There was never supposed to be a winner. Not really. Every season, Phillip and Joe tore up their rosters and started over — new teams, new stars, same grudge. There was no dynasty to defend here, no franchise to protect; the redraft erased everything but the rivalry itself. Eleven times they built from scratch, and eleven times the league found a way to hand the trophy to whoever hadn't won it last. By the time the dust settled on Season 11, the two of them had somehow split the difference right down the middle: five championships apiece, and nothing resolved.
The Early Rounds
Phillip struck first. Running it back with the 76ers, he opened the era with a 9-1 playoff run and a Finals MVP from Karl-Anthony Towns, while Joe, behind the Spurs, was bounced in the 1st round without much of a fight. Season 2 brought a fresh draft and a fresh set of jerseys — Phillip landed with the Thunder, Joe with the Bulls — but the result was the same story with new names on the front. Phillip won again, a LeBron James Finals MVP sealing his second straight title, while Joe's Bulls turned in the single best regular season of the entire era — a perfect 14-0 — only to watch it evaporate in the first round of the playoffs. Two seasons in, it looked like a rout.
It wasn't. New rosters, new fight — Joe came out with the Clippers in Season 3 and swept Phillip's Celtics in the Finals for his first ring. He didn't stop there. Redrafted again as the Knicks in Season 4, he swept the Rockets. Redrafted again as the Spurs in Season 5, he won it a third straight time, Kristaps Porzingis claiming back-to-back Finals MVPs for two completely different champions. Three seasons, three different teams, three championships. What looked like Phillip's era at the start had flipped entirely; Joe led 3-2 and was pulling away.
Phillip Answers
Just as fast as Joe built his lead, Phillip erased it. New team, same result — his Nuggets ran a perfect 9-0 through the Season 6 playoffs behind Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, tying it back up at 3-3. Season 7 was even more emphatic: with an entirely new roster in the Hawks, Phillip matched his own perfect postseason from a season earlier, going 9-0 again — and Bam Adebayo, the very player who'd beaten Phillip in the Season 3 Finals wearing a Clippers jersey, delivered the Finals MVP for him this time. Two championships back-to-back, two completely different champions. Phillip took the lead for the first time since Season 2, 4-3.
The response came immediately. Joe, now running the Celtics, beat Phillip's Lakers 3-1 in a Season 8 Finals that read like a throwback, Kevin Durant sweeping both Season and Finals MVP. Tied again, 4-4. Then Season 9 turned into one of the stranger footnotes of the era: Phillip's Heat put together a flawless 14-0 regular season behind a Giannis Antetokounmpo MVP campaign, and still couldn't get out of the 1st round — while Joe's Grizzlies took the title behind a Kawhi Leonard Finals MVP. (The playoff box scores from that series were lost entirely to an in-game file error; only the regular-season numbers survived.) Joe led again, 5-4, with two seasons left to play.
The Stretch Run
Down one with two to go, Phillip delivered exactly when he needed to. A new roster in the Warriors matched the era's gold standard with a second perfect 14-0 regular season in Season 10, this time finishing the job with an RJ Barrett Finals MVP performance to tie the series at 5-5 heading into the final season. Whoever won Season 11 — whatever team they happened to draft — would walk away the definitive champion of the entire 2k25 era.
No Winner, No Surrender
Season 11 had a winner-take-all setup and refused to give anyone the storybook ending. Phillip, drafted into the Bulls, ground out a 12-2 regular season and a 7-3 playoff run all the way to the Finals — the deepest either side had gone with the whole era on the line — and still lost. Joe, back with the Spurs, got a breakout season from rookie Matas Buzelis (Rookie of the Year, Clutch Player of the Year) but couldn't get past the 2nd round. Neither man reached the title. The all-time count froze exactly where it started the season: five championships each.
No tiebreaker. No sudden-death season. Just eleven years of redrafts, trash talk, and Finals runs that somehow balanced out to a dead heat. That's how the 2k25 era ended — a stalemate nobody designed and nobody could escape.