Expected wins for 2023-24 Phoenix Suns — too high or too low?

The Sportsbooks all peg the new-look Phoenix Suns with the 4th best betting odds to win the 2024 NBA Championship, right behind the leveled-up Celtics, Bucks and current champ Nuggets.

That happens when you’ve got three All-NBA players in their primes. Very few teams have 3 recent All-NBA players in their lineup, considering All-NBA nods are reserved for the top 15 players in a 30-team, 450-player league — the top 3%. Devin Booker and Kevin Durant were both among the top-five first-team in 2022, while Beal made third-team in 2021.

Draftkings says the Suns will get to the Conference Finals with an over/under betting line of 51.5 regular season wins. The Nuggets are expected to grab the West’s top seed with an over-under line of 54.5 wins.

Seem like low betting lines? I’ll try to put this into perspective a bit. Sportbooks are fueled by bets, who puts money where, and are frozen as of the first day of the season. So it’s all based on fans like us predicting over-under lines before they’ve seen anyone play a game. That flattens the lines quite a bit. Fans put money on the ‘over’ on their bad team, while betting the under on the