LeBron James returns to the NBA Finals for the 10th time in his Hall of Fame career when his Los Angeles Lakers take on the Miami Heat for the 2020 NBA Championship inside the bubble in Orlando, Florida.
The NBA betting odds have LeBron and the Lakers set as 5-point favorites for Game 1 of the finals Wednesday night and marked around -400 front runners to win the NBA title.
The Lakers are the fourth team (third franchise) James has led to the NBA Finals, with two go-arounds with the Cleveland Cavaliers in finals appearances in 2007 and 2015-2018, and a memorable stint with the Heat from 2012-2014. It’s also is the ninth time in the past 10 seasons a LeBron-led team has qualified for the championship round.
But while that resume puts James into the same company as Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, he’s fallen out of favor with NBA bettors looking to back “The King” against the spread in those NBA Finals contests.
For his career, James is 18-31 SU and 20-28-1 ATS in NBA Finals games, covering the spread only 42 percent of the time.
While a lot of that damage came when Cleveland took on the Golden State Warriors dynasty in four straight finals between 2015 and 2018, going just 7-15 SU and 9-13 ATS, James-led teams (Cleveland 2007 and Miami) were 11-15-1 ATS before that four-year rivalry.
Looking deeper into those numbers, you can see when LeBron loses an NBA Finals series it never goes the distance and usually ends rather quickly, averaging just five games per series. In the six finals LeBron has lost, his win/loss is just 6-24 (20 percent) with an ATS record of 9-21-1 (30 percent).
In the three NBA Finals James has won, the series go an average of 6.3 games with LeBron-led teams going 11-8 ATS in the process, resulting in a much more profitable 58-percent winning clip against the point spread.
In the strange COVID-delayed 2020 NBA season, Los Angeles finished 52-19 SU and 36-34-1 ATS. The Lakers posted a dismal 3-5 SU record when the seeding schedule started in Orlando, going 1-7 ATS, but clinched the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference in their second game and seemed to cruise to the postseason, protecting their top talents. In the 2020 NBA Playoffs, L.A. enters the NBA Finals with a 12-3 SU record and a 9-5-1 ATS count.
Los Angeles went 2-0 SU and 1-1 ATS in two meetings with the Heat in the regular season. The Lakers, who will likely be the betting favorite in all of these neutral-site games, own a 37-37-2 ATS record as point spread favorites this season.
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