How to Bet on NBA Finals
There are a lot of people who believe the NBA regular season is too long, at 82 games and almost seven months. And much of that feeling is driven by the trend we’ve seen over the last few years of superstar players taking more and more games off to “load manage” during those 82 games.
It is truly annoying when you put a bet down on an NBA game, and the offensive star you were counting on decides to take a seat for 48 minutes and completely sinks your bet. If this has ever happened to you, you probably are one of the haters of the NBA regular season, and who can blame you.
However, where the NBA regular season fails you, the NBA Playoffs richly reward you. The slog of the basketball season is replaced by a series of seven-game sprints to the NBA Finals. It’s daily intensity and a war of attrition, all in the hopes of winning an NBA championship and basketball immortality.
It is the best basketball you will ever see, and it provides the best possible betting anywhere in the sport.
NBA Finals Single-Game Betting
The most basic bets that you played during the regular season can, of course, be played during the NBA Finals, minus the fear that one of the stars will rest on the bench to save himself for the next game. The basic bets you can place on each Finals game are:
- Point Spread
- Moneyline
- Totals
If you are betting during the first round of the playoffs, you will notice that the point spreads and moneylines are largely based on regular-season results and playoff seeding. So when you do your research for those bets, the season series between teams has significant relevance. Pay attention to those games.
By the time the NBA Finals rolls around, it has been weeks, if not months, since the two teams played each other, and the regular season is a distant memory. How teams have done to get to the Finals is far more critical in parsing your bets than how they did to get to the playoffs.
The pace of play in the playoffs, player rotations, and how the teams have handled adversity are all part of the equation you should examine. But the health of each team and how many games they had to play to get past their other playoff opponents are perhaps the most important factors to consider.
Before placing any NBA Finals bet, it’s important to know that the overall series winner trends heavily in the direction of the favorite. But rarely is the series won 4-0, so when betting on each individual game, there is almost always going to be upsets.
NBA Finals Series Betting
When betting on the NBA Finals, it’s hard to resist placing a wager on the series as a whole. It’s one bet on the overall winner, and the game-to-game results don’t matter, as long as the team lifting the Larry O’Brien Trophy at the end of it all is the team you bet.
There are no point spreads or over/unders to consider. It’s a simple odds-based bet that tends to pay heavily to the underdog and not so great to the favorite.
Consider that in 2018 a bet on the Warriors to beat the Cavaliers paid just -1075. Golden State completed the sweep, so your bet was a winner. But even with a bet of $1,000, you got back less than $100 in winnings. In 2017 a bet on the Warriors paid a more reasonable -300, but even then, you had to place a big bet to get back modest winnings.
This is largely driven by the overall history of the NBA Finals. The top seed in the playoffs is the overwhelming majority winner of the NBA Finals. The lowest seed to ever win was a 6th seed, and that has only happened once (Houston Rockets, 1995). There has never been a 5th seed winner, and only once has a 4th seed won (Los Angeles Lakers, 1969).
In fact, in the 71-year history of the NBA Finals, the championship has been won by a team that began the playoffs as a No. 1 seed 49 times.
This doesn’t mean that you always should bet the top seed. The Warriors were No. 2 when they won the last of their dynasty, as were the Raptors when they ended that dynasty. The Mavericks were No. 3 when they beat the Heat in 2011, which is where the Spurs were seeded when they won the last of their four titles and beat a young LeBron James, making his first Finals appearance.
Series Correct Score
If you want to really get specific with your Finals bet and increase your possible payout, there is a correct score bet. Instead of just picking which team will win the Finals, you pick the final series score. If the teams are mismatched, go for the 4-0 sweep. It takes a small payout on a heavy favorite and makes it a far more valuable bet.
On the flip side, if the two teams are evenly matched, betting on a 4-3 series score may be a way for you to add value to your Finals bet. However, make sure and do your research. The last time the NBA Finals went the full seven games was 2010 when the Lakers beat the Celtics, and head coach Phil Jackson won the last of his 11 NBA Championships.
Series Total Games
The final type of NBA Finals series bet you can place is on the over/under of games played.
Just as with an over/under bet on an individual game, you don’t care who wins. You just care about how quickly or how long the series takes. If it’s a 4-0 sweep and you bet under five games, that’s a big win. And if you bet the over, there is nothing better than a full seven-game series to solidify your victory.
It’s worth knowing that throughout NBA Playoff history, the most common series length is six games.
NBA Finals Proposition Betting
Those last two types of series bets – series correct score and series total games – are proposition bets. But because the joyous cup of NBA Finals props overfloweth with money-making opportunities, we decided to include those two props in the above section.
As for the NBA Finals proposition bets in this section, the most common bets you will find are as follows.
- NBA Final MVP
- NBA Finals Scoring Leader
- Individual Player Points Per Game (Over/Under)
The less played props are:
- Over/Under on Fouls
- Over/Under on Technical Fouls
- Will a Player be Ejected?
- Will there be a Game-Winning Buzzer-Beater?
- Will there be an on-court streaker?
- First Team to Score 10 Points
As with the other big proposition betting day (Super Bowl Sunday), the NBA Finals props can be broken down into player props (the over/under on a point guard’s assists) and team props (which team will hit the most three-point baskets).
But unlike with the Super Bowl, NBA Finals props come in both series form (how many total minutes will LeBron James play) and new prop bets for every single game (which big man gets the most rebounds in Game 1).
As good as the Super Bowl proposition betting can be, a strong case can be made that having a full two weeks of proposition bets makes the NBA Finals the true king of the prop bet.
Sports Betting How To Guide
How Money Line Works?
Moneyline betting is by far the easiest way to place a sports wager. There are no point spreads to parse, no garbage-time free throws to ruin your betting day, and no last-minute meaningless touchdowns to take you from a winner to a loser.
How to Bet Odds
When we, as sports fans, learned our multiplication tables, we aced the number 7. Seven, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42 were easy because we all watched football on the weekends. Multiplication by sevens, then add a three, a six after a missed PAT.
How to Bet on NFL Games
Baseball is America’s pastime, but football is America’s crazed passion, with its weekly schedule of games, millions of television viewers across the country and the world, and the billion-dollar stadiums that serve as Sunday cathedrals in 32 American cities.
What is the Spread?
If you are a golfer or have ever played on a bowling team, think of a point spread like a handicap. It is a way for two teams of differing abilities to play each other on equal footing. The better team, and the favorite in the game, gives a certain amount …
