NBA Championship Odds: Futures Market for 2024-25

The 2024-25 NBA season has arrived, which means dramatic trades and NBA odds adjustments are already 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, 2024-25

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

Based on the current futures market, the Boston Celtics have an implied 26.7% chance to win the 2025 NBA championship.

The Oklahoma City Thunder (+500, 16.7%) are the second-most likely to win the NBA championship, followed by the New York Knicks (+850, 10.5%).

NBA Championship Odds: Cavaliers’ Hot Start Begins to Reshape Market

More than a dozen games into the season, many of the top teams in the NBA standings are the usual suspects – teams that the NBA championship odds market expected to be in contention for this year’s title. That includes Oklahoma City and Boston. 

The surprise has been the Cleveland Cavaliers, who reached 15-0 before finally losing on Nov. 19. 

Now, I don’t think anyone was holding their breath, waiting for the Cavaliers to go 82-0. Cleveland’s perfect start was at least a littleunsustainable, partly because the team as a whole is shooting a league-best 41% from behind the arc.

Still, the Cavs have shown they can be excellent on both sides of the ball, with Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen locking down the paint while Darius Garland runs the offense and Donovan Mitchell leads the scoring. 

In short, it’s a team that could push Boston for the No. 1 seed in the East.

At BetMGM, Cleveland has seen some buy-in from public bettors, attracting 8% of tickets and 4.5% of handle in the Finals market as of Nov. 20. The Cavaliers are down to +1300 after opening at 50-to-1. 

Bettors much prefer to target Cleveland in the lower-stakes market for the Eastern Conference. At BetMGM, Cleveland has sucked up nearly 33% of the ticket volume to win the East, supplanting preseason darling New York as the preferred challenger to Boston. 

For now, the Celtics still have a small ticket lead of less than one percentage. However, Boston still has a huge discrepancy in handle after some very large bets came in on the Celtics before the season. A whopping 60% of the Eastern Conference handle is backing Boston.

NBA Title Odds: Western Conference Teams Attract Big Betting Action

Unsurprisingly, the reigning champion Celtics have an early lead in ticket count with 17% of the market.

Overall, though, a plurality of NBA futures bettors are eyeing potential Western Conference champions as the 2024-25 NBA winner.

There’s just one problem – everyone likes a different team in the West. A whopping seven of the top nine most popular championship tickets at BetMGM are teams from the Western Conference. Here’s the breakdown:

• Boston Celtics (17.3% tickets)
• Denver Nuggets (9.7%)
• Cleveland Cavaliers (8%)
• Oklahoma City Thunder (7.8%)
• Los Angeles Lakers (7.4%)
• Dallas Mavericks (6.2%)
• Golden State Warriors (5.4%)
• Minnesota Timberwolves (5.3%)
• Phoenix Suns (5.3%)

There’s also the Spurs, a popular preseason target, that have now been watered down to 2% of ticket share.

Many of those tickets are obviously dead on arrival. The Lakers, Spurs, and Warriors all have great individual players, and one of the three has won the West a staggering 20 times since 1999. Yet it seems unlikely that any of them could win an NBA championship this season without major roster upgrades on the fly.

Denver has three-time MVP Nikola Jokić and has a good matchup against Boston, but the Nuggets’ roster situation seems to be trending in the wrong direction since winning the title in 2022.

Phoenix is over-indexed on jump shooting and hasn’t done anything substantive since making the Finals in 2021. The roster has been dramatically overhauled since then.

Minnesota and Dallas could grow into real contenders, but we need to see more from the on-court product after major additions this offseason.

All that Western skew has potentially tilted the odds market toward the East. Value hunters should look to potential contenders like Cleveland and Orlando, both of which have healthier returns and far less playoff competition to consider.