The 5 Best Bets to Win the NBA Scoring Title

The Best Value: Russell Westbrook

Betting Odds (rank): +1600 (6th)
numberFire Points Per Game Projection (rank): 27.68 (3rd)

The discrepancy between the betting odds and our projections is most pronounced with Russell Westbrook.

The scoring leader in the 2016-17 season, Westbrook went on to finish seventh last year with 25.4 points per game. The arrival of Paul George and Carmelo Anthony took the ball out of his hands more than we saw the year prior as Westbrook attempted 5.3 fewer field goals per 100 possessions.

Using NBAWowy, we can look at Westbrook's stats with different players on the floor to try to pin down how much George, who is still in town, affected his game, and how much of it was the now-departed Melo.

In the 1,947 minutes that Westbrook played with both Anthony and George on the floor, his usage rate sat at 32.8%, and he turned 26.4 field goal attempts into 32.2 points per 100 possessions.

Just taking his 405 minutes with George on the floor but Melo off, though, that usage rate jumps to 37.6%, and he averaged 31.1 field goal attempts and 38.8 points per 100 possessions.

That's still not quite in line with what he was putting up the year he won the scoring title (34.0 field goals and 44.8 points), but he also won it with a gap of 2.5 points per game (31.6 to James Harden's 29.1). Westbrook doesn't need to hit 2017 levels of volume this season to be a real threat for the scoring title.

numberFire's models project Westbrook to finish second in the NBA in total scoring and third in points per game. The betting odds imply Westbrook as only the sixth-most likely player to win the scoring title, and the top-heavy nature makes that even more extreme than it sounds. He is implied to only be only about 17% as likely as Harden to win, and a winning bet on Westbrook pays out over eight-times more than one on Harden.

Sure, we still like Harden and Anthony Davis to finish first and second in the scoring title race, but with the big edge in betting odds, Westbrook stands out as a far better value.