New York Knicks Win 2026 NBA Championship Over San Antonio Spurs

The New York Knicks defeated the San Antonio Spurs to win the 2026 NBA Championship. A little over a week later the team held a parade through lower Manhattan. cnbc.com reported that NBA fans in Southeast Asia rose 15 percent over three years through the first quarter of 2026.

Video views on the league's Asian social media platforms increased 88 percent year on year, and the number of followers on regional platforms nearly doubled during the 2025-26 season. The NBA staged a Rising Stars Invitational tournament in Singapore for high school teams from across Asia and held an investor conference alongside it.

Sheila Rasu, the NBA's vice president for Southeast Asia, said basketball is probably the fastest growing sport in the region.

She added that it is the most played team sport in Singapore and that Indonesia has a large and growing population of children taking up the game. The league announced a strategic expansion of its NBA Launchpad program in Asia the same week. The program, first launched in 2021, identifies emerging technologies to improve the sport and fan experience.

Former player Jeremy Lin, who won a championship with the Toronto Raptors in 2019 and was the first Asian American to do so, attended the Singapore events. Lin said the NBA is an amazing brand that is value-aligned and that he wants to build basketball in Asia, where he has roots.

The league returned to Greater China in 2025 for the first time in six years when the Brooklyn Nets and Phoenix Suns played two preseason games at The Venetian Arena in Macao.

Those games followed a 2019 dispute in which state broadcasters and sponsors in China cut ties after then-Houston Rockets executive Daryl Morey voiced support for Hong Kong protesters. The NBA's relationship with China dates to the 1970s.