2013-14 NBA G League Finals

Result

Fort Wayne's only D-League/G League title, capping a perfect 6-0 postseason as the No. 1 seed; the Mad Ants lost a Finals rematch to Santa Cruz the very next season.

Games

Finals context

The 2013-14 Fort Wayne Mad Ants capped one of the most dominant single-season playoff runs the league had yet produced, finishing the regular season 34-16 to claim the top seed in their division and conference, then sweeping through the postseason entirely, going a perfect 6-0 to become only the third team in league history to run the table through the playoffs without a loss (following the 2007-08 Idaho Stampede's earlier three-game Finals win and the Vipers' undefeated run the season before). Fort Wayne closed out the Finals against Santa Cruz in two games, capturing the first D-League championship in franchise history. The Mad Ants' most visible individual storyline that season belonged to guard Ron Howard, who backed up his contributions during Fort Wayne's title run by winning the league's Slam Dunk Contest and earning All-NBA D-League Third Team honors in 2014, on top of having already won back-to-back Sportsmanship Awards in 2013 and 2014 -- a rare combination of on-court flash and off-court reputation that made him one of the more recognizable faces in the league that season. No Finals MVP award was presented, as the honor was still a year away from its introduction in 2014-15, but Fort Wayne's perfect postseason record spoke for itself as validation of a genuinely complete team effort rather than any single dominant performer. The championship also set up one of the more poignant sequels in recent league history. Fort Wayne returned to the Finals the very next season, 2014-15, in a rematch against the very same Santa Cruz Warriors team it had just beaten -- only this time the outcome flipped entirely, with the Mad Ants swept in two games as Santa Cruz claimed its own first franchise title. That Santa Cruz roster notably included Seth Curry and Mychel Thompson, younger brothers respectively of Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson of the Golden State Warriors, whose own NBA dynasty was just beginning to take shape at the same time; the family connections gave the Santa Cruz D-League affiliate an unusual degree of built-in national attention for a minor-league team. Fort Wayne's 2013-14 title remains, to this day, the only D-League/G League championship in franchise history, a high-water mark the Mad Ants have not been able to replicate in the years since, even as they have remained a fixture of the league (eventually as the Indiana Pacers' single affiliate) through multiple subsequent rounds of league expansion, restructuring, and format changes that transformed the D-League into the modern NBA G League over the following decade.

Sources

• Wikipedia — Fort Wayne Mad Ants
• Wikipedia — List of NBA G League champions