Regardless of where you live in the world, there aren’t many bigger events on the sports calendar than the National Basketball Association’s championship series. Millions of people from across the globe tune in each year to see who will be crowned the latest NBA champion, and the Finals always deliver as a showcase for the greatest basketball talent on earth.
In this article, we’ll look deeper at the history of the NBA Finals, explain how you can bet on it, and most importantly, we’ll recommend the best places to bet on it.
But first…
Because betting on the action only adds to the excitement! Whether it’s wagering on the favorite, the underdog, how many points will be scored, or getting involved in live betting, NBA Finals betting allows you to feel as if you’re part of the game.
Entertainment value aside, there is also a great opportunity to make some money betting on the NBA Finals. That’s because a lot of the betting action in the NBA Finals comes from people who don’t normally bet on basketball and are just cheering for their favorite teams or players, not necessarily the most likely outcomes. That can open up some great value for anyone who bets with their head, not their heart.
The emergence of online betting sites over the past 20 years have made it incredibly easy to bet on the NBA Finals. However, before you rush to join the first betting site you can find, you need to do a little bit of homework. While there are a lot of safe betting sites online, there are just as many (if not more) sites that aren’t deserving of your trust or your money.
Before you sign up and make a deposit at a site to start betting on the NBA Finals, you need to ensure that your money will be safe. Since NBA Finals betting is so popular, a lot of shady sites will be offering huge bonuses and other perks in order to attract new players. It’s easy to get blinded by the lucrative offers, but your first priority should be making sure that any site you join has a long and strong history of paying out winning players. The size of bonus you get or the amount of money you win on the NBA Finals won’t matter at all if the site you join ends up stiffing you on your payouts.
We don’t say this to scare you away from joining a betting site and wagering on the NBA Finals. As stated earlier, there are quite a few online sportsbooks who have rock-solid histories for being ethical and reliable in the online gambling space. Here are several that we recommend as sites that will not only give you a great NBA Finals betting experience but also the peace of mind that comes with knowing your money is safe.
Even though there are lots of ways to bet on regular-season NBA games, online betting sites seem to invent even more options every year when the NBA Finals come around!
Here’s a closer look at the most popular types of wagers available for betting on the NBA Finals.
The point spread is the most common type of NBA bet because of the way it levels the playing field, making either side of a game an attractive option for bettors. Anyone betting on the favorite can improve their potential payout by taking them on the point spread, while underdog bettors have a chance to win their wager even if the underdog doesn’t pull off the outright upset.
An example of a point spread is if the Warriors are 7.5-point favorites over the Cavaliers. A bet on Golden State would require the Warriors to win the game by more than 7.5 points, while a wager on the Cavaliers would allow a bettor to cash their ticket as long as Cleveland doesn’t lose by more than 7.5 points (including the straight-up victory). Both sides on a typical point spread bet will pay -110 odds, although sometimes the odds will be even better than that.
A moneyline wager is the simplest way to bet on the NBA Finals. When betting a moneyline, you’re simply betting on who you think will win the game. The final margin of victory doesn’t matter.
If you take the favorite on the moneyline, you’ll have to risk more than you hope to win, while a moneyline bet on the underdog allows you to win more than you risk. The ratio of what you risk/what you win is dependent on how likely either team is to win the game, so the more a team is favored by on the point spread, the more you’ll have to risk on the moneyline. Fortunately, since teams that meet in the NBA Finals are usually pretty evenly matched, you won’t typically have to risk a lot to win a little on the favorite.
Using the Golden State/Cleveland example that we referenced in the point spread, the Warriors might be -250 favorites on the moneyline, while the Cavaliers are +220 underdogs. That would mean that you would have to risk $250 for every $100 you wanted to win on a moneyline bet on the Warriors, or you could win $220 for every $100 you risked on a moneyline bet on the Cavaliers.
Betting Over/Under in any sport is when you wager on the number of points that will be scored in a match. The oddsmaker will post a number of how many points are projected to be scored (otherwise known as a total), and you bet on whether the actual number of points scored will be Over or Under that amount. Like point spreads, either side of the wager (Over or Under) generally pays -110 odds.
Teams don’t get to the NBA Finals without excelling both offensively and defensively. Your job when betting on Over/Under is to determine which end of the court the teams will combine to excel at the most in the upcoming game. If you are expecting both offenses to light it up with a strong 3-point shooting display, the Over is a logical wager. If you think the defensive intensity will pick up, you’ll want to consider the Under instead.
No sport is a better fit for live betting (when you wager on a game while it’s in progress) than NBA basketball, where wild momentum swings are extremely common. That’s even more true in the NBA Finals where there is so much on the line and emotions can run extremely high. Even in a game with evenly-matched teams, it’s not uncommon to see one team score 10 straight points (or more) at any point.
Since the live betting odds are adjusted every time a team scores a basket or even when the ball changes possession, they can fluctuate dramatically throughout the course of a contest. For example, if the favorite gets off to a slow start, they might suddenly be available at an underdog price. Taking advantage of odds that are more favorable than when the game began is a key to winning at live betting, and you should have plenty of opportunities to do that in the NBA Finals.
If you’d rather bet on the outcome of the NBA Finals than the individual games, you can do that, too! Series lines give you the ability to bet on who will win the Finals before they begin, and you can also bet on the series winner at adjusted odds after every game.
For example, the Warriors may be a -200 favorite to beat the Cavaliers before the series begins. If Golden State won game 1, they might now become -300 favorites, while the payout for the Cavaliers to win the series might increase to a more attractive +250 return. Injuries can have a drastic effect on the series lines over the course of the NBA Finals as well.
