Out of the eight teams to qualify for the postseason out of the NBA’s Western Conference this season, three hail from California. With that in mind, as we wait for legal California sports betting, BetCalifornia.com used data from ChampsorChumps.US to find trends for how NBA playoff series go after Game 1. The data includes all best-of-seven series in NBA history, dating to the 1946-47 season.
Won Series After Game 1 Loss | 24.6% |
Won Series After Winning Game 2 (After G1 Loss) | 42.1% |
Won Series After Losing Game 2 (After G1 Loss) | 6.9% |
Both the Los Angeles Clippers and Lakers find themselves in 1-0 series holes, against the Denver Nuggets and Minnesota Timberwolves, respectively.
Since that 1946-47 season, teams that lost Game 1 of their respective best-of-seven series in the postseason have only come back to win 24.6% of the time, according to Champs or Chumps data.
That does not bode well for L.A.’s teams, though it does mean good things in general for the Golden State Warriors, who defeated the Houston Rockets in Game 1 of the Bay Area team’s series.
While the proverbial writing is not quite etched on the wall just yet in the City of Angels, both the Clippers and Lakers will be in deep water if they fall in Game 2. Teams that lost the first two games in a pest-of-seven series have only won 6.9% of the time since the league was founded – and that is a trend worth watching especially for Los Angeles Lakers odds going forward as the team tried to even the series at home.
The road to redemption begins tonight when the Clippers host the Nuggets in Game 2 of the series at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood. DraftKings Sportsbook, as of Monday afternoon, was listing the home team as a 1-point favorite in the contest with -118 moneyline for Los Angels Clippers odds on Tyronn Lue’s bunch (compared with -102 odds on the visiting Nuggets).
Tuesday night, LeBron James and the Lakers are facing better odds on the Boston-based sportsbook. DraftKings has L.A. listed as a 5.5-point home favorite in Game 2 over the Timberwolves, with a -245 moneyline on the home side compared with +200 odds for the visitors from the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
Should both L.A. teams pull off wins in their respective Game 2’s tonight and Tuesday night, their odds of coming back in the series improve greatly – in NBA history, 42.1% of teams that won the second game of a best-of-seven series after losing the first contest ultimately emerged as the series victor.
The Clippers and Lakers will seek to further that trend in their respective arenas in the L.A. metroplex. Meanwhile, for Golden State Warriors odds, the Bay Area’s NBA team hopes to keep the series tilting in their favor by taking a 2-0 series lead in Houston.
USA Today photo by Jayne Kamin
Author
Christopher Boan is the lead writer at BetCalifornia.com, specializing in sports betting issues in the western United States. He's covered sports and sports betting in Arizona for more than seven years, including stops at ArizonaSports.com, the Tucson Weekly and the Green Valley News.
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