The proposition was seemingly so outlandish that some bookmakers were hesitant to post odds on it: Would anyone really bet on Bronny James to be the No. 1 pick in the NBA draft?
The answer was yes, and lots of them, and not just recreational bettors, either.
On May 12, after some debate, BetMGM opened Bronny as a 200-1 long shot to be the first pick. The son of active legend LeBron James, Bronny didn’t have the playing résumé typically required to even be in the discussion as the top pick. It didn’t matter.
Bets started showing up on Bronny, one after the other at BetMGM. Most of the wagers were small, but there were hundreds of them, from across the country. On the day before the draft, there had been more bets on Bronny to be the top pick than any other player at BetMGM.
“We were debating even putting it up, to be honest with you,” Halvor Egeland, senior trader for BetMGM, said during a draft day phone interview with ESPN. “We definitely didn’t expect it to strike the most bets when we put it up.”
It’s not the first time that the American betting public has latched onto a long shot with an unrealistic narrative. Each year, bettors place wagers on Charles Barkley to win the American Century Championship at 5,000-1 odds or higher. Barkley, a notoriously bad golfer, finished 105 points behind last year’s winner, Stephen Curry, and has never finished better than 60th in the tournament. Last year, it was Deion Sanders and the Colorado Buffaloes to win the national championship at 300-1 odds. The Buffaloes, coming off a one-win campaign, entered the 2023 season having attracted more title bets than established contenders such as the Florida State Seminoles and Texas Longhorns. Coach Prime and Colorado fell short of winning the national championship, finishing 4-8, last in the Pac-12.
This year, it was Bronny, who averaged 4.8 points per game coming off the bench for the USC Trojans as a freshman last season. Still, the combination of Bronny’s pedigree, his father’s influence in the NBA and a draft class without a consensus top pick was enough for an unexpected number of bettors to take a shot on him going first.
“I think it’s more of a LeBron James bet than it is a Bronny bet,” Egeland said, referencing the theory that a team might have drafted Bronny in hopes of attracting LeBron, too.
Some of the bettors who bet on Bronny had…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at www.espn.com – NBA…