Note: This post was conceived before the NBA decided to suspend its season on March 11th following Rudy Gobert’s positive COVID-19 test. Best wishes to everyone dealing with the virus, and please take all precautions for your health and safety. This post is only intended for entertainment purposes during this difficult time.

The Milwaukee Bucks are having an amazing season, leading the NBA in wins and are the favorites to represent the Eastern Conference in the NBA Finals. Prognosticators and betters were asking: what the chances of the Bucks winning the 2020 NBA title?

I thought it would be an interesting thought excise to extend the time horizon of the question. Let’s ask, what are the odds of the Milwaukee Bucks winning an NBA title in the next three seasons? We’ll include 2020, 2021, and 2022 for this question, and explore this from both a probability and betting standpoint.
Let’s start with some assumptions I made about this Bucks team.

• I gave them a 35% chance of winning the NBA title this season, higher than the 20 percent chance given to them by FiveThirtyEight and the implied probability of current betting odds.
• If the Bucks don’t win it this season, I gave them a 25 percent chance for next season. This is because Giannis and their secondary players will improve, but there is much uncertainty about what other teams will do to improve themselves.
• I gave Giannis a 50/50 shot of staying after the conclusion of the 2020-21 season. I have no inside information on this, so I made it a coin flip.
• If Giannis stays, I gave the Bucks a 20 percent chance of winning the title. This is based on Giannis taking a leap into his prime, but other teams making moves that create uncertainty.
• If he leaves, it’s most likely through free agency, and no trade will net them an equal player. In that scenario, I gave them a 3 percent chance of winning the title.

To see how this plays out, we need to understand some probability. If A and B are independent, the idea is that the probability of “A” happening and “B” happening is obtained by multiplying the probability of “A” and the probability of “B.” It’s not fair to say that each season is independent and won’t change downstream scenarios, but I am using this framework to calculate the probabilities.

With this method, the probability of Milwaukee losing in 2020 and winning in 2021 is (65%)*(25%), or 16.25%. We’ll add up all the probabilities that involve Milwaukee winning the championship.
With this, the probability of Milwaukee winning at least one of the next three championships is ~57% percent, and their chance of not doing so is ~43%.

For a sportsbook to offer this as a wager, they need to add the “vig”, which is their cut of the action. They get the vig by inflating the odds of each side of the wager to make it less lucrative.

We’ll add the vig and turn the percent of “yes” from 57% to 58.5%, and “no” from 43% to 44.5%. Using this calculator, we can calculate American betting odds.

This means that a $141 bet on “yes” would net you $100 dollars, while a $100 bet on “no” would net you $125 dollars.

Please gamble responsibly and consult a professional for any issues or questions you may have.