Tag: San Antonio Spurs

NBA /

Golden State has ‘no chance’ to reach 73 wins; prop bet taken off the board at SuperBook

Jeff Sherman is feeling pretty good about his short position on the odds of a record-breaking season for the Golden State Warriors.

The assistant manager of the Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook told the Las Vegas Review-Journal this weekend that the Warriors, now 38-4 after demolishing Cleveland on Monday, had “no chance” to reach 73 wins and break the single-season record held by the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls.

That came before Golden State dropped the Cavs, 132-98, but it’s unlikely Monday’s result swayed his opinion much.

“They have got no chance to get there,” Sherman said. “There’s no way the Warriors are going 36-5 with that schedule. We’re in real good position on the prop.”

The odds for a 73-win season opened at 5-to-1 shortly after regular season began, but crept down to +130 in December, when Golden State was sitting at 23-0. Sherman said at the time 90 percent of the action had been on the Warriors surpassing 72 wins.

The prop was taken off the board Sunday, according to the Review-Journal. Sherman said in December the “no” side was starting to see more support, and that was likely accelerated when Golden State lost back-to-back road games last week.

“You see injuries taking a toll on the Warriors,” Sherman told the Review-Journal. “It’s going to be a tired team at some point. I like San Antonio more than I do Golden State.”

Westgate still has the Warriors as the 3-2 favorite to repeat as champs, but the Spurs aren’t far behind, currently getting 7-4 odds.

Winners of 11 straight, San Antonio has the NBA’s second-best record at 38-6 and leads the league in point differential, +14.3 compared to Golden State’s +11.7.

The Warriors have four straight games against probable playoff teams on deck, including a meeting with San Antonio on Monday. It will be the first meeting of the season between the Western Conference frontrunners, and the first of four scheduled clashes over the second half of the season.

NBA /

Betting Markets Declare Spurs Largest—And Only—Winners Of NBA Free Agency Period

There’s been much discussion about the San Antonio Spurs’ impending juggernaut given the team’s summer acquisitions of LaMarcus Aldridge and David West, re-signing of Danny Green and Kawhi Leonard to what have widely been considered very team-friendly contracts, and retaining the services of Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili from retirement.

Not only were the Spurs the unanimous choice of offseason winner by a panel of ESPN experts and described as “clear cut winners” of the summer by FiveThirtyEight—the betting markets declared them, well, the only winners (or just about).

nba

*Vegas win probabilities are derived from the implied percentages from betting odds (i.e. 4-1 would convert to 20%) and then dividing these percentages by the sum of the implied percentages on every team (generally around 130%) so that they total to 100 percent.

It’s clear there’s only one real winner according to the futures markets: the Spurs, who made a huge 8.9 percent jump in implied championship probability, nearly tripling their pre-deadline title chances. (Other books had the jump as being even higher.)

A big reason the Spurs were the only team to make such a massive jump was not because they were the only team to sign a star player, but because they were the only team to do so that was not already widely expected to. LeBron James and Kevin Love both re-signed with Cleveland, the team with the best odds both before and after the deadline, but those were highly anticipated deals already baked into the Cavs’ pre-deadline odds. It’s the same situation for Marc Gasol and Memphis.

With the Spurs’ odds improving so much (San Antonio is now ahead of the defending champion Warriors but behind Cleveland for the 2016 title favorite), the perennial contender took percentage points from many other teams in the zero-sum system. Thus, only four of the 30 teams actually improved their title chances during free agency.

The Cavs, who dispelled the tiny amount of uncertainty surrounding their free agents, the Warriors, who re-signed Draymond Green, and the Bucks, who surprisingly landed Greg Monroe on a max contract, all saw minor bumps, though small enough to possibly just be market fluctuation noise. (For example, other books had the Warriors’ odds growing slightly longer after free agency.)

The remaining 26 teams had either zero or small decreases in championship probability.

At the bottom of the list, the team to suffer the greatest drop was the Aldridge-losing Blazers. Though their probability only dropped by 1.4 percent, given that a) their odds were already long with Aldridge, and b) the betting markets clearly had already anticipated the All-Star center would leave Portland—it was simply unclear which lucky suitor would land his services.

* * *

For current NBA futures odds, courtesy of Las Vegas SuperBook, click here.