When the Indiana Pacers got to within a game of the 2025 NBA championship, taking the heavily favored Oklahoma City Thunder the distance before losing Game 7 with Tyrese Haliburton suffering an Achilles rupture, there was an echo of the team’s first run to a title game.
Eighteen months earlier, the Pacers had reached the final of the inaugural NBA Cup, then, temporarily branded as the In-Season Tournament. And though Indiana also lost that final to the Los Angeles Lakers, the lessons learned in Las Vegas proved useful for a Pacers team that hadn’t won a playoff series since 2014.
Now, the San Antonio Spurs find themselves in a similar position, having triumphed in four consecutive must-win games since the group stage to reach Tuesday’s final against the New York Knicks, the first three of them without star Victor Wembanyama. Despite San Antonio dropping the final 124-113, the Pacers’ NBA cup road map is something the Spurs can follow.
And although they didn’t reach the title game, the rising Orlando Magic are surely also hoping their NBA Cup run can act as a similar springboard for the postseason.
Orlando has gone even longer without advancing in the playoffs than Indiana, having last done so when Dwight Howard led the Magic to the 2010 Eastern Conference finals. Meanwhile, the Spurs are well on their way to snapping the league’s second-longest playoff drought, having last appeared in the first round in 2019.
With all that in mind, let’s take a look at how San Antonio or Orlando can follow in Indiana’s footsteps and use this NBA Cup experience as a crucial stepping stone for the postseason.
A taste of high stakes
Indiana did have a recent NBA champion on its 2023 roster in Bruce Brown, signed away from the Denver Nuggets after helping them to the title days earlier. But 10 of the 14 players who played for the Pacers in the 2023 NBA Cup final had never appeared in a playoff game.
That group included Haliburton, whose teams had never finished fewer than 10 games below .500 through the three previous seasons. That group also would have included backcourt mate Andrew Nembhard had he not been sidelined by injury.
By comparison, the Magic and Spurs have more playoff experience on their current rosters, but not by much. Remarkably, despite consecutive appearances, the Magic have the second-fewest combined playoff games on their current roster of any team in the NBA at 139. (Only the Toronto Raptors, who lost in the NBA Cup quarterfinals, have fewer with 106.)
All of Orlando’s key players have playoff experience, but none have ever advanced beyond the second round. Every other NBA team has at least one player with multiround experience. That includes San Antonio, whose 225 playoff games are primarily concentrated between veterans Harrison Barnes (71), Kelly Olynyk (48), Luke Kornet (43) and Bismack Biyombo (40). De’Aaron Fox, with one series that helped the Sacramento Kings end their own drought, is the lone other rotation player with playoff experience.
In the Spurs’ victorious locker room after the first of two must-win games to advance from West Group C, the most competitive NBA Cup group, Fox gave off the air of a grizzled veteran alongside boisterous young teammate Dylan Harper. The 2025 No. 2 pick is 19 years old, and along with recent Rookie of the Year winners Wembanyama and Stephon Castle (both 21), will figure to benefit the most from playing against far more experienced teams in the NBA Cup knockout stages.
As the 2023 NBA Cup run introduced casual fans to Haliburton — a few months away from his All-Star debut and long before Haliburton earned a reputation as a clutch shotmaker — the last two rounds of the NBA Cup were an important showcase for Wembanyama. As anticipated as Wembanyama’s arrival as the No. 1 pick was, these cup games were among the most meaningful NBA games he has played to date. He responded with 22 points in 21 minutes in his return from a calf strain for Saturday’s upset win over the defending champion Thunder, during which San Antonio outscored Oklahoma City by 21 points, handing the Thunder only their second loss of the season.
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Wemby comes alive in the 3rd with impressive buckets
Victor Wembanyama drills a big 3 and follows it up with a putback finish.
That’s where the Spurs and Magic differ from the eventual champion Knicks. No, New York didn’t add the NBA Cup to a recent championship banner won with the same core stars. However, the Knicks have won a playoff series each of the last three seasons, culminating in last year’s trip to the Eastern Conference Finals that cemented them as East favorites this season.
