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The 2026 NBA Finals get going on Wednesday night, and three members of the New York Knicks will look to make some history beyond leading the franchise to its first NBA title since 1973.
Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart and Mikal Bridges were also teammates at the college level, sharing the court for two seasons at Villanova University. All three were members of the 2016 squad that won the school’s second national title in men’s basketball, and Brunson and Bridges were teammates on the 2018 championship-winning team.
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With a series win over the Spurs, the “Nova Knicks” would become the fifth set of teammates to have won NCAA and NBA titles. Let’s look at the first four and their production in their first NBA Finals appearances together.
Stats credit: Basketball Reference
Bill Russell and K.C. Jones (University of San Francisco, Boston Celtics)
Russell accomplished a feat that has not been done since: he ended his collegiate career having won back-to-back national titles with the Dons in 1955 and 1956, then went on to win an NBA title as a rookie in 1957. Jones could have been a member of that 1956-57 Celtics squad, but he served two years in the Army before entering the NBA as a rookie during the 1958-59 campaign.
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Boston won the 1959 NBA Finals in a four-game sweep of the Minneapolis Lakers, with Russell averaging a staggering 29.5 rebounds per game. The Celtics center also averaged 9.3 points and 5.3 assists, and at the time, the NBA did not record steals or blocked shots. As for Jones, he only appeared in two of the four games.
The 1959 title would be the first of eight straight titles the Celtics would win, with Russell and Jones on each squad.
John Havlicek and Larry Siegfried (The Ohio State University, Boston Celtics)
Havlicek and Siegfried were part of the Ohio State team that won the school’s first (and, to this point, only) national title in 1960. They could have won two straight, but a loss to an Oscar Robertson-led Cincinnati squad in the 1961 title game ended the Buckeyes’ quest for a repeat.
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Siegfried, the third overall pick of the Cincinnati Royals in the 1961 draft, would not…
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Publish date : 2026-06-02 19:21:00
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