The GM survey confirms what Spurs Nation knew—the Knicks’ title was a fluke

Fifteen NBA general managers picked the Spurs to win the 2027 title. Thirteen took the Thunder. The New York Knicks just lifted the Larry O'Brien Trophy a few months ago, but only got one vote. One. That paints a very clear picture. Thirty front offices watched the same five games we did, and 29 of them came back and said it won't happen again.

Defending champions don't get one vote in these surveys

Go look at what the Annual GM Surveys usually do for the champs. Boston won in 2024, and 83% of general managers picked the Celtics to repeat the following October. Oklahoma City won in 2025 and got 80%. That's the standard treatment. You win it, you get crowned again before anybody plays a game, and the league spends the season figuring out how to take it from you.

Well, New York won it and got 3%. Nobody is allowed to vote for their own team, so that's one ballot out of the 29 executives who could have picked the Knicks and didn't.

Spike Lee and Mariska Hargitay will be happy to know that the executives still think NY is good, though. It's not a complete dunking. Mike Brown's group took 60% of first-place votes in the Eastern Conference rankings, finishing first with room to spare. So, the same folks who won't hand the champs a repeat title still expect them to make it back to the Finals.

They just believe the Knicks will lose.

San Antonio led every single game of the NBA Finals

The tough part is having to live with how it ended. New York beat the Spurs 4-1. They won three games in San Antonio. The little rascals even beat the Silver and Black in the NBA Cup finals in December, well before any of this. They're a good team and won the finals on their own merit... to an extent.

Go back and watch how those games actually went. The Spurs held a double-digit lead in every single game of the Finals. All five. Game 2 was a one-point loss, Game 5 was by four, and Game 4 was the largest comeback in NBA Finals history. Twenty-nine points gone after San Antonio had posted the biggest halftime lead for a road team ever in a Finals game.

That doesn't scream "Knicks are the more talented team." If they were, the Silver and Black wouldn't have been smacking them in every single game. Nah. It was a young team that struggled to close in the biggest moment of their lives as their superstar ran out of gas after going from 29 minutes a night to almost 40 per game in the Finals.

Jalen Brunson got his trophy. Cool. He earned it. The better team still didn't win, and these GM survey results tell me that almost every single general manager in the league agrees.

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