NBA Championship Odds: Futures Market for 2025

The 2025 NBA season is in full swing, which means dramatic trades and NBA odds adjustments are underway at the BetMGM online sportsbook.

Minutes after Boston won its 18th championship, BetMGM posted its opening NBA futures market for the current season. Unsurprisingly, the Celtics are still favored to win the title, as they were all last season. 

Here are the updated NBA championship odds at BetMGM, along with my analysis for the evolving market.

Odds to Win NBA Championship 2025

NBA Championship Prediction: Who Will Win the Finals This Year?

Based on the current futures market, the Boston Celtics have an implied 31.75% chance to win the 2025 NBA championship.

NBA Championship Odds: Thunder, Celtics Square Off Atop Table

This year’s race to the NBA Finals has come to focus on two key teams: Oklahoma City and the defending champion Boston Celtics. Both teams are +225 or shorter to win the title; no other team is shorter than 5-to-1 as of March 12.

The Celtics require minimal explanation. After Boston cruised through a bruised East last year and won its first championship in over a decade, they entered the 2024-25 season as obvious favorites. That status has mostly endured, despite the injury concerns that Boston has endured throughout this year’s campaign. 

In the West, Oklahoma City’s deep and skilled roster took the leap this year from one of many contenders to the clear best team. The Thunder aren’t just good – they’re currently an odds-on favorite at BetMGM to finish the regular season with the most wins in the league.

Many NBA seasons are imbued with the feeling that a Finals series between two clear top teams is inevitable. Take, for example, the Warriors-Cavaliers finales of the late 2010s. There was little mystery about how those seasons would end.

But as good as the Celtics and Thunder are, it’s not clear that either team rises to that line of inevitability. 

In the East, Boston will be strained by back-to-back long seasons with an Olympic interlude thrown in the middle for good measure. The Cavaliers are in great position to finish with the No. 1 seed – they’re third in the table at +500 – and the Knicks are starting to eye Boston in the standings. 

As for the West, no team is ever safe in a conference with this kind of year-to-year depth. Denver, in particular, is making a strong push now that Jamal Murray is healthy again. Memphis, Houston, and Minnesota have enough raw talent to compete.

At BetMGM, Boston is the unsurprising recipient of 13.6% of tickets and nearly 15% of all championship handle. 

Overall, five teams have at least 8% of tickets and at least 10% of handle: Boston, Cleveland, Denver, OKC, and the Lakers.

NBA Finals Odds: Lakers, Warriors Charging After Trade Deadline

Few teams are as popular these days as LeBron James’ Lakers or Stephen Curry’s Warriors, so it probably won’t surprise you to learn that there’s a huge uptick in betting activity surrounding those two teams.

Both teams landed huge trades at the NBA trade deadline in February. The Warriors were the beneficiaries of Jimmy Butler’s unhappy ending in Miami, while the Lakers landed the Luka Doncic trade heard round the world.

The departure of Doncic from Dallas has been a boon for Lakers odds and a disaster for the Mavericks. Right before the trade, Dallas was 20-to-1 to win it all; now, with Doncic gone, Anthony Davis hurt, and Kyrie Irving done for the season, the Mavericks are suddenly +50000 to win the West.

Meanwhile, the Lakers have moved from +4000 before the trade, to +1400 right after, to +1000 as of March 12. BetMGM players can’t get enough of Los Angeles, with the Lake Show now accounting for 14.6% of tickets – the most of any team in the championship market. That includes title favorites like the Celtics and Thunder.

As for the Warriors, they’re climbing the table too. Golden State is now +1200 to win the championship and fourth in the Western Conference futures table at +850. About 6% of all championship bets are behind the Warriors, who suddenly look like a top-six seed capable of making a run at the title. 

Los Angeles is getting tons of deserved hype in the wake of the Doncic trade, but don’t sleep on Golden State. The Warriors are just as live, and the market will catch up soon enough.