2025 NBA Finals: Step aside, millennial stars, we’re about to crown our first Gen Z champion
When Michael Jordan hit the clinching shot over Utah in the 1998 NBA Finals, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander wasn’t even born yet. When Kobe Bryant threw the iconic ‘oop to Shaquille O’Neal in the 2000 Western Conference finals, Tyrese Haliburton was just a few months old.
Feeling old yet?
Millennials certainly do. But nothing makes this millennial feel older than the following fact:
The 2025 NBA Finals winner will be the first Gen Z champion in league history.
Welcome to the Zoomers NBA.
Headlining these Finals are two youthful teams — the Oklahoma City Thunder and Indiana Pacers — whose franchises haven’t won a title in decades and whose average age makes them too young to qualify for the millennial cohort. The rotations of the Thunder and Pacers hardly have any 30-year-olds.
The playoffs used to be the domain of older, savvy vets deep into their 30s, but the league has gotten younger, and the best teams seem to be heading in that direction more rapidly.
Is contending for a title increasingly becoming a young man’s game?
The first Gen Z champ
While there is no official separating line between Gen Z and millennials, leading think tank Pew Research Center has defined 1996 as the last birth year for the millennial generation based on their demographic work looking at technological, economic and social shifts throughout the last century. For the first time in NBA history, all four conference finalists — based on minutes-weighted average age, which accounts for playing time — will fit into the Gen Z category.
This postseason, the Celtics’ minutes-weighted average age was 29.9 years old, a birth year of 1995, making them the last millennial team that was remaining in the playoff field. The much younger and healthier Knicks squad (27.7) ousted them in six games after Jayson Tatum tore his Achilles in Game 4. (For the research study, ages are derived from Basketball Reference’s historical pages using a player’s age on Feb. 1 of the season.) If current trends hold, the Celtics will be the last millennial team to ever win the championship.
The kids are doing more than alright. Led by 26-year-old Gilgeous-Alexander, the Thunder’s minutes-weighted average age clocks in at 24.7 years old. That gives the West’s No. 1 seed a “team” birth year of 2000, three years after the 1997 cutoff for Gen Z. The 25-year-old Haliburton represents the face of the speedy Pacers, who, at an average of 26.2 years old, blitzed past the slightly more senior Cleveland Cavaliers (26.5) and Milwaukee Bucks (28.1) in earlier rounds.
If you’ve been paying attention, the NBA’s elder statesmen have all been kicked to the curb this postseason. There is no LeBron James, no Stephen Curry, no Jimmy Butler left. No Kevin Durant, who didn’t even make the play-in tournament. Not even Jrue Holiday, who won a title with both the Celtics and Bucks; the 34-year-old might as well be known as Uncle Jrue around some of the remaining youngsters.
With an 80-18 record including the postseason, the Thunder are redefining everything that older generations thought they knew about what championship contenders look like. If OKC were to hoist the Larry O’Brien Trophy this season, it would be the second-youngest NBA champion ever, trailing only the 1977 Portland Trail Blazers (24.2) led by a 24-year-old Bill Walton. A modern precedent to these Thunder doesn’t really exist if they pull it off. The youngest championship team of the 21st century was the 2015 Golden State Warriors, who were 26.3 years old, almost two full years older than the current OKC squad.
With the Thunder leading the way, the average age of the two finalists stands at 25.5 years old, which is the lowest on record. As recently as 2014, that same figure was 30.4 years old.
This continues a surprising trend that has seen the NBA get younger and younger in its final stages of the season. A Gen Z champion was only a matter of time, but if late 1990s roster trends held firm, we’d be about 2-3 years away from reaching that point. With these four teams, we’re way ahead of schedule.
While it’s true the league,