Paolo Banchero was drafted first overall last night. It was a surprise. Betting markets swung vigorously in his direction as the day began, but a large collection of experts thought the Magic would select Jabari Smith, and those who mentioned Banchero seemed, to my eyes, to do so hesitantly.
There’s a thought channel to go down with the betting market thing, and we’ll dip our toes into it below, but first, I want to talk about Mike Krzyzewski.
When Coach K embraced one-and-dones, he embraced a different kind of basketball. It wasn’t so much an on-court pivot—that happened too, but it isn’t as significant—as it was an off-court pivot. Duke’s identity changed. Once, Duke had been more on the Belichick-Patriots side of loathed powers, arrogant and shady but achieving its success through a unique approach. With the one-and-dones, Duke became more like the prototypical Steinbrenner-Yankees, doing college basketball’s equivalent of spending the most money to dominate free agency (which was, allegedly, spending money, but we don’t want to get into the allegedly game here). It was an approach more in line with the modern NBA, and it was an approach which gave Duke a larger presence in the NBA Draft, and it was an approach, therefore, which led a lot of NBA fans and NBA-style fans to embrace Duke. Duke became the NBA fan’s college basketball team. Coach K became the NBA fan’s college basketball coach. And last night, Coach K won the NBA fan’s college basketball national championship.
The thing about NBA fans today, or at least too many of them, is that they get more excited about what happens off the court than what happens on it. There’s an online element to it which surpasses that surrounding other sports, and in this online, instant-reaction environment, everything is processed with the same energy, from the Warriors winning the title last week to Joel Embiid tweeting that he wanted to team back up with Jimmy Butler a few weeks ago. In the online NBA, the reality show element of the association naturally receives more energy than the games themselves. This subset of fans processes the drama of players teaming up and breaking up and all the drama which surrounds that process with the same vigor they direct towards significant games. With few significant games outside of the playoffs, and with plenty of Game of Thrones-esque alliance-building going on at seemingly all times, this translates to a species of fan that, as we said, gets more excited about what happens off the court than what happens on it.
The draft is an off-court event.
Will most fans look back at Coach K’s final year and say, “Yeah, he got Paolo Banchero drafted first overall?” No, not at all. But there is a fan out there—there is a type of fan out there—that cares more about Banchero’s draft place than Duke losing to North Carolina in Mike Krzyzewski’s final game. Congratulations, Mike. At least you won with someone.
Insider Betting?
What happened with the betting markets was this:
When the college basketball season ended, a consensus quickly solidified that there was a three-player race to be the first overall draft pick. Jabari Smith was in the picture. Chet Holmgren was in the picture. Paolo Banchero was in the picture. As Ben Fawkes notes at VSiN, Caesars opened the betting with Smith at 11-to-10 (+110, requiring a 47.6% probability to be an even-value bet), Holmgren at 9-to-5 (+180, requiring a 35.7% probability), and Banchero at 2-to-1 (+200, requiring a 33.3% probability). If you’re totaling those parenthetical percentages, yes, sportsbooks get a big cut of the action, this is a lot of how they make their money. But what this shows is that even with oddsmakers’ estimation that Banchero was a step behind the others, they kept him at a value such that a bettor who said, “Well, they’re all equal in terms of probability,” would be right on the inflection point between betting on Banchero and not betting at all.
Gradually, as the lottery set the draft order and as the pre-draft evaluator process played out, the consensus began to pivot away from Banchero and towards a binary Smith-vs.-Holmgren decision for the Magic (or, relevantly, a potential trade partner). As Fawkes notes, Banchero could be found at times at odds as high as 20-to-1. Last week, Holmgren and Smith were co-favorites at -115.
Mock drafts were largely unified by last week: The Magic would take Smith, the Thunder would take Holmgren, the Rockets would take Banchero. There were exceptions, of course—John Hollinger at The Athletic had the Magic taking Holmgren and the Thunder taking Smith—but this was the consensus order. It wasn’t communicated as set in stone, and in fact, many mock drafts took pains to say they didn’t think it was set in stone, but when such a large percentage of prognosticators are presenting the same top three, an impression grows that it’s set in stone. Sharps, Fawkes explains, read that it wasn’t set in stone. Sharps jumped on Banchero’s long odds.
What is left unexplained, though, is why Banchero ever got below those 2-to-1 odds. If the idea behind bettors putting so much money on him is that he could be as likely as Smith or Holmgren to be selected first, why did bettors bet on him to be more likely than Smith and Holmgren? By Wednesday night, Banchero was the favorite at certain books. Yesterday morning, Adrian Wojnarowski, legendarily hardly ever wrong, tweeted that “the 1-2-3 of the NBA draft is increasingly firm, per sources: Jabari Smith to Orlando, Chet Holmgren to Oklahoma City and Paolo Banchero to Houston.” The markets reacted, pricing accordingly. The bettors reacted, betting Banchero back down.
