Cleveland Cavaliers have been dominant this season; when will the betting markets notice?

Only six teams in NBA history have ever posted a net rating of plus-11.6 or higher. The four of them that are not playing this season won the NBA championship. You likely guessed that one of the others is this year’s Oklahoma City Thunder. The other, based on the headline, has to be the Cleveland Cavaliers, right?

Well … yes. But here’s the catch: The Cavaliers don’t have a net rating of plus-11.6. They have a net rating of plus-11.6 … if you ignore their 15-0 start. You know, the thing only four teams in NBA history have ever done. Just pretend that didn’t happen, and the 2024-25 Cleveland Cavaliers are still playing at a historic level.

In a just world, that would earn them acknowledgement as the juggernaut they have become, or at the very least, as legitimate championship contenders. There’s no real argument for small-sample weirdness anymore. We’re nearing the halfway point of the season and by just about any measure the Cavaliers are having one of the greatest seasons in NBA history. Don’t like net rating? OK. The Cavaliers are 28-4. Only 14 teams in NBA history have won 28 of their first 32 games, only five of them this century.

One would think that the betting community would be jumping all over a team of that caliber. But it’s not. In fact, Vegas seems to see the Cavaliers as a second-tier championship contender at best. Below are the current championship odds at five major sports books and where the Cavaliers rank in terms of shortest championship odds, as aggregated by OddsChecker.

All five books have the Cavaliers trailing the Celtics, Thunder and Knicks. Some have them trailing or tied with the Denver Nuggets, who have a plus-2.9 net rating, or the Dallas Mavericks, who were getting a subpar Luka Doncic season even before a calf injury knocked him out for at least the next month. Both the Nuggets and Mavericks play in the ultra-competitive Western Conference. The Cavaliers play in the East, and, critically, they have a five-game lead for the No. 1 seed as of this writing. Aside from home-court advantage, the current standings would assure that Cleveland only has to play one of the Knicks or Celtics, seeded No. 2 and No. 3 with a cushion right now, rather than both. In other words, Vegas seems to believe it’s likelier that the Celtics or Knicks beat each other and then Cleveland than it is that Cleveland can beat either of them. Doesn’t that seem a bit farfetched?

The crucial point here driving this skepticism is likely Cleveland’s playoff history. The Cavaliers have won a grand total of one playoff series since losing LeBron James in 2018. They lost badly to the Knicks in 2023 and then fell against the Celtics in 2024, albeit with a severely injured roster. Theoretically, it makes sense that bettors would want to see some measure of playoff success before putting their hard-earned money on the Cavaliers.

But this current Knicks core hasn’t played a single playoff game together yet. Everyone on the team has playoff experience, sure, but it’s far too early to say with certainty how those pieces will coexist against playoff-caliber opponents and game-planning. Boston has been a Vegas darling for years now. Granted, the Celtics have been making deep runs, but they were championship favorites well before they actually won a championship, and even when they weren’t, they haven’t seen odds as long as Cleveland is facing now since their 23-24 start to the 2021-22 season.

There’s an argument to be made here in favor of wing-heavy rosters. Boston and New York have them in spades. Oklahoma City and Dallas do too out West, and while the Nuggets don’t, they do have a three-time MVP. Before this breakout start to the season, the widespread belief among fans and critics was that Cleveland would eventually have to break up either the backcourt of Donovan Mitchell and Darius Garland or the frontcourt of Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen. Maybe you could get away with two small guards on defense or two non-shooting big men on offense, the argument went, but you certainly can’t get away with both.

For starters, that bias against the Cleveland roster may not even be true anymore. Mobley’s 3-point volume is steadily rising. He took 1.6 3s per game in October, 2.1 in November and 3.5 in December, and he’s making 42.7% of them. He is, at the very least, reaching “has to be guarded” territory, and that’s enough to solve the spacing issues that two non-shooting big men tend to cause. Throw in his remarkable growth as a ball-handler and he and Allen can now meaningfully interact offensively. If Mobley and Allen run a pick-and-roll together, there can be three shooters surrounding it. That’s a lot of space.

More pertinently, Cleveland’s wing rotation is better than it’s ever been even if it isn’t quite as flashy as Boston’s or New York’s. While Isaac Okoro will likely never be a volume shooter, he at least has a three-year sample of at least being mostly reliable when he’s left wide-open. He’s made 39.7% of such shots since Mitchell’s arrival. He isn’t Andre Roberson on offense anymore. If Max Strus can defend well enough to start playoff minutes for the Heat, he can defend well enough to play for this team. And then there’s Dean Wade.

Wade is quietly the single most important Cavaliers role player by a wide margin. Since the Mitchell trade, they are 88-33 with him and 39-36 without him. That’s a 60-win pace when he’s healthy and a 43-win pace when he isn’t. Cleveland is 22-1 with him on the floor this season. He hasn’t been healthy for either of Cleveland’s last two playoff runs, having spent only around 11 minutes on the floor against New York in 2023 and suiting up for just the final three games against Boston last season. It’s worth noting in that series that in Wade’s first two games back, Cleveland won his minutes by 14 points and lost the minutes they played without him by 34. His plus-minus streak ended with the series-ending Game 5 blowout, but generally speaking, he almost always falls on the right side of that ledger. He led the Cavaliers with a plus-8.3 net rating last season. Cleveland wins his minutes by 14 points per 100 possessions this season.

Wade gets hurt frequently. There’s no denying that. But building up this enormous early season lead in the standings potentially makes it easier to keep him fresh and healthy down the stretch if Cleveland can pull far enough away to start resting players. His presence is going to be essential in the postseason because he is Cleveland’s best option by far to defend Boston’s wings. Fittingly, the Cavaliers have played Boston with a healthy Wade seven times in the last three regular seasons and have won that “series” 4-3. The general consensus among the all-in-one metrics is that he is among the NBA’s best defensive wings. Estimated Plus-Minus ranks him No. 21 in the NBA among all defenders. Bball-Index’s LEBRON metric rates him the second-most effective defender under their “wing stopper” archetype this season, trailing only Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. Having a healthy Wade in the 2025 playoffs affects Cleveland’s outlook as much as the presence of Coach of the Year frontrunner Kenny Atkinson.

None of this is an argument that Cleveland should be the undisputed championship favorite, of course. We’re talking about degrees here. The shortest available championship odds among those five books we tracked is the +1300 BetMGM line. Those represent implied odds of 7.14%. Boston, meanwhile, is no longer than +255 at any of the books we tracked. Those represent implied odds of 28.17%. Is Boston really four times likelier to win the championship than Cleveland is? Even if you think the Celtics are better, aren’t they just as vulnerable to injuries or bad shooting variance? At what point are bettors going to be willing to challenge their priors and accept that the Cleveland Cavaliers are not just some regular-season curiosity, but a genuine championship contender? Do the Cavs need to win 70 games? More?

These are unanswerable questions, and the truth here likely has more to do with the field than the Cavaliers. The Celtics, losers of four of their last six, haven’t looked like the Celtics for about two weeks now. If that turns into two months, bettors will start to panic. Take a look at the minutes leaderboard right now. Three of the 12-most used players in the NBA on a per-game basis are Knicks, and all five starters are in the top 40. Their odds probably start to dip if they experience wear and tear injuries. The betting public started the season expecting the Celtics and Knicks to be the two best teams in the Eastern Conference. It’s very hard to get people to change their mind, especially when the teams in question have mostly lived up to expectations.

But Cleveland has exceeded their own to a cartoonish degree, and it’s time for the betting public to actually take notice.