The path of a Knicks-Spurs NBA Finals basketball starts with all 30 teams

The cast of the NBA's grandest stage is always easy to identify. This year, there's Victor Wembanyama and Jalen Brunson. The Spurs' Coyote and Spike Lee. The ex-Knicks and Spurs in the crowd. Head coaches Mike Brown and Mitch Johnson. And of course, New York's celebrity fans courtside.

But, the most avoidable yet arguably important supporting character of each NBA Finals? The 29.5-inch official Wilson-branded 100% genuine leather cover basketball.

Karl-Anthony Towns will grab it from the air. Stephon Castle could punch it through the basket. Josh Hart surely will dive in the stands to secure it. De'Aaron Fox can dash up the floor while dribbling it.

As New York and San Antonio face off in the 2026 NBA Finals (Game 2 on Friday) the basketballs in action have all had a winding trip to Frost Bank Center and Madison Square Garden. They've actually been thudding off the hardwood for months across the NBA. It's how the league makes sure the game's biggest stage has the right bounces.

Every January, the NBA sends four Finals-branded basketballs to all 30 teams. The mission is simple: Break them in before the league collects and redistributes them for the NBA Finals.

"Obviously, this is the most pivotal series of games we have. And so, you want them to have, I keep using game-ready, but game-ready basketballs which is different than out-of-the-box basketballs," Christopher Arena, the NBA's head of on-court and brand partnerships, told ESPN.

Similar to Spalding, Wilson uses leather supplied by Chicago's Horween Leather Company. But one key difference emerged when Wilson became the NBA's official ball provider in the 2021-22 season.

Under Spalding, used game balls were sent back to be laser-engraved with the NBA Finals script. Wilson's Finals basketballs are pre-produced and distributed to teams months in advance to be broken in.

Wilson has a protocol at their Ada, Ohio, facility that Arena said the league calls "waking the windings of the ball." Wilson pre-balances them on a machine that dribbles rapidly, while another sends them against a wooden panel.

But there's nothing to substitute sweat, oils and dirt that can come from a player, court and environment. What makes leather unique is that it's an organic material derived from a living thing (in the NBA's case, the leather comes from cowhides). Therefore, there's a natural aging process, referred to in the fashion industry as "patina" -- a fancy way of saying it gets stained.

"Those elements sort of break the ball in. It gives it its darker color. It gives it a little bit more tack over time," Arena said. "And so, it takes, depending on who you ask and how much play, like three to four weeks to get that right."

Any equipment manager around the league will explain that the veterans won't play with the new balls, Arena added. The job falls to rookies, G-League players or ball attendants. The Knicks' and Spurs' equipment managers were not made available for this story.

Unlike composite basketballs that are "made of synthetically produced material that feels like leather," the NBA's official game ball uses genuine leather.

Leather doesn't always have to be broken in either, Keanan Duffty, a professor at the University of Southern California, told ESPN.

Duffty, a member of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, explained the process of breaking in a basketball, which is "very much a utility. It's very practical.

"Leather reacts to humidity. ... It can stretch. Depending on the heat in its environment, it can change the way it behaves. So I would think that basketball players don't want to be surprised by that on the court," Duffty said. "They want it to go through this process of being utilized so they know how it's going to behave when they're actually on the court for a game."

Every time a ball bounces, it stretches, going through an aging process. Leather naturally softens, but the pressure it endures while hitting the court can cause it to soften, too.

Moisture impacts that process in a unique way. The friction that a ball goes through when feeling the court or rim would change according to the moisture in the skin of the ball, Duffty explained. The moisture too increases over time of a game with more people touching the ball, resulting in a different behavior.

All of these factors lead to a preferred game experience for the players, especially important on the heightened stage of the NBA Finals.

"If you take the new balls out of the box ... and you shoot for an hour, the tips of your fingers will be bloody, just because the thread is so new," the Golden State Warriors' then-equipment/travel manager Eric Housen told ESPN in 2015.

The league entrusts all 30 of its teams to approach the process their own way.

Most of the time, those basketballs remain hidden from public view. But occasionally they surface in the open, creating a rare, bizarre scene when teams are spotted shooting around with an NBA Finals basketball before the playoffs.

Someone saw basketballs for the 2025 series at a Denver Nuggets game that season, prompting theories that the NBA had "leaked its script." A 2024 version was found during warmups at a Memphis Grizzlies game in March of that year.

"Most of the time, I think the equipment managers are really good about trying to keep it in the practice facility. And it's not a secret," he said. "Like, it's not the end of the world. It's just a little weird to have it on a court on March 2 on a Tuesday, you know?"

The minute a team is eliminated from postseason contention or in the playoffs, they will begin sending the their Finals basketballs back to the NBA, and the league will designate them by conference.

The teams at the last stage keep their own basketballs. The league supplements the rest so that it can hopefully fill up a rack in a game and practice facility. That total reaches 38 basketballs.

"Through the months of April, May, we are just collecting them. And then as soon as we know who the Western, Eastern Conference participants are in the Finals, we ship them right to them," Arena said. "It's challenging when you get to Game 6s and 7s and there's a tight turnaround because we want them playing with them ASAP."

Case in point: the 2026 Western Conference finals between the Spurs and Oklahoma City Thunder.

With the Thunder up 3-2 in the series, the NBA sent Finals basketballs to Oklahoma City. Therefore, if the Thunder closed out the Spurs, they had theirs ready once they landed back home. If San Antonio sent it to seven, the basketballs would be ready for either team regardless of the winner since the series shifted to Oklahoma City.

The Spurs won in Game 7 and as they prepared to depart, one task remained: grabbing the basketballs. Oklahoma City's equipment manager handed them to San Antonio, which took them on the plane.

"We wanted to maximize the amount of time they had to play with those basketballs, knowing those were going to be the balls they were going to play the NBA Finals with," Arena said.

One more important bounce en route to the Larry O'Brien Trophy.br/]