It was so noteworthy that it became a bit of a narrative. I believe it was on Titus & Tate, recorded Monday, that Sam Vecenie (NBA Draft expert for The Athletic) mentioned bettors liking Banchero, but said he still believed Smith would be taken first overall. Right around the time Woj sent his 1-2-3 tweet, college basketball analyst Jeff Goodman tweeted the same. The odds became a story. And looking ahead, the odds might become the story. Because this is all a little bit odd.
There’s an innocuous explanation and there’s a shady explanation and there’s an explanation in between.
The innocuous explanation is that this was a run on Banchero that happened to work out. Sharps started betting him at too-long odds, the public followed, the public followed with such vigor that they lost the plot and bet the odds down into too short of territory, with Banchero suddenly the favorite.
The shady explanation is that someone who knew something was placing bets, and that the market followed, and that we’re on the verge of our first massive insider trading scandal in legal American sports betting, should investigative journalists get to the bottom of it.
The explanation in between is that the sharps bet Banchero at too-long odds, and that the public followed, and that rumors were thrown around about Banchero and about a Rockets trade for the first pick (to take Banchero) and that with few more notable sporting events to bet on right now and betting very popular, bets were placed on Paolo Banchero. It’s the innocuous explanation again, but with the rumors added.
In the end, slightly more than eleven hours after his 1-2-3 tweet, Woj tweeted that Banchero was the frontrunner. Fourteen minutes after that, he tweeted that the Magic were going to select Banchero.
The shady explanation is concerning for the sports betting industry. An insider trading scandal could be catastrophic for an addictive product recently made much more legal. But there are a few things to remember here:
First, there are presumably protections within the NBA against insider betting. If someone from the Magic was caught using inside information to place bets on the draft market, they would be fired by the Magic.
Second, there are protections within the industry against insider betting. There’s a natural incentive to discourage it, obviously, because if insiders are betting, sportsbooks are losing money on their bets, but there’s also already a natural mechanism in markets more prone to this sort of intel-based manipulation: Limits on NBA Draft bets are much lower than limits on, say, the Super Bowl over/under.
Third, there’s a phenomenon with conspiracies (not conspiracy theories, but conspiracies themselves) where involving more people makes a thing likelier to blow up. Should a member of the Magic front office really want to make a ton of money on NBA Draft futures, they’d have to involve others, because 1) they’d get fired if they were caught doing this and 2) sportsbooks limit how much individuals can bet on who’ll be taken first in the NBA Draft.
There are, then, a lot of protections, and while those could be more robust, they also…couldn’t be? I don’t really see how you can have NBA Draft odds without this risk. I don’t see how you can have widespread sports betting (which we had even before the Supreme Court began allowing non-Nevada states to legalize it) without the risk of a point-shaving scandal. This is part of the deal with this industry, the same way that largescale financial crime is part of big business. Should the SEC open a branch to investigate sports betting? Not right now, no. If scandals become prevalent and it’s in the public interest to prosecute insider bettors, yes, but we aren’t there right now. We’re not even close to there. Because what probably happened here is really this:
- The Magic decided recently that Paolo Banchero was their top choice.
- The Magic kept this information extremely close to their chest, wanting to 1) keep their intentions unknown so that any team who desperately wanted either Smith, Holmgren, or Banchero would be forced to make a better trade offer for the first pick, and 2) keep their intentions unknown so that other teams would have more difficulty figuring out their own draft plan.
- As the mock draft 1-2-3 consensus emerged, sharps read the explanation, looked past the 1-2-3, and bet on Banchero.
- As Banchero’s odds dropped, a run developed.
- As a run developed, theories developed as to what was happening, most notably the Houston trade theory. These theories quickly became rumors in a social media environment ill-equipped to parse details and not-at-all-concerned about factualness.
- The Magic never got a trade offer good enough to shake them from their stance, so they took Banchero.
On the Topic of Betting
Our NHL portfolio situation, entering tonight, is basically that if the Avalanche win in five games, we’ll more or less break even (0.2% profit). If the Avalanche win in six or seven games, we might lose as much as 25% of our initial investment there. If the Lightning win, we might lose something like 9% of our initial investment there. Not where we wanted to end up, but Gelo won’t be responsible for our worst futures effort ever, and it did fine on the day-to-day, single-game picks as well.
Where does this leave us? Nowhere too different from where we started the effort. We’ll still be needing a good performance from our MLB futures to get back to even, barring something sensational with NASCAR betting or early-season college football betting (where we’re planning on being pretty darn conservative). Thankfully, the MLB futures are still shaping up well. Doing them every weekday seems to be resulting in smaller holes than we’ve had the last three years, though the Dodgers are a great big bogeyman right now.
