back from a 3-1 series deficit in the championship round.
How the Finals Work
The NBA Finals is a best-of-seven series between the champions of the Eastern and Western Conferences. Home-court advantage goes to the team with the better regular-season record. Games are arranged in a 2-2-1-1-1 pattern, the format used for most of league history; a 2-3-2 format was adopted in 1985 to reduce cross-country travel during the Celtics-Lakers years and was scrapped in favor of the original order beginning with the 2014 Finals.
Sixteen teams reach the playoffs, eight per conference, with the seventh and eighth seeds in each conference decided through a play-in tournament that was made a regular feature in 2021. Every round is best-of-seven. The champion receives the Larry O'Brien Trophy, named in 1984 for the former commissioner and previously known as the Walter A. Brown Trophy.
The Finals MVP
The Finals MVP award dates to 1969, when Jerry West of the Lakers won it despite his team losing to Boston in seven games. He remains the only player from a losing team to receive it. In 2009 the league renamed the award the Bill Russell NBA Finals Most Valuable Player Award, a fitting tribute given that Russell won 11 titles before the award existed. Jordan's six Finals MVPs lead the list, followed by LeBron James with four; James is the only player to win it with three different franchises.
Recent Champions and the Parity Era
The league has entered an unusually balanced stretch. The Toronto Raptors won in 2019, the Lakers in 2020, the Milwaukee Bucks in 2021, the Warriors in 2022, the Denver Nuggets in 2023 and the Celtics in 2024. In 2025 the Oklahoma City Thunder beat the Indiana Pacers 103-91 in Game 7, the first Finals Game 7 in nine years, to win the franchise's first championship since moving from Seattle in 2008. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the regular-season MVP, was named Finals MVP after posting 29 points and 12 assists in the deciding game.
The 2026 Finals produced yet another new champion. The New York Knicks beat the San Antonio Spurs four games to one for their first title since 1973 and the third in franchise history. The series was closer than the score suggests: Game 4 featured a 29-point comeback, the largest in Finals history, capped by OG Anunoby's tip-in with 1.2 seconds left. Jalen Brunson, who scored 45 points in the clinching game and averaged 32.6 for the series, was a unanimous choice as Finals MVP. That made eight consecutive seasons with a different champion, the longest such streak the league has ever seen, and a sharp contrast with the dynasties that built the NBA's reputation.
