Breaking down the NBA Finals and Stanley Cup Final by the betting odds

Sportsbooks’ last hurrah begins over the next few days and runs for up to the next two weeks.

The Stanley Cup Final and NBA Finals may not attract Super Bowl or March Madness level attention in casinos, but they’re far and away the biggest betting events on the summer calendar. Once they end, it’s vacation time for many of those in the sports betting industry for a couple months before football muscles out virtually all other competition.  

Surely mainstream sports fans and casual bettors want some action to tide them over until and keep the pair of best-of-seven championship series interesting, so I’m here to help.

Here’s a breakdown of both the Edmonton Oilers versus Florida Panthers’ matchup and Oklahoma City Thunder versus Indiana Pacers pairing from a betting perspective with some ideas of wagers to make going into the series.  

Stanley Cup Final

Let’s start on the ice since the games begin a day earlier, at 5 p.m. Wednesday from Rogers Place in Edmonton airing on TNT, and project to be more competitive.

Oilers vs. Panthers opened as a straight pick’em at a couple Las Vegas shops though the early money has steamed in on the former. Edmonton is now widely a -130 (i.e. risking $130 to win $100) favorite with Florida coming back at +110 (i.e. risking $100 to win $110).

In the NBA Finals, Oklahoma City is a five times bigger favorite than Edmonton. 

But there is one noticeable similarity between the two championship series. They both feel like a showdown between the archetypal “Team of Destiny” and a locked-and-loaded juggernaut.

The Oilers are the more sentimental favorite in the NHL. They’ve seemed destined to atone for last year’s Stanley Cup Final loss to the Panthers ever since the start of the season when Amazon Prime Video released raw locker-room footage from after their Game 7 loss.

“I know we’re going to be back,” forward Zach Hyman vowed in between a string of expletives.

 The top-line, net-front presence was proven right but it came at a major cost: He won’t play in the series after suffering an injury in the Western Conference Final victory over the Dallas Stars.

The Panthers proceed into their third straight Stanley Cup Final with a fuller lineup, though offensive leaders Matthew Tkachuk and Sam Reinhart have both dealt with injuries throughout the postseason.

That makes it even more impressive how dominant the Panthers have been against a historically tough path consisting of the Tampa Bay Lightning, Toronto Maple Leafs and Carolina Hurricanes. They racked up a +27 goal differential and a 54.96% expected goal rate during 5-on-5 play against three teams the betting market rated as their toughest competition in the East.   

The Oilers have a +20 goal differential and a 54.42% 5-on-5 expected goal share against a slightly more forgiving slate of opponents — the Minnesota Wild, Vegas Golden Knights and Stars.

Connor McDavid looks to follow in Wayne Gretzky’s Edmonton footsteps and win in his second trip to the Final after falling short in his debut. McDavid won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the postseason’s most valuable player last year with 42 points, fourth-most of all-time.

He’s leading the Oilers again this year, but holds only a one-point edge on teammate Leon Draisaitl, who also had the stronger regular season. Sentiment among the voters will remain strongest for McDavid, but Draisaitl has a better chance to pry the honor away than the odds currently indicate if the Oilers prevail.

McDavid is as low as Even money to win the Conn Smythe going into the series with Draisaitl at as high as 11-to-1. Taking a piece of Draisaitl’s odds feels obligatory with the plan to hope he makes a big splash early to open the opportunity of playing back on McDavid at a longer price after a game or two.  

Goalie Sergei Bobrovsky is the Panthers’ top choice at as low as 2-to-1, but that should change.

An offense with McDavid and Draisaitl is too potent to keep at bay forever. The duo and their cohorts should become the first team to crack Bobrovsky consistently this postseason.

Florida needs big two-way contributions from its forwards to win the series, and there’s not a better two-way forward in the league than Aleksander “Sasha” Barkov. Florida’s captain is the likeliest MVP in this matchup.

