The Knicks picked up another title in a very Reddit way.
A user on r/nba built a website that tracks an unofficial NBA champion, using the old boxing-belt idea: start with a champion, then pass the belt to the next team that beats that champion. The twist is that this tracker begins with the first NBA game ever and does not reset at the end of each season.
The project points back to an earlier r/nba thread and a Grantland article that helped popularize the concept. The author then built a public site at unofficialchampions.com to trace the chain across league history, with regular season games, NBA Cup games, play-in games and playoff games counting as title bouts. Exhibition and preseason games do not count.
The starting point is simple. The first game in NBA history was Knicks vs. Toronto Huskies, and New York won. Under this tracker, that made the Knicks the inaugural unofficial champion. They lost the belt the next day to the Chicago Stags, and the chain moved from there.
Then the project hits its first strange historical problem. On March 29, 1947, the Detroit Falcons beat the Toronto Huskies 66-63. The Falcons then folded and never played another game. In lineal-champion terms, the original belt disappeared with them.
The author handled that by treating the title as vacated and choosing a new championship bout. There were two games on March 30, 1947: Celtics vs. Cleveland Rebels in front of 2,000 fans in Cleveland, and Philadelphia Warriors vs. New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden before 15,152 fans. The tracker uses the Warriors-Knicks game as the restart point.
From there, the replacement lineage runs cleanly. The author says the project follows how the NBA treats its own history, including the BAA as part of the NBA record while excluding the NBL and ABA from this specific chain. Franchise stats also follow the league's official treatment around relocations and expansions.
The final result is the part Knicks fans will enjoy. After more than 70,000 official NBA games and 7,504 unofficial title bouts, the tracker lands on the New York Knicks as the current unofficial champion at the end of the 2025-26 NBA season.
That does not mean the belt always ends with the actual NBA champion. The author specifically notes that it does not reset to the Finals winner every year and includes a disputed-champions section on the site. But this season, the joke wraps itself neatly: the Knicks are listed as both the official champion and the unofficial lineal champion.
The site also produces a few good franchise oddities. The Pacers, Clippers, Nets and Timberwolves have all carried the unofficial belt into an offseason despite never winning an official NBA title. Every NBA franchise ever, including 30 active teams and 15 defunct teams, has appeared in a title bout. Only the pre-1950 Denver Nuggets and Waterloo Hawks have never held the belt.
The harshest detail belongs to Washington. According to the tracker, every active NBA team has held the belt in the last two years except the Wizards. Washington last defended the title on November 15, 2021, then failed to defend it two days later and has lost 14 straight title bouts as the challenger.
The Reddit reaction leaned straight into the Knicks angle. One top comment joked that Knicks fans should not be allowed to see the post because they now get to claim NBA champions, in-season tournament champions and lineal champions at the same time. Another user noted that when a playoff or play-in team holds the belt at the start of the postseason, the belt tends to end with the Finals winner.
There is also a useful rules note under the joke. The tracker treats the NBA Cup as a countable game because it is part of the league's official schedule, and it treats the play-in the same way. That means the belt can move through parts of the modern calendar that did not exist for most of NBA history, while still excluding preseason games that do not belong in the competitive chain.
The early-league cleanup is what makes the project more than a scoreboard filter. The author had to decide how to handle defunct teams, uncertain game timing and the league's own historical boundary between BAA records and later merged leagues. Those choices are subjective, but they are documented, which is the only way a fan-made lineage can stay readable once it reaches the 1940s.
The project is fan-made, not an official NBA record. That is the point. It turns the league's full schedule history into a continuous king-of-the-hill thread, and it gives old one-off games a funny afterlife. A March 1947 Falcons-Huskies result suddenly matters because it broke the first belt. A random Wizards loss in November 2021 matters because it started a long challenger drought.
The author said the site uses game data from sources including a Kaggle dataset by Eoin A Moore and Basketball Reference, especially for the early NBA period. They also set up an API to pull new games directly, with the goal of keeping the NBA tracker updated and later expanding the same idea to other sports.
The bigger appeal is that it connects eras without pretending to compare them seriously. The Knicks, Stags, Falcons, Rebels, Warriors and modern teams all appear in the same chain. It is not power ranking. It is not a legacy argument. It is just a rule applied over time, which is why fans can argue about the edge cases without ruining the fun.
As a basketball story, this is mostly a clever offseason artifact. As a Knicks story, it fits the year perfectly. New York already has the real banner. Now it also gets the internet's lineal belt, a circular ending to a chain that began with the Knicks winning the first game the league counts.
There is no trophy presentation coming from Adam Silver for this one. Still, it is the kind of project NBA fans tend to keep alive: part history lesson, part database, part running bit, and just structured enough to make the bit feel real.
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