NBA

The 5 Best Bets to Miss the 2018-19 NBA Playoffs

Just how doomed are the Cavaliers' playoffs hopes now that they have lost LeBron James?

With the NBA regular season only a week away, there's optimism everywhere. We're looking for players to draft who will bolster our fantasy lineups all season. We're trying to find teams that will make a playoff run, or even challenge the Warriors for the title. We're trying to spot players who are under-priced in daily fantasy to open the year.

But let's get pessimistic now. Let's look at some teams that won't live up to expectations -- teams whose playoff chances are being way overrated.

Here are numberFire, our Team Rankings page has full-season projections for all 30 teams. This includes not only projected win and loss records, but probabilities that a team makes the playoffs and probabilities that they win the championship.

If we compare these projections to the betting lines at the FanDuel Sportsbook, where you can find odds on any of the 30 teams missing the playoffs, we can find some serious betting value.

This isn't a list of the five teams most likely to miss the playoffs (for example, we give the Phoenix Suns only a 0.1% chance of making the postseason, but you're getting ridiculously low -9000 odds on that), but rather a list of the teams with the biggest gaps between our projections and the betting odds. Some are teams that we still project at better than 50% for the postseason, some are teams that we have as huge long-shots. But what they all have in common is that they are mispriced in the betting markets, per our numbers.

Let's get right into it and look at the best bets to miss the playoffs.