The series should be extremely close and, much like last year, could largely come down to home ice. Florida got to play at home in the decisive Game 7 in 2024; Edmonton will this time around if the series stretches that far.

The main market Game 1 prices — Edmonton is a -120 favorite with Florida coming back at +111 with the over/under at 6 goals at Circa Sports — look spot-on. Be patient and don’t wade into those waters until there’s an overreaction to the first game or two.

Florida is the better team, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that it feels like Edmonton’s time.   

Bets: Panthers +1.5 games series spread at -200 (BetMGM), Aleksander Barkov to win the Conn Smythe Award at 5-to-1 (Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook) and Leon Draisaitl to win the Conn Smythe Award at 11-to-1 (SuperBook)

NBA Finals

It happened again.

NBA history is rife with examples of the playoffs starting with a pair of prohibitive favorites coming in, one from the Eastern Conference and one from the Western Conference.

But the expected matchup of the two Goliaths rarely materializes. One of them tends to get upset before the NBA Finals, which start at 5:30 p.m. Thursday in Oklahoma City airing on ABC. 

The trend fell off a decade ago while the prime Golden State Warriors and LeBron James-led Cleveland Cavaliers were so much better than the rest of the league, but it’s come back stronger since.

The Boston Celtics and Denver Nuggets were near odds-on favorites to reach the Finals the last two years. But the play-in Miami Heat shocked the 2023 Celtics, and the matchup-nightmare Minnesota Timberwolves knocked off the 2024 Nuggets.

This year, everything pointed towards the Celtics and Oklahoma City Thunder squaring off for the Larry O’Brien Trophy.

The latter did their part, but the Celtics collapsed in the East semifinals by blowing a couple leads and losing star Jayson Tatum to injury against the New York Knicks. The upset feels even harder to believe after the Knicks were no match for the Pacers in the Eastern Conference Finals.

The bad news for the Pacers is that the party crasher rarely beats the established overlord in the Finals. There has been a pair of upsets in the last seven years since the end of the aforementioned Warriors-Cavaliers era — the Toronto Raptors over the Warriors in 2019 and the Milwaukee Bucks over the Phoenix Suns in 2021 — but the odds were much lower than this year’s matchup.

The Thunder come in as a -650 favorite over the Pacers, which come back at +500. The last time a team overcame that large of a price to win the Finals was 21 years ago when the Detroit Pistons ended the Shaquille O’Neal-Kobe Bryant Los Angeles Lakers.  

Thunder vs. Pacers looks like an even bigger mismatch on paper.

Oklahoma City had the best point differential, +12.9, and against the spread record, 55-23-4, in modern history during the regular season. The Thunder won and covered in both meetings against the Pacers despite being without 7-footer Chet Holmgren in one of the matchups.

The Pacers have leveled up in the playoffs behind the fast-paced playmaking brilliance of Tyrese Haliburton and coaching acumen of Rick Carlisle, but every piece of data indicates they’ve overachieved. They’re shooting nearly a percentage point higher from the field in the playoffs than they were in the regular season, and more than 3% higher from three-point range.

That simply doesn’t happen traditionally, though some of it can be explained by facing a mediocre slate of opposing defenses so far. The Thunder end that stretch of good luck as they’ve been the NBA’s top defensive team all year.  

The Pacers’ best (only?) hope seems to be an injury to NBA regular-season Most Valuable Player Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, whose odds to win Finals MVP should be 1-to-1 with the Thunder’s series price to win the series.

He’s as high as -500 at STN Sports. Most bettors don’t want to lay that much juice, but it’s a good bet. Perhaps find another future to parlay it with and bring down the price.

The Thunder are too dynamic on defense and versatile on offense to be seriously bothered by the Pacers. Prepare for a third straight year where the NBA Finals goes five games, at most.  

Bets: Thunder -2.5 games series spread at -115 (Caesars/William Hill), Under 230.5 points in Game 1 (Circa Sports)