Bettors are heavily backing LeBron James' 76ers to win the title: 'The enthusiasm for betting this team doesn’t seem to let up'
· Yahoo Sports
The betting public has found its NBA offseason darling — it’s the LeBron James-led Philadelphia 76ers.
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The 76ers opened this offseason with 60-1 odds to win the 2026-27 NBA championship (13th best), but after trading for Boston Celtics forward Jaylen Brown and signing the free-agent James, those odds have skyrocketed to +850 at sportsbooks.
Philadelphia now has the third-best odds to win the NBA title, behind the co-favorite San Antonio Spurs and Oklahoma City Thunder at +260 at BetMGM.
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And the amount of money and wagers on the 76ers to win it all has dwarfed any other team.
At BetMGM, over 30% of all championship wagers and nearly 40% of all the money wagered to win the title was on the 76ers, as of this weekend. Philadelphia had more than five times the amount of wagers and the amount of money bet as any other team.
“It’s a lot of 76ers money,” Halvor Egeland, a BetMGM trader, told Yahoo Sports. “It’s the 76ers and a huge gap to the Thunder at No. 2 in terms of money. Philadelphia has the most handle and is our biggest liability.”
Some of the excitement began after the Brown trade, according to multiple oddsmakers Yahoo Sports spoke with, but the faucet was really turned on after the James deal.
“It’s all really stemmed from after the LeBron signing,” Thomas Gable, sportsbook director at The Borgata in Atlantic City, said. “We were at 18-1 on the 76ers and when he was announced, we ended up going to 10-1. I thought that would be too short, and within the first 24 hours we’d taken so many bets that we went to +950, +900 and now we’re down to +850. The enthusiasm for betting this team doesn’t seem to let up.”
Gable said that his book has about 20 times as much money on the 76ers to win the title as the nearest competitor — the New York Knicks. The Knicks (10-1) have the fourth-best odds at sportsbooks, as they look to defend their first NBA championship since 1973.
Other notable teams include the Boston Celtics without Brown (14-1), the Minnesota Timberwolves now with LaMelo Ball (25-1), the Denver Nuggets (25-1) and the Miami Heat — Giannis Antetokounmpo’s new team — at 25-1.
The Brooklyn Nets and Sacramento Kings (1000-1) have the longest odds to win the championship.