New York’s roster actually features the most playoff experience in terms of games and minutes played of any team to reach Las Vegas, ahead of the Thunder. So the NBA Cup final was more old hat than new territory for the Knicks.
Pacers’ proof of concept
The biggest difference between Indiana and this year’s young NBA Cup contenders is that, at the time, the Pacers’ roster was a work in progress. The combination of advancing to the NBA Cup final and getting exposed there by the Lakers in a 123-109 loss surely played into Indiana’s decision to trade for veteran forward Pascal Siakam the following month. Siakam proved to be the final key of a Pacers core that reached the 2024 conference finals before reaching the NBA finals last postseason.
The Magic hope they’ve made their version of the Siakam move by adding guard Desmond Bane in June. Bane’s predictable slow start with Orlando was a distant memory as he knocked down six 3-pointers to fuel a Magic comeback in the NBA Cup quarterfinals against Miami, finishing with 37 points.
For San Antonio, the trade to add a veteran to its young core came when the Spurs acquired Fox before the 2025 trade deadline. After initially struggling to fit in on a Spurs team with veteran Chris Paul starting at point guard, Fox has looked more like what San Antonio expected of the 10-year guard since returning from a hamstring strain in November. He’s averaging 24 points on the best true shooting percentage (.608) of his NBA career.
Fox was a stabilizing force in the NBA Cup quarterfinals as the Spurs fended off a Lakers comeback. Fox’s 3-pointer with 3:35 left stopped an 11-0 Lakers run and pushed San Antonio’s lead back to double digits.
The Spurs differ with their current ability to make a second big trade if they want to improve their roster before the postseason. Despite giving up multiple first-round picks to get Fox, San Antonio still has at least one first-round pick in every future draft, plus swaps in 2026 (with Atlanta), 2028 (Boston), 2030 (Dallas and Minnesota) and 2031 (Sacramento).
We included the Spurs as a possible destination if either Giannis Antetokounmpo or Anthony Davis is traded midseason.
San Antonio’s NBA Cup run could potentially have the opposite effect from the Pacers — showing the Spurs don’t need another big addition to compete in the playoffs as soon as this spring, now that they’ve surrounded Wembanyama with so much perimeter talent.
Conference finals booster?
In the wake of San Antonio’s win Saturday, when it comes to matching Indiana’s feat of going from not winning a playoff series in years to the conference finals with an NBA Cup knockout win in between, the odds still favor Orlando. The Magic entered the season with higher expectations after the Bane trade and has the benefit of a clearer path to the late rounds of the playoffs with so many injuries in the East.
Even though San Antonio has the better record thus far — and has played 12 games without Wembanyama — projections using ESPN’s Basketball Power Index (BPI) have Orlando finishing just a game back in the standings on average. That’s partially because of the schedule. BPI rates the Spurs’ remaining schedule the fifth hardest in the NBA, while the remaining Magic games rate as the easiest.
Part of that is a product of BPI continuing to peg the West as the stronger conference. The top six-hardest schedules left belong to West teams, while East teams have the two easiest left. Beyond that, Saturday’s semifinal completed Orlando’s season series against the Knicks, and the Magic have played only two of their 13 scheduled games against the bottom five teams in BPI. (San Antonio has played four.)
The conference gap should also benefit the Magic in terms of seeding. Orlando claims a top-four seed and home-court advantage in the first round more than two-thirds of the time, as compared to a little better than less than half of simulations for the Spurs (47%). There’s still a realistic chance for the Magic to make up a 5.5-game gap on the Detroit Pistons and finish with the East’s best record. That’s probably off the table for San Antonio, given Oklahoma City’s current historic pace.
Add up those factors, and BPI gives Orlando much better odds of reaching the conference finals this season. That happens in 31% of simulations, with the Spurs reaching the West finals just 9.5% of the time.
Whether it happens this season or takes longer, a San Antonio playoff breakthrough is probably coming as long as Wembanyama stays healthy. When that takes place for the Spurs or the Magic, like the Pacers before them, an NBA Cup run will be a key part of the story.
