New York Money is Backing the Knicks — and Creating Spurs Value for the Rest of the Market
Rarely does public money create value for the favorite...
There’s a lot more than pride riding on the Knicks in New York — there’s money. And lots of it.
At DraftKings Sportsbook in New York, nearly half of all futures money wagered on the NBA Finals winner has landed on the Knicks — roughly matching the combined handle on every other team in the market. That dynamic has now helped create what some traders are calling “Spurs value” for the rest of the country.
San Antonio opened the series as high as -220 favorites to win the Finals, with New York sitting as a +180 underdog. But as Knicks money kept pouring in overnight— particularly from New York-based bettors — the market quickly adjusted. By Sunday morning, the Spurs had already been steamed down to around -200.
In other words, the Knicks aren’t just getting respect — they’re getting overbet.
“Knicks are unsurprisingly very heavily bet on in New York, more so than any other state, both per game and in futures,” Caesars Sportsbook lead NBA trader David Lieberman said, noting that both the Knicks and Spurs are now significant liabilities in futures markets.
That’s the key dynamic: when one side becomes a public magnet, the other side often becomes artificially attractive to bettors looking for mispriced numbers. And right now, Spurs backers around the world are benefitting from exactly that effect. Usually, the public overbets the favorite. Rarely does such a situation benefit the favorite, but alas, such is the power of the New York market.
San Antonio opened at 65-1 to win the title. Meanwhile, the Knicks started the year at 10-1, briefly drifted to 19-1 during a volatile regular season, and even spiked out to 35-1 in the postseason after a shaky first-round series against Atlanta.
Now, after both teams have survived the chaos of the postseason, the market is still trying to balance two very different forces: sharp adjustment on San Antonio’s dominance, and relentless public money on New York.
For Spurs backers looking for even more value than the -200 series price, Victor Wembanyama, named NBA Defensive Player of the Year last month, is now the -185 favorite to win Finals MVP at DraftKings.
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