Many betting sites also give you the option of betting the NBA Finals series lines with more specifics, such as how many games the series will last or what score a team will win the Finals by (4-3, 4-2, 4-1 or 4-0). These bets are obviously harder to win, but they pay quite a bit more than a series bet on the favorite.
You’re probably aware of all the different prop bets that betting sites offer on the Super Bowl. But did you know that there are always tons of props available for the NBA Finals as well?
Props (short for propositions) are when you wager on things that happen over the course of a game or series, not the final outcomes of the games or series themselves. Examples of props offered during the NBA Finals are who will be named NBA Finals MVPs (hint, it’s almost always a member of the winning team), which player will score the most points, who will record the most assists, and so on.
You’ll also find props related to the games, not just the individual players. For example, props in a game may include which team will be the first to score 20 points, which team will commit the most fouls, or which team will hit the most 3-pointers!
The championship series of American professional basketball has been known by several different names over the years. It was first known as the BAA Finals from 1947-50, then changed to the NBA World Championship Series after the Basketball Association of America and National Basketball League merged to form the National Basketball Association. In 1982, NBA officials changed the name of the league’s championship series to the “Showdown,” a short-lived title that was changed to the NBA Finals four years later.
Heck, even the name and look of the trophy that is awarded to the NBA champion has been changed a few times. It was simply known as the “NBA Finals trophy” until 1964 when league officials decided to change the name to the Walter A. Brown Trophy in tribute to the first-ever owner of the Boston Celtics. The trophy was redesigned in 1977 from a generic bowl-on-a-stand model to a unique look of a basketball about to enter a net. Seven years later, the NBA changed the name of the new trophy to its current title, the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy, in recognition of O’Brien, the league’s commissioner from 1975-84.
But while the names of the competition and the trophy have seen significant changes over time, the format has not. The NBA Finals and their previous incarnations have always been contested between the winner of the league’s Eastern and Western conferences (other than 1950, when the Central Division champion Minneapolis Lakers claimed the title), and they’ve always been a best-of-7 series in which the team with the better regular-season record enjoyed home court advantage. The only notable change to the NBA Finals format came in 2013 when organizers switched from a 2-3-2 system (higher seed hosting games 1 and 2, lower seed hosting games 3, 4, and 5, and higher seed hosting games 6 and 7) to the current 2-2-1-1-1 model.
Of the four major professional North American sports, the NBA Finals is the championship series in which the best teams from each conference tend to face each other the most. The ability of individual superstars to dominate a 5-on-5 basketball game means we see a lot less randomness and variance in the playoffs than in sports like hockey, baseball, and football, where it’s become increasingly rare to see the same team(s) reach the finals in consecutive years.
As of 2018, LeBron James had participated in the NBA Finals in seven consecutive years, the first four of those with the Miami Heat and the last three with his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers. However, being the most dominant player in the sport over the past decade hasn’t guaranteed success in the Finals for LeBron, who won just three of the first eight championship series he competed in. In 2015 and 2017, he and the Cavaliers were overwhelmed by the Golden State Warriors’ lethal perimeter shooting, and his first trip to the finals (2007) came with a weak Cavs squad that was easily swept by the powerful San Antonio Spurs. LeBron’s other Finals losses came in 2011 and 2014, when a Heat squad that also featured Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh lost as big favorites to Dallas and San Antonio, respectively.
One of LeBron’s three championship victories, however, will go down in history among the most memorable of all time. That win came in 2016, when the Cavaliers became the first-ever team in NBA Finals to come back from a 3-1 series deficit, winning the final three games to beat Golden State in a seven-game classic. Cleveland’s championship (its first in franchise history) was punctuated by an incredible block by James in the dying minutes and a tie-breaking 3-pointer by Kyrie Irving with 53 seconds left.
At the risk of making this section all about LeBron, James was also a part of another memorable seven-game Finals in 2013. That’s when the Spurs held a 3-2 series over James and the Heat going into game 6 in Miami and were seconds away from claiming the title before Ray Allen hit a game-tying 3-pointer late in regulation. Miami went on to win the game in overtime, then defeated the devastated Spurs by seven points two nights later to claim the 2013 title.
Other recent Finals that will forever be etched in history as classics were seven-gamers between the Celtics and Lakers in 2010, Spurs and Pistons in 2005, and the Rockets and Knicks in 1994. Meanwhile, most consider Golden State’s seven-game win over Washington in 1975 to be the biggest upset in NBA Finals history, although Houston’s 4-0 sweep of the Shaquille O’Neal and the Orlando Magic in 1995 has to rank right up there as well.
You may have noticed that we’ve only referred to online betting sites in this article when explaining how and where to bet on the NBA Finals.
There are actually other places and ways to bet on the NBA Finals than on the internet. Casinos throughout Las Vegas and the state of Nevada are famous for offering sports betting on the NBA Finals as well as games in all other sports. It’s also possible to bet on sports over the telephone.
However, there are several reasons that we strongly recommend the use of online betting sites over any other method. Online sites are always accessible at your fingertips with a computer or even a smartphone, while Vegas sportsbooks aren’t available to anyone who doesn’t live or travel there. And although placing bets over the phone may sound convenient, you don’t have the same type of physical proof of your wager as you get when you place a bet online.
Again, online betting sites are the best place for you to bet on the NBA Finals, but only if you’re using the best and most reliable ones. As long as you check out our sportsbook reviews and join one of the sites we recommend, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about. From there, a little research on the games (or reading our NBA basketball betting picks) is all that stands in the way of you hopefully making some money on the NBA Finals this year!
