NBA Finals: Thunder Among Biggest Betting Favorites To Win It All Over Past 20 Years

If you’re not a betting person, you may be interested to know the following, anyway: And that’s the fact the Thunder are wildly overwhelming favorites.

How overwhelming? Well, as relayed by ESPN’s David Purdum, OKC is “one of the biggest betting favorites in an NBA Finals across the past 20 seasons.”

Alrighty, then.

The Thunder opened as -750 favorites over the Pacers in the Finals at ESPN BET,” Purdum added. “The Pacers opened as +525 underdogs on Saturday.

“Since 2005, only the 2017-18 Golden State Warriors (-1075 versus the Cleveland Cavaliers) had shorter odds heading into the Finals than this season’s Thunder.”

Of course, all this likely means little to the Pacers (or, for that matter, the Thunder). After all, Indiana worked its way to the Finals as the No. 4 seed in the Eastern Conference. They overtook the fifth-seeded Milwaukee, first-seeded Cleveland Cavaliers, and third-seeded New York Knicks along the way.

But here they are again, the underdogs, and amazingly so.

“The Pacers, at 50-1, would be the biggest preseason long shots to win the title in the past 40 years. History is against them, however,” Purdum wrote.

“Over the past 50 years, only two teams that were at least +200 underdogs to start the NBA Finals — the 2003-04 Detroit Pistons at +500 and the 2018-19 Toronto Raptors at +230 — went on to claim the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy, according to betting archive SportsOddsHistory.com.”

More NBA Finals coverage:

• OKC says Indiana is much like itself
• OKC, Indiana offer Finals we didn’t know we deserved