LAS VEGAS (AP) — The NBA Cup final doesn't count. New York will enter with an 18-7 record. San Antonio will enter with an 18-7 record. And when Tuesday night's game between the Knicks and Spurs is over, those records will be unchanged.
But the game will have plenty of meaning. The teams are sure of that.
A trophy, some bragging rights and a ton of money will be at stake when the Knicks and Spurs play in the NBA Cup title game. It'll be the first time those franchises have met with a trophy on the line since San Antonio topped New York in the 1999 NBA Finals.
“It's a high-stakes game that both teams are going to be very invested in winning," Spurs star Victor Wembanyama said. “It just shows that we are preparing and we will pass the next step for more significant games in the playoffs. This is a complicated explanation, but it’s as simple as that: As competitors, we want to win every game, and this one brings something new on the table, so we want to win it even more.”
It will be the end of the third in-season event: The Los Angeles Lakers beat Indiana in Year 1 when it was part of what was simply called the In-Season Tournament, and Milwaukee beat Oklahoma City last year after the rebranding to the NBA Cup. At stake: $318,560 per player with a standard contract on the winning team — they've secured $212,373 each from the Cup bonus pool by getting to the final, and the winners' share jumps to $530,933 apiece.
“You’re not winning or gaining anything in your record, but you’re going out there and competing,” Knicks guard Jalen Brunson said. “You’re playing for more than just yourself. You’re playing for your team, your organization and your city. There’s a lot at stake besides the record. You go out there and compete no matter what.”
Added Spurs guard De'Aaron Fox: “People like money. It is what it is. That's life.”
The financial payoff is one thing. There's another payoff that could come this spring for the Spurs and Knicks.
The four previous Cup finalists — the Lakers and Pacers, then the Thunder and Bucks — all went to the playoffs after playing for this trophy, with the Pacers making the East finals in 2024 and the Thunder winning the title last season.
“No matter if it’s the Cup, NBA Finals, winning any game, when you get that feeling of winning, it’s addictive,” Knicks forward Karl-Anthony Towns said. “Obviously, I want us to have that mindset where we’re addicted to the next championship if we can win this one. I think this is a great start for us to understand the standards needed to win at a high level, at a championship level.”
Every NBA Cup game counts in the standings, except the final. The NBA regular season is 82 games long and the league — in the Cup era — gives each club an 80-game schedule over the summer, with two more games to be filled in depending on how they perform during the group stage of the tournament.
For the Spurs and Knicks, those two extra games were the Cup quarterfinals and semifinals. This would be an 83rd game, so the league decided when it added the tournament that the Cup final wouldn't count in the official records or stats for that season.
It won't change the way the teams play.
“You treat it like a regular game,” Brunson said.
Wembanyama will likely remain on some sort of minutes restriction; he played 21 minutes off the bench on Saturday night in San Antonio’s 111-109 win over Oklahoma City, his first game back after missing 12 with a strained left calf.
The Spurs came into Monday still deciding whether to start Wembanyama against the Knicks.
“When it comes to a guy like Wemby, because at his size and his skillset, nine times out of 10 he’s going to miss because he misses,” Knicks coach Mike Brown said. “But we have some pretty good defenders with length, and hopefully they can, at the point of attack, try to make it as difficult as possible with him, knowing that they have help behind them.”
The Knicks and Spurs both got to the Cup final with 5-1 records in the tournament; they each were 3-1 in group play, then went on the road for quarterfinal wins (New York over Toronto, San Antonio over the Lakers) before New York topped Orlando and San Antonio beat the Thunder in Saturday's semifinals in Las Vegas.
And now, a game that means nothing. Or everything, depending on perspective.
“I think we go into (Tuesday) trying to win the NBA Cup, and that’s the approach,” Spurs coach Mitch Johnson said. “Our guys are really, really excited to be here. They’ve been excited since the start of it. ... I think we’ve seen our group really embrace the Cup. We’ve earned the right to be here, and I think we’re going to attack the game and be really fired up to try to go win it.”
