When this tournament began OKC was already the heavy favorites to win it all. Now that we are approaching the semi-finals, not much has changed about that and normally with NBA you can bet that the sportsbooks are going to be pretty accurate in an overall sense about who is going to win, especially this late in the game.
Really the only thing that could change any of that would to be if some sort of freak accident were to happen to one of the Thunder starters but let's be honest, it would likely need to be several players getting injured for anyone else to have a chance.
When OKC swept Phoenix this wasn't a big surprise. The number 8 play-in teams are meant to get run over and that is why the brackets are designed that way. OKC worked hard all season and I guess you could say that they deserve to have a bit of a weaker first round. They quite handily won all of those games but the sports world was a bit up in the air about whether or not the LA Lakers were going to give them some trouble in the quarterfinals.
They Lakers didn't put up much resistance as the Thunder went on to win all the games other than game 4 by an average of 20 points or so. This is a blowout folks. The 4th game being close is just OKC putting on the brakes because they don't have a sense of urgency. I always kind of suspect when a team is playing the Lakers that there is probably some sort of back room pressure to draw the series out if possible, sine the LA market will spend untold amounts of money for home game tickets.
But lets look at the current odds for who is going to win the overall championship.
OKC is -170 to -220 depending on where you look. This is a remarkable favorite numbers to have when there are still at least 8 games remaining for Oklahoma City before it possibly can be over.
at the moment 63% of all bets are on OKC to win
The Knicks have made a statement in their relative thrashing of Atlanta and sweep of Philadelphia, and the fact that Philly ousted number 2 seed Boston pushed the odds up a bit as far as they are concerned. They currently sit at +600 to +900 to win.
Something that really surprised me is that number 1 seed (in the East) Detroit Pistons are the least favorite to win the whole thing at this point at a +1800 to +2000 and I think this has a lot to do with the fact that they narrowly avoided elimination at the hands of number 8 ranked Orlando and they are currently struggling with Cleveland even though they went up 2-0 initially.
I think the Vegas odd-makers are kind of looking at San Antonio as well because they are a mere +320 to win it all. This is quite surprising because they haven't even won their quaterfinal series which currently sits at 3-2 against the Minnesota Timberwolves.
Personally, I think it is going to take a miracle, or a string of injuries to OKC for there to be any champion other than them, they are just too good. I suppose there is always some sort of shock outcome that could occur but when you consider the fact that other than the last two games of the regular season which were meaningless because OKC had already clinched the number 1 spot, they haven't lost a game since March and other than that 1 loss they won the other 15 games in that month. They haven't lost back-to-back games since February.
I would prefer that there was a bit more competition but for the most part I would say that this season was kind of wrapped up several months ago. OKC is just one of those rare teams that is significantly better than anyone else. While I reckon they could lose a game or two before the end of the tournament, I don't really feel as though there is any realistic chance of them not winning.
But I'm just one guy that looks at stats. Things could happen that are really shocking!
What do you think?