Sportsbooks never give odds that accurately reflect real world probabilities. A recent line offered by FanDuel, however, took the discrepancy to a new level.
A post on X from the FanDuel Sportsbook account on Tuesday afternoon promoted odds of +100000 for betting on the Cleveland Cavaliers to go 82-0 in the 2024-25 NBA regular season. The Cavs are the league’s only remaining undefeated team at 12-0.
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The post, which had more than 1 million impressions by the end of the day, got plenty of attention, but not the good kind. “What if … the Cavs just NEVER lost this season?” read the post’s caption. “What if … you either just offered an actual fair price or just didn’t offer this market?” wrote Circa Sports head of operations Jeffrey Benson in the replies.
Indeed, the price is detached from reality. Odds of +100000 mean that a bettor wagers $1 to win $1,000, but the odds of an undefeated season are clearly far longer than 1 in 1,000. Just take the fact that, across nearly 1,700 individual team seasons in NBA history, no franchise has ever won more than 33 games in a row.
Assuming the 2024-25 Cavaliers are as good as the 2015-16 Warriors, who finished 73-9, which seems highly unlikely, we could assign them an 89% probability (73 / 82) of winning each game. With those chances, the odds of winning the next 70 games would be about 1 in 3,500.
According to Basketball Reference, the Cavaliers’ margin of victory this year adjusted for strength of opponents is roughly +10.0. A 10-point favorite in an NBA game will have moneyline odds of approximately -540, per The Action Network, implying an 85% chance of victory. If we give the Cavs only an 85% chance of winning each of their next 70 games, they would have closer to a 1 in 100,000 chance of going undefeated.
Even that number, however, severely understates the unlikelihood of an undefeated season. An NBA team is never favored by exactly 10 points in each game. In reality, it may be favored by 16 points against a bad team but only by four points against a good team, for instance. If we assume that the point spreads by which the Cavaliers are favored over the remainder of the season are roughly evenly distributed across this range, then their odds of going 82-0 drops all the way to less than 1 in a million.
And the real number is likely more extreme for a multitude of reasons. Here’s one: Donovan Mitchell hasn’t played more than 77 games since his rookie season, and Cleveland is only 19-22 without him during his tenure there. If we generously assume that Mitchell misses only five games this season and give the team a 50% chance of winning those games, then we’re suddenly talking about 1 in 10 million.
