The NBA Finals is the annual championship series of the National Basketball Association. The Eastern and Western conference champions play a best-of-seven game series to determine the league champion. The team that wins the series is awarded the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy. A total of 19 franchises have won the NBA Finals, with the Los Angeles Lakers winning in 2020. The Lakers and the Boston Celtics hold the record for the most victories, having both won the competition 17 times.
About NBA Finals in brief
The NBA Finals is the annual championship series of the National Basketball Association. The Eastern and Western conference champions play a best-of-seven game series to determine the league champion. The team that wins the series is awarded the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy, which replaced the Walter A. Brown Trophy in 1983. A total of 19 franchises have won the NBA Finals, with the Los Angeles Lakers winning in 2020. The Lakers and the Boston Celtics hold the record for the most victories, having both won the competition 17 times. The Boston Celtics also won the most consecutive titles, winning eight in a row from 1959 to 1966. The series was initially known as the BAA Finals prior to the 1949–50 season when the Basketball Association of America merged with the National basketball League to form the NBA. The NBA Finals was initially structured in a 2–2–1–1-1 format. In 1985, to ease the amount of cross-country travel, it was changed to a 2-3–2 format, where the first two and last two games of the series were played at the arena of the team who earned home-court advantage by having the better record during the regular season. Since 2018, it has been officially known as NBA Finals presented by YouTube TV for sponsorship reasons. To date the Baltimore Bullets are the only defunct team to win a championship. The Los Angeles Clippers have contested the Finals the most times, with 32 appearances. The Philadelphia Warriors also won multiple championships, including the inaugural title in 1947 and another in 1956 to bookend the NBA’s first decade. The New York Knicks lost the first of three consecutive Finals to the Lakers in 1952 and 1953.
In 1951 the Rochester Royals defeated the New York Yankees in the only Finals contested between two teams from the same state. In 1954 the Lakers would win again in 1954 to become the first team to three-peat. In 1964 the San Francisco Warriors, led by Wilt Chamberlain, won the Western Conference championship, but again failed to conquer the Celtics. In 1966 the Celtics went 11–1 in the NBA finals during 12 seasons, with Chamberlain and Bill Russell leading the team. The first time a team made up over 65% of Finals appearances was the only ever time the Finals was decided in double overtime. The Celtics won the series 4–1 with Chamberlain, who led the team to a 4-1 series victory in the playoffs in the 1966 season. The following season he returned to the Celtics, but failed to defeat the Celtics in the following season’s Finals. The next season he moved to California to cover the vacancy created by the departure of the Warriors. The Warriors would win their second and last title in 1956 before eventually moving to California. In 1955 the Syracuse Nationals won their only title before becoming the Philadelphia 76ers, and in 1956 the Warriors won their second title in Philadelphia before moving to the city of San Francisco. Of the five franchises to win the championship from 1947 to 1956, one would fold and the other four would all relocate by 1964. The Eastern Conference has provided the most champions, with 38 wins from 10 franchises. The Western Conference has 34, from 9 franchises.
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This page is based on the article NBA Finals published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 20, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
