Welcome to the Winner’s Circle, a weekly column by Bet For The Win senior writer Prince J. Grimes.
Not that the NBA bubble playoffs of 2020 needed anyone to legitimize its results, but the exact four teams that reached the conference finals that year are back again three years later.
It’s not a coincidence.
The Denver Nuggets and Boston Celtics were always going to be forces in their respective conferences for years to come thanks to young, budding cores that remain in tact. The Los Angeles Lakers still have top-75 players Anthony Davis and LeBron James as their driving force despite a completely different supporting cast than the one that helped them win a title. And the Miami Heat have Erik Spoelstra and Jimmy Butler — who remains committed to never letting them be an easy out.
However, that’s where the parallels end. If you’re thinking about having a stake in how things play out this time around, it’d be a mistake to expect a repeat of what happened in 2020.
For starters, the team that was supposed to win the title in 2020 did.
The Lakers entered the 2019-20 season with the second-best preseason title odds at +450, according to Basketball-Reference, and they were a massive favorite in the series against Denver.
This year, the tables have turned.
Denver entered the season with the same +1800 title odds as the Lakers but had a significantly higher preseason over/under, which it eclipsed on its way to the best record in the Western Conference.
It’s the Nuggets who are now favored to come out on top in the series, and with the way they and two-time MVP Nikola Jokic have played this postseason, it’s hard to argue they won’t win the whole thing.
In the Eastern Conference, the Celtics are once again favored over Miami like they were in 2020, except the odds are much more lopsided. The Heat are +400 underdogs, which doesn’t give them the same fighting chance as +115 a few years ago.
That doesn’t mean Miami will roll over. But Boston’s best players are even better now — they’re NBA Finals-tested, and the roster is also just a lot deeper than it was in 2020. Miami’s is thinner, older and missing Tyler Herro.
Boston was the preseason favorite to win this year’s title and remains the favorite even through a shaky postseason. If the Celtics don’t at least get past the Heat, it’ll be as much about what they didn’t do as it will be what Butler likely did.
Of course, all of this goes out the window once these teams lace it up and play the games. But the best bets today aren’t the teams that reached the bubble NBA Finals. It’s the other two.
