With the NBA regular season concluding in just two weeks, lifting the Larry O’Brien Trophy is no longer a dream for some teams — it’s a realistic goal. That also means it’s not too early to look ahead at how the playoffs might shake out.
The Oklahoma City Thunder are +150 favorites to win the NBA Finals at DraftKings Sportsbook, followed by the defending champion Boston Celtics (+220) and the Cleveland Cavaliers (+650). Every other team has +1300 or longer odds to win.
Best Bet to Win the Eastern Conference
Cleveland Cavaliers (+210) over Boston Celtics (-130)
Cleveland and Boston have been on a collision course to meet in the Eastern Conference Finals all season, and barring an injury to a key player on either team, I can’t see any other matchup. Even the games between them have been epic, especially the February 28 clash, in which the Celtics ran out to a 25-3 lead before the Cavaliers clawed their way back into the game, eventually winning 123-116. Sign me up for seven of those come late May.
The conventional wisdom would say to take Boston. The Celtics are the hottest team in the league, having rattled off eight straight wins, and all of their core pieces are finally healthy. Payton Pritchard was a deep bench piece during last season’s NBA Finals run and is a Sixth Man of the Year contender now. It obviously wouldn’t surprise me to see Boston make another Finals or even win another championship.
But winning back-to-back titles is hard. No team has done it since the Steph Curry-Kevin Durant Golden State Warriors in 2016-17 and 2017-18, the longest such streak of parity in NBA history, and this team isn’t perfect. Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis have been in and out of the lineup. 38-year-old Al Horford has lost a step. Finals MVP Jaylen Brown has shot the ball inefficiently and is posting his worst defensive box plus-minus in four years. The Celtics’ margin for error against Cleveland is virtually zero, and I don’t think this team is quite as good as last year’s. Boston will likely face New York in the second round, and while the Knicks haven’t proven themselves capable of beating the Celtics, any team led by Tom Thibodeau and Jalen Brunson will fight hard to the final whistle every game.
Of course, the Cavaliers aren’t perfect either, and five losses in their past nine games is concerning. But plenty of championship-caliber teams have had a March malaise before, and it wasn’t too long ago that Cleveland was on its second 15-plus-game win streak of the season. The Cavaliers are led by an experienced postseason star in Donovan Mitchell ready to get over the hump, and they also picked up De’Andre Hunter at the trade deadline to address their hole at small forward. While all the pressure is on Boston, Cleveland has a chip on its shoulder and has far less to lose if it falls short. In a coin-flip series, give me the team with longer odds.
Best Bet to Win the Western Conference
Oklahoma City Thunder (-140) over Los Angeles Lakers (+800)
Even at negative odds, there’s really no way to go against a team that clinched home court advantage throughout the Western Conference playoffs with nearly a month left in the season. By net rating, the Thunder’s closest competition isn’t in the West this season, and it’s not even the Cavaliers. Instead, Oklahoma City is within striking distance of besting the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls, commonly considered the greatest team in NBA history.
Besides a below-average rebounding percentage, the Thunder truly have no flaws. The gap between Oklahoma City and the Magic — who have league’s second-best defense — is more than three points per 100 possessions, the biggest such discrepancy in NBA history. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander can score at will from all three levels. Jalen Williams, Cason Wallace, Aaron Wiggins, Lu Dort, Alex Caruso, and Isaiah Joe can all hit threes at a respectable rate while playing elite perimeter defense. Isaiah Hartenstein and Chet Holmgren offer solid rim protection, especially Holmgren. The Thunder have more wins by 20 or more points (19) than they do losses (12).
Picking the team to join Oklahoma City in the Western Conference Finals is much tricker than selecting the two in the East. Houston has been on fire in recent weeks to climb into second in the conference, but the Rockets’ stars have no postseason experience. Denver has the world’s best player —Nikola Jokić still holds that title over Gilgeous-Alexander, even if the latter is likely to pip him to the MVP award this season — but the Nuggets’ depth is lacking and they have a losing record to teams above .500. Golden State has looked excellent since adding Jimmy Butler, but it’s hard to ignore how bad the Warriors were in the first half of the season. The Clippers benefit from the services of the much-improved Norman Powell and Ivica Zubac, and Kawhi Leonard is healthy…for now.
Of the rest, I trust Los Angeles the most. The Lakers could use the services of a higher-upside big man than Jaxson Hayes — when only taking into account this season and not considering the future draft capital involved in the deal, the nixed trade for Mark Williams probably would have raised the immediate ceiling — but any team led by Luka Dončić and LeBron James is, almost by definition, a championship contender. The star turn that Austin Reaves has taken since the calendar turned to 2025 also helps. For the two to meet in the West Finals would require Los Angeles to rise to the third seed or fall to the sixth seed, but that amounts to a rise or fall of two games, which could easily happen.
Best Bet to Win the NBA Finals
Oklahoma City Thunder over Cleveland Cavaliers (+600)
After taking out James, the Thunder will defeat James’ former team to win their first NBA title since moving to Oklahoma City. With a win, Gilgeous-Alexander will cap one of the greatest all-around individual seasons in league history and cement himself alongside Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant in the pantheon of Thunder greats. Last season, Oklahoma City won 57 games and claimed the conference’s top seed, but it wasn’t in the convincing fashion that its dominance this season has displayed.
The Cavaliers will give it a good fight. The teams’ first matchup of the season, a 129-122 Cleveland victory on January 8, was an instant classic and probably the best game of the 2024-25 regular season. In that game, Gilgeous-Alexander had one of his least efficient games of the season — by true shooting percentage, it was his 11th-worst — but Cleveland could reasonably have been better too, given that the game happened before the Cavaliers acquired Hunter and before Ty Jerome turned into one of the most valuable bench pieces in the league. Mitchell, too, shot poorly in that game.
At its best, this Cleveland team equal to the Thunder at their best. But no team is going to have its absolute best four times in a seven-game series, and the Cavaliers’ floor is a lot lower than Oklahoma City’s. Gilgeous-Alexander is one of the league’s most consistent scorers, while Donovan Mitchell can go through prolonged shooting slumps — like the one that resulted in Cleveland’s recent four-game losing streak — and pivotal Cavaliers role players like Hunter and Jerome are relatively untested in the playoffs. Most of the Thunder core experienced last season’s playoff defeat with the team, and those who didn’t — Hartenstein and Caruso — have made deep runs before with other squads. In a series between two all-time great squads, the little things matter.
The 2024-25 NBA season was always supposed to end with a battle of attrition between two of the league’s best small-market success stories. If that situation comes to bear, give me Oklahoma City in six.
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