For many NBA fans, this is where the real season begins. For the next two months, the best basketball players in the world will battle at full intensity, a sight seen far too infrequently in the regular season, for the right to hoist the Larry O’Brien trophy in mid-June.
Pretty much everyone, from casual observers to NBA executives, agrees that the league has an ongoing issue with product quality, but the quality of the NBA playoff product harbors no such concern. This is largely due to the absence of what have become maddeningly routine tenets of the regular season, which include the game’s best and highest-paid players regularly taking nights off for “load management” and what appears to be an unspoken agreement for clubs to play at significantly less than 100% effort up until the point when the stakes are highest.
That time is now, and when NBA players perform as if the outcome matters, there are few spectacles in all of sports that are more entertaining to watch. Whether this compelling two-month window offsets the haphazard doldrums of the regular season is up for debate. But no matter one’s baseline interest in the NBA, it’s fair to say viewership ratchets up proportionally this time of year.
Of course, the associated betting opportunities are endless. Single-game parlays have become the addictive sweet candy of the betting world, in-game betting has become a dominant discipline, and there will always be a place for the standard point spread and total bets.
The NBA futures realm also expands into numerous tempting options, including odds to win NBA Finals MVP, series spread betting and who will capture individual milestones such as top scorer or rebounder in the playoffs.
But oftentimes, a simple NBA prop bet is one that carries significant value, and we’ll explore one of those here. A prop bet that has seen widespread availability at sportsbooks worldwide is whether the NBA Finals champion will come from the Western Conference or Eastern Conference. The West is favored with odds around -140, while the East fetches odds of around +120. Here is a pick and analysis of this NBA futures prop:
Eastern Conference team to win NBA championship (+120)
We believe the East is the value-loaded side because the West’s status as the betting favorite is driven by the fact that the Oklahoma City Thunder, with NBA title odds of around +170, are the front-runners to win it all. Although it feels borderline preposterous to discard the NBA’s winningest regular-season team at 68-14 as a legitimate threat to win it all, we basically have to put faith in fading the Thunder to feel confident in the East.
For one, the Thunder have the league’s youngest roster with an average age of 24.1, and history suggests the NBA champion has a pedigree that includes veteran experience and youthful talent. By comparison, the last two NBA champions, the Boston Celtics and Denver Nuggets, have an average age of 26.3 and 26.1, respectively.
Celtics star Jayson Tatum was in his seventh year before finally breaking through last year, while Nuggets star Nikola Jokic was in his eighth season before hoisting the trophy. Although MVP front-runner Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is in his seventh season, his key supporting cast members, such as Chet Holmgren and Jalen Williams, have five seasons of combined NBA experience.
The Thunder appeared at least one year ahead of schedule with their impressive breakout campaign last year that resulted in the No. 1 seed. But their poise showed cracks against a veteran-laden Dallas Mavericks team, which took a 4-2 win in the conference semifinals.
Although the Thunder could take another step this season, we still expect them to come up a bit short of an NBA championship.
Moreover, taking the East provides a nice insurance policy against the Celtics (+190 to win it all) failing to repeat as champion. If Boston comes up short, we still like a secondary option such as the Cleveland Cavaliers to prevail over any non-Thunder representative from the West, with the Lakers (+1000) looming as the biggest potential threat. The price on the East already has dropped a bit in some markets and likely will plummet further, so we recommend grabbing it now for the best value.
Josh Nagel is the assistant managing editor of SportsLine. He heads into the 2025 NBA playoffs with a lifetime record of 154-117-3 on NBA against-the-spread picks on the site, bringing his followers a profit of nearly $2,700. His accurate NBA futures predictions include picking the Nuggets (+425) to win it all before the 2023 playoffs.
Want more NBA picks?
You can visit SportsLine to see the projection model’s top player prop picks, along with ATS and total selections for every NBA playoff game. You can also view expert betting advice before making NBA picks or player props. Visit SportsLine now to see expert Bruce Marshall’s picks from an expert who is 90-64-1 (+1945) over his last 155 NBA picks.
SportsLine also has multiple experts who specialize in player props, including Mike Barner, who is 137-89 (+3254) over his last 226 player props. Visit SportsLine now to see who Barner is including in his NBA player prop picks for Wednesday, which includes a play on one of the league’s top rookies.
