Sportsbooks never give odds that accurately reflect real world probabilities. A recent line offered by FanDuel, however, took the difference to a new level.
A post on X of 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 a lot 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 a real fair price or just didn’t offer this market?” wrote Circa Sports chief of operations Jeffrey Benson in the responses.
Indeed, the price is detached from reality. Odds of +100000 mean that a bettor bets $1 to win $1,000, but the odds of an undefeated season are clearly much 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 every 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 approximately +10.0. A 10-point favorite in an NBA game will have a purse of about -540, per The Action Networkimplying an 85% chance of victory. If we gave 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 underestimates the improbability of an undefeated season. An NBA team is never favored by exactly 10 points in every game. In fact, it can be favored by 16 points against a bad team but only by four points against a good team, for example. If we assume that the point spread by which the Cavaliers are favored for the rest of the season is roughly evenly distributed across this range, then their odds of going 82-0 drop to less than 1 in a million.
And the actual number is probably more extreme for many reasons. Here’s one: Donovan Mitchell hasn’t played more than 77 games since his rookie season, and Cleveland is just 19-22 without him during his tenure there. If we generously assume that Mitchell misses only five games this season and will give the team a 50% chance to win those games, then we’re suddenly talking about 1 in 10 million.
Remember that FanDuel only offers $1,000 per $1 bet. Instead of taking part in that bet, a bettor could simply place a money bet with -540 odds for 70 straight games, starting with $1 in the first game and then reinvesting any winnings in the subsequent games. If the Cavaliers actually went undefeated, this hypothetical bettor would end up netting over $100,000.
Across the industry, sportsbooks have tried to lean toward novelty bets that hit on major storylines, a mix of marketing and chance. A representative for FanDuel declined to comment.
There were calls for more regulation of sports betting. Some proposed barriers include bans on endorsement bets for college athletes and the elimination of “bonus bet” ads that encourage addicted gamblers to act on their unhealthy habits.
In theory, sports betting companies could be banned from making a bid like the one FanDuel did on the Cavaliers. They could, for example, be required that all probabilities have a price for both possible outcomes: in this case, on the Cavaliers becoming undefeated and the Cavaliers. no going undefeated.
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