With tonight’s hockey game itself, it’s interesting how much stronger lines are favoring the Avalanche in Game 5 than they did in Games 1 and 2. I have a hard time believing it’s all because of Nazem Kadri’s return, or that it’s because of anything other than the general thought of, “Yeah, the Avalanche have this wrapped up.” It’s about 60% likely that the Avalanche win tonight. That’s not that likely. 40% chance we see Game 6, something like a 20% chance we’ve got a Game 7 coming our way.
Iowa State: Checking In
Bill Connelly posted the first half of his Big 12 preview the other day, and if you have ESPN+, it’s a great read, as is most Connelly writes about college football. The biggest takeaways from the piece, in my opinion, are that…
- Iowa State’s in the bowl-bid probability territory where you should expect a bowl bid and not be shocked if it doesn’t happen. It would be disappointing and not shocking to miss a bowl. That’s where we’re at.
- Iowa State’s a .500 team on paper.
- Iowa State is absurdly inexperienced relative to the rest of the country. One of the three or four most inexperienced rosters in the country. This is the flipside of all those guys coming back after 2020, and it creates a lot of uncertainty surrounding the program.
On that last note: Does the idea of a .500 median expectation paired with a large unknown and Matt Campbell at the helm make anyone else optimistic?
On the basketball court, Izaiah Brockington signed an Exhibit 10 deal with the Pelicans, which means he’ll spend the offseason with them but is far from guaranteed a spot on the active roster this fall.
Tight Ends Love Tight Ends
Tight End U was or is this week in Nashville—a celebration of all things Tight End, organized initially by George Kittle, right? Regardless of who designed it, I don’t know whether to find it corny or awesome, but it’s happened for another year, and it’s interesting to see so many NFL players crossing team lines to work on their craft together. Even quarterbacks are involved: Josh Allen, Zach Wilson, and C.J. Beathard were all reportedly there to throw.
For the Packers fans in the room: Robert Tonyan was in attendance and appears to be on track as far as his knee recovery goes. David Lombardi reported he was “running on the side,” which lines up with the expectation he’ll be back for Week 1.
The World Series of College
We’ve got our final two teams in the College World Series, with Oklahoma and Mississippi playing tomorrow, Sunday, and possibly Monday to determine the NCAA’s final champion of the academic year. I’m afraid I know little about pitching availability or things of that sort, but the odds seem to be narrowly in Oklahoma’s favor, though sportsbooks are keeping a big vig on this. I wonder if there’s a great database out there for college baseball stats. I’m guessing there is, and that it might even be through the NCAA. Theoretically, you could get pretty far towards a WAR-like metric with all the basic box score stuff, I would think. Curious how Vegas sets its odds on this one.
Ok, We’ll Talk About the Cubs
Man, what a terrible game yesterday. Justin Steele was kind of fine—struck out eight, walked none, did allow the two home runs so that’s how we get back to “kind of fine”—and the eighth-inning comeback was a blast, but then the Cubs gave it right back.
Jonathan Villar’s defense was a problem, and his offense did not make up for it (he’s at a 66 wRC+ with a nearly identical xwOBA to his wOBA, combining with the defensive issues to make him 0.6 wins below replacement level just one year after being 2.5 wins above replacement level), and with David Bote activated from the 60-day IL, it’s Villar who’s being designated for assignment.
Bote is quietly kind of a big part of the Cubs’ plans, having signed an extension prior to 2020 that keeps him under club control at an affordable rate through 2026. He’s cheap enough that they could theoretically cut him if they ever wanted to, but at 29 years old, having always been at least close to league-average in xwOBA, that’s unlikely. Expect him to get a good amount of plate appearances this year and to be an above-replacement level player. Not quite a league-average hitter, but not far behind that.
In other happy news, the Myrtle Beach Pelicans—the Cubs’ low-A affiliate—won the Carolina League’s South Division championship for the first half of the season. They’ll be in the playoffs, and more than that, it’s a reminder of how much talent the Cubs have down at the lowest levels of the farm system. It’s a long way away, and some will fail while other parts materialize, but it’s there, and it’s coming.
Tough series this weekend, on the road in St. Louis, but what does this team have to lose? Kyle Hendricks tonight, TBD tomorrow, Matt Swarmer on Sunday.
Injuries, Arbitration
News around the Majors:
- I missed this yesterday, but Carlos Carrasco left his Wednesday start with back tightness, adding to the Mets’ rotation struggles. If Carrasco doesn’t make his next start and Max Scherzer’s timeline isn’t unexpectedly accelerated, the Mets will be digging down to their ninth starting pitching option. Who that is remains unclear.
- Danny Mendick went on the IL yesterday with a torn ACL in yet another blow for the struggling White Sox, who started a four-game set with the Orioles by losing last night. The team is two games below .500 and four and a half back of both the Twins and the Guardians.
