Best NBA futures bets: Bullish on the Thunder, Nuggets and… the Bulls?!

The NBA is back, baby, as is “Roundball Rock!” What more could you ask for as a basketball fan?

The season tips off with a star-studded doubleheader on Tuesday. The first game features the Kevin Durant-led Houston Rockets vs. the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder. The second game will showcase two of the league’s biggest stars in Steph Curry and Luka Dončić, as the Golden State Warriors take on the Los Angeles Lakers.

If you are looking to get a few futures bets down to keep the season enjoyable, you’ve come to the right spot. From which team is a good wager to win the title to Coach of the Year, our basketball triumvirate of Zach Harper, John Hollinger and Sam Vecenie has you covered.

Thunder over 62.5 wins

This feels like the easiest money to me. They won 68 last year, are better from winning a title plus continuity, and these guys are so young they’re still developing into better players. They’re going to probably win 70.

Nuggets +550 to win the title

The Nuggets were in a terrible situation at the end of last season and still took OKC to seven games because Nikola Jokić is so good. I’m not saying dismiss the Thunder, but Denver solved all of its roster issues this summer. Over a 5-to-1 payout seems phenomenal on this.

Jokić +750 to win Finals MVP

Look, if you’re betting the Nuggets to win it all, then these odds are ridiculous for Finals MVP. You have to believe in this all the way. Nobody else in this scenario is sniffing the Finals MVP. By the way, you should have bet the Nuggets over 53.5 wins, too. Regardless of thinking they’ll win the title.

Wizards under 21.5 wins

This is a low number, and yet, it’s a number that I feel the Wizards will have a very difficult time exceeding, even in a dilapidated Eastern Conference that will provide countless opportunities for wins.

The Wizards won 18 games last year, and that figure still manages to flatter them. They did so with a staggeringly bad minus-12.4 points per game scoring margin that was the third worst in NBA history. By any reasonable analysis, the Wizards were far and away the worst team in the NBA.

Wait, it gets worse. Statistically, Washington’s three most effective players last season were Jonas Valančiūnas, who now plays for the Nuggets; Jordan Poole, who now plays for the Pelicans; and Malcolm Brogdon, who now plays for the Knicks.

Washington has two other good veteran players on the team, for the moment, in CJ McCollum and Khris Middleton, but there is no reason to expect the grown-ups will be in the building for long. Each has an expiring contract, each is much more valuable to a contender than they are to the Wizards, and both likely will be bought out at the trade deadline if they aren’t moved for draft capital before then.

Once those two move on, the Wizards’ best player is … Cam Whitmore? Justin Champagnie? Washington will once again invest heavy minutes in recent lottery picks, but none of the four on the roster (Alex Sarr, Tre Johnson, Bilal Coulibaly and Bub Carrington) look like NBA starters yet, much less impactful ones.

All told, the Wizards look like a shoo-in for 60 losses while they bide their time for the May draft lottery and hope they can get in on the Darryn Peterson-AJ Dybantsa-Cameron Boozer fun. In the meantime, this team will once again sport the league’s worst scoring margin. Even 21.5 wins seems wildly optimistic.

Thunder over 62.5 wins

The Thunder’s two biggest obstacles to beating this number are injuries and boredom. Last year, they won 68 regular-season games with a historic point differential while carrying the league’s youngest minutes-weighted roster, even with both of their key big men (Chet Holmgren and Isaiah Hartenstein) missing long stretches.

This year, they have the same team — the top 13 players on the depth chart are exactly the same — and are basically in a “name your win total” scenario. They can probably win 70 if they go all out and sprint through the tape, but that seems unlikely, as NBA teams have become much smarter about leaving gas in the tank for the games that truly matter in May and June.

However, the competitiveness of the rest of the Western Conference should encourage the Thunder to push hard deep into spring to ensure they have the top seed in the playoffs. Plus, a team like Cleveland or Orlando in the East may rattle off a high enough win total to keep OKC sufficiently motivated to maintain home-court advantage in a potential NBA Finals matchup.

The Thunder also have enough depth to rack up wins even if they’re resting players in the second half of the season. This team is strong enough that several things can go wrong, and they can still get to 63 wins. I’m surprised the over isn’t significantly higher.

Bulls over 32.5 wins

Over the last three seasons, the Bulls have won 39, 39 and 40 games, and they made the Play-In in each of those three seasons. I have a hard time seeing how the script for this season ends up being much different, which is why I’m amazed that their over/under is so low. To achieve that over/under would mean that the Bulls fell out of the Play-In race, even in the lowly East, and fell out by such a margin that they started tanking late in the year, which is a strategy this franchise has never embraced.

I also struggle to see how worst-case scenarios could turn out that badly for these guys. Chicago isn’t good by any means, but it has enough depth that it should survive the regular-season slog in relatively good shape. My projections value 13 of their 15 players at above replacement level, with the 15th being rookie Noa Essengue. (The other one is, um, starting center Nikola Vučević. Let’s move on.)

Anyway, “no terrible minutes” isn’t an upside strategy, but it delivers a pretty reliable floor. The Bulls also have some upside outs in the second-year version of Matas Buzelis, the still-young Josh Giddey and the fact that every key player except Vučević is in their 20s.

The Bulls didn’t exactly fall apart after the Zach LaVine trade in 2024-25, going 17-13 in their final 30 games, and they’re bringing back essentially the same team. Domination isn’t in the cards, but Vegas has set the bar ankle-high. I would be very surprised if the Bulls lost 50 games in the East.

Draymond Green +5000 to win Defensive Player of the Year

For the final third of last season, after the trade deadline, the Golden State Warriors had the No. 1 defense in the league. That was led by Green, and I thought his run from February to April was probably the best elongated run I saw from anyone on that end of the court last season, outside of Victor Wembanyama. If Wembanyama reaches the games played criteria, it’s hard to pick against him. But honestly, given the way the Warriors defended down the stretch in addition to now having both Jimmy Butler and Al Horford for increased infrastructure defensively, I’d probably have Green as one of the three or four most likely players to win the award. Instead, coming off of a first-team All-Defense season, you can get him at 50-1 here.

Even if my prediction is just that Wembanyama wins this award for the first time, there are so many avenues where he ends up not reaching the games played threshold. The value is too strong to pass up for Green here, and he did a great job of building a narrative for himself for voters down the stretch last year.

Mark Daigneault +3300 to win Coach of the Year

So, I know that this award typically goes to the coach whose team exceeds expectations the most and ends up winning more games than prognosticators expected coming into the year. But hear me out: what if the Thunder are just way better this year, even than they were last year when they won 68 games in the regular season? This is a young team. Guys like Jalen Williams, Chet Holmgren, Cason Wallace and Ajay Mitchell are probably going to be better this year than they were last year. They’re all still on rookie scale deals! Holmgren missed 50 games, Isaiah Hartenstein missed 25 and Alex Caruso missed nearly 30. There was a stretch early last season where the team had to play extensive minutes of Jalen Williams at center because all of Holmgren, Hartenstein and Jaylin Williams were out.

I don’t think it’s crazy to think that this team could take a run at winning 72 games this year, given the consistency of their defense and their overall depth, allowing them to compete even in games where their stars miss time. If that were to happen, Daigneault would have to be on the short list to win Coach of the Year, right?

I think 33-to-1 is just spicy enough to where I like it.