The 40-before-20 club for the 2025-2026 NBA season is set.
With the Boston Celtics’ defeat at the hands of the Denver Nuggets on Wednesday night, there will be only three teams that qualify under Phil Jackson’s tried-and-true rule for NBA championship contenders. For those unaware, as I diagram every year, the legendary coach once asserted that a title-caliber NBA team must win 40 games before it loses 20 to be taken seriously as a group capable of winning that year’s Larry O’Brien Trophy. It’s a principle tied to great teams that build good habits in the context of a long regular season and accrue enough of a lead in the standings to avoid burning the jets through all 82 games.
Over 90 percent of all champions in the last 46 years have won 40 games before losing 20.
Here are the 40-before-20 teams for the 2025-2026 NBA season:
- The reigning NBA champion Oklahoma City Thunder.
- The upstart East-leading Detroit Pistons.
- The ascending San Antonio Spurs.
Based on the 40-before-20 rule, it stands to reason that one of these three squads will very likely be the 2026 NBA champion come June.
Of course, we shouldn’t necessarily treat 40-before-20 as an end-all, be-all type of rule. It’s simply a matter of prior established precedent and the fact that great teams tend to win 40 before losing 20. But in a modern context, 40-before-20 might not hold as much water as it used to. In the last three years alone, a No. 8 seed (the 2023 Miami Heat), a No. 5 seed (the 2024 Dallas Mavericks), and a No. 4 seed (the 2025 Indiana Pacers) all qualified for the NBA Finals. None of them won it all, of course. But if not for a Tyrese Haliburton Achilles injury in Game 7 of the 2025 finals, perhaps the underdog Pacers’ story ends differently.
If you make the Finals alone, regardless of whether you won 40 before 20, you have a chance to win it all. Why? Because we still have to play the games. One of these years, a team that didn’t qualify for 40-before-20 will finally break through and win the championship again. I will contend that 40-before-20 should and will hold true most of the time, but not always.
On that note, the 2026 season is shaping up to be one where an outlier team is the last one standing.
Here are a few NBA squads who missed out on 40-before-20 in 2026 but still certainly seem capable of winning it all this summer.
Which NBA teams that didn’t win 40 before losing 20 could win the 2026 NBA title?
As long as they roster three-time league MVP Nikola Jokić, I believe the Denver Nuggets, who won the 2023 title, will always have a chance at the NBA title. This year, Denver has surrounded Jokić with the best team on paper that he’s ever had. Health, in fact, was arguably the biggest reason the Nuggets fell short of the 40-before-20 mark. Health, for all intents and purposes, may also ultimately determine whether this version of Denver can reach its peak.
It may well depend on the availability of Jayson Tatum, but you should doubt the Boston Celtics at your own risk. In what was supposed to be a transitional year, Joe Mazzulla’s team has plugged away at the near-top of the Eastern Conference standings all year. Jaylen Brown and Derrick White have predictably been brilliant. Key reserve Payton Pritchard has levelled up. And breakout talents like Neemias Queta have fueled the resurgent Celtics. If they get their face of the franchise back with plenty of on-ramp before the playoffs, the Celtics very well could win their second title in three seasons.
I’m also high on the New York Knicks. Jalen Brunson’s and Karl-Anthony Towns’ defensive limitations are not enough for me to overlook what the Knicks are capable of. At the time of this writing, the Knicks have won 12 of their last 16 games. Any team capable of piecing together a midseason stretch like that deserves to be taken seriously as championship-worthy. The Knicks were a few bounces away from their first NBA Finals in a quarter-century last spring. Perhaps this is the year they make it back.
If this indeed is the sort of NBA season where a team on the outside of the 40-before-20 club wins the title, I’d venture to guess that one of these three mentioned squads will be the one to do it.
This article originally appeared on For The Win: Here are the 2026 NBA 40-before-20 title contenders, per Phil Jackson