- Manuel Margot avoided a torn ACL, but at this point that’s better news for next year than this year for the Rays. I suppose it’s possible—he has a “significant patellar tendon strain”—that he could come back before the playoffs, but it doesn’t look particularly likely, and the Rays are a dicey proposition at the moment to make the playoff field, a game behind the Twins for the last spot and not much better on paper than the Angels or the AL Central trio. Could be a good bounce-back bet early next year.
- In Los Angeles, Andrew Heaney is going on the IL with a shoulder strain. The veteran has only made three starts for the Dodgers this year, but they’d been good ones: 23 strikeouts, four walks. His start on Sunday was his first since April. Could be a good piece, and a possibly necessary one, if the Dodgers can get him healthy.
- Salvador Pérez is going on the IL and will have surgery to repair a ligament in his thumb. Doesn’t make much difference at this point for the Royals, but sad for the game, and explains some of his struggles at the plate this year.
- Going the other direction, Jake Meyers is coming off the 60-day IL for the Astros after tearing his labrum last fall crashing into the wall in the Division Series. The rich get a little bit richer.
- And finally, also getting richer is Aaron Judge, who settled with the Yankees today on a compromised salary before his arbitration hearing had to begin. No extension, though, soothing fears there from those hopeful to acquire Judge this offseason.
On the field:
- The Twins had a nice night, getting six scoreless from Devin Smeltzer in a 1-0 win over Cleveland which pulled the two back to a tie in the AL Central. Nick Gordon’s home run was the difference maker there.
- Dansby Swanson had another huge day for Atlanta, homering twice and reaching base four times in a 7-6 win over the Giants.
- The Brewers beat the Cardinals, 6-4, pulling back even in the NL Central as Tyrone Taylor and Willy Adames each went deep.
- The Yankees rallied for four off of Ryan Pressly in the ninth, with Giancarlo Stanton and Gleyber Torres each walking before Aaron Hicks tied it and, eventually, Aaron Judge drove Jose Trevino home for the win.
- Joe Musgrove struggled in his return, allowing two home runs and failing to record a quality start for the first time all year.
- Frankie Montas took a no-hitter into the eighth inning, didn’t allow a run, and…the A’s still lost. 2-1.
***
Viewing schedule for the weekend, second screen rotation in italics:
Friday
- 6:40 PM EDT: Mets @ Marlins, Walker vs. Alcántara (MLB TV)
- 7:05 PM EDT: Astros @ Yankees, Verlander vs. Severino (MLB TV/ESPN+)
- 7:10 PM EDT: Red Sox @ Guardians, Pivetta vs. Quantrill (MLB TV)
- 7:20 PM EDT: Dodgers @ Atlanta, Urías vs. Anderson (MLB TV)
- 8:00 PM EDT: Lightning @ Avalanche, Game 5 (ABC)
- 8:10 PM EDT: Blue Jays @ Brewers, Manoah vs. Houser (MLB TV)
- 8:15 PM EDT: Cubs @ Cardinals, Hendricks vs. Pallante (Apple TV+)
- 9:40 PM EDT: Phillies @ Padres, Nola vs. Gore (MLB TV)
Saturday
- 1:05 PM EDT: Astros @ Yankees, Javier vs. Cole (MLB TV)
- 2:15 PM EDT: Cubs @ Cardinals, TBD vs. Mikolas (MLB TV)
- 4:10 PM EDT: Blue Jays @ Brewers, Kikuchi vs. Burnes (MLB TV)
- 6:10 PM EDT: Red Sox @ Guardians, Winckowski vs. Bieber (MLB TV)
- 7:00 PM EDT: Oklahoma vs. Mississippi, Game 1 (ESPN)
- 7:15 PM EDT: Dodgers @ Atlanta, TBD vs. Fried (FOX)
- 10:10 PM EDT: Phillies @ Padres, Eflin vs. Snell (MLB TV)
Sunday
- 1:35 PM EDT: Astros @ Yankees, Urquidy vs. Cortes (MLB TV)
- 2:10 PM EDT: Blue Jays @ Brewers, Berríos vs. TBD (MLB TV)
- 2:15 PM EDT: Cubs @ Cardinals, Swarmer vs. Flaherty (MLB TV)
- 3:00 PM EDT: Mississippi vs. Oklahoma, Game 2 (ESPN)
- 4:10 PM EDT: Phillies @ Padres, Gibson vs. Darvish (MLB TV)
- 5:00 PM EDT: NASCAR Cup Series @ Nashville (NBC)
- 7:00 PM EDT: Dodgers @ Atlanta, Gonsolin vs. Strider (ESPN)
- 8:00 PM EDT: Avalanche @ Lightning, Game 6 – if necessary (ABC)