AP NBA: https://apnews.com/hub/NBA
New York Knicks' Jalen Brunson (11) lines up a pass past Toronto Raptors' Jamal Shead during the first half of an NBA Cup basketball game in Toronto, Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025. (Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press via AP)
San Antonio Spurs forward Victor Wembanyama (1) stands on court before film crews after playing in an NBA Cup semifinals basketball game against the Oklahoma City Thunder, Saturday, Dec. 13, 2025, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Ronda Churchill)
TEL AVIV, Israel & NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec 16, 2025--
Dux, an agentic exposure management platform built for the speed of AI-driven cyberattacks, today emerged from stealth with a $9 million seed round led by Redpoint, TLV Partners and Maple Capital, with participation from leading cybersecurity executives from CrowdStrike, Okta and Armis.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251216193951/en/
Dux was created to eliminate exposures before they become attacks — by uncovering what's actually exploitable and finding the fastest path to safety. Already supporting major U.S. enterprises, the company was founded by Or Latovitz, Amit Nir and Nadav Geva, all graduates of the IDF’s elite Talpiot program who led large-scale offensive and defensive cybersecurity and AI initiatives for national agencies. Their work earned multiple national innovation awards and involved building operational systems deployed at a national scale.
This significant seed financing will support the expansion of Dux’s R&D team in Tel Aviv, grow its U.S. go-to-market organization, and accelerate development of the platform’s agentic capabilities across exploitability analysis, lightweight mitigation and continuous exposure management.
The Problem: Exploitation Now Moves Faster Than Remediation
Enterprises have long struggled with an increasing volume of assets, scanners and vulnerabilities — more than teams can realistically triage. AI has exacerbated this problem by dramatically increasing the speed at which vulnerabilities are exploited. Mandiant reports that, in just two years, the average time-to-exploit has collapsed from 32 days to just 5 days. Earlier this year, Anthropic documented the first real-world, AI-orchestrated cyber-espionage campaign where attackers used agentic AI not just for guidance but to execute attacks autonomously.
“These attacks don’t wait for patch cycles,” said Or Latovitz, co-founder and CEO of Dux. “Defenders need rapid insight into what’s actually exploitable and the means to reduce those exposures effectively, at the pace modern attacks demand.”
Dux’s Solution: An Agentic Approach Aligned to CTEM
Dux aligns with Gartner’s Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) framework, but applies it through agentic AI workers designed to reason like expert analysts at scale. Instead of generating more findings or another prioritization layer, Dux focuses on the essential question: What matters now, and what’s the fastest path to safety?
Dux’s AI-workers continuously analyze exploitability across the entire environment, determining whether existing controls already block a potential attack path, surfacing lightweight mitigations that can eliminate risk faster than a full patch and routing targeted remediation to identified owners only when necessary.
“Most scanner findings aren’t exploitable once you account for real context,” said Amit Nir, co-founder and CPO. “But discovering that manually takes expert judgment and deep knowledge of the environment. Agentic AI lets teams apply that level of reasoning across every vulnerability and asset, every time.”
The Shift: A New Operating Model for Vulnerability Management
“Attackers are moving faster than ever, and defenders need a platform built for that pace,” said Erica Brescia, managing director at Redpoint. “Dux puts vulnerabilities in the context of their actual threat to a business, and then uses AI agents exactly where speed and precision matter most to resolve them. At last, and with Dux, vulnerability management is something teams can finally get ahead of — overcoming what was an insurmountable hurdle during my time at GitHub.”
Dux represents a shift from periodic scans and manual triage to continuous, agentic investigation. The platform determines what’s viable for an attacker in a given environment and moves organizations toward the fastest safe fix, whether that’s a configuration change, a control update or a targeted patch. The result is a materially smaller attack surface and a far shorter path from vulnerability discovery to resolution.
“Every time a zero-day drops or a critical vulnerability hits the news, teams need answers fast. Our customers spin up AI-workers to investigate those vulnerabilities across their environment within minutes,” said Nadav Geva, co-founder and CTO. “That’s a level of rapid, environment-specific research that simply wasn’t possible before.”
“Most security tools show you what’s vulnerable. Dux shows you what attackers can actually use — and that’s a game changer,” said Rona Segev, co-founder and managing partner at TLV Partners. “Their AI agents bring a perspective that’s been missing from exposure management, and the Dux team has precisely the kind of experience you want steering a shift of this magnitude.”
About Dux
Dux is an agentic exposure management platform that rapidly uncovers what is truly exploitable in an environment and eliminates it fast. The platform uses AI-workers to perform continuous exploitability analysis, surface control-based mitigations and accelerate remediation across the entire environment. Founded by veterans of national-scale cyber and AI programs, Dux is backed by Redpoint, TLV Partners and Maple Capital and operates in the United States and Israel.
Learn more at https://dux.io/.
Dux founders (left to right): Amit Nir, CPO; Or Latovitz, CEO; and Nadav Geva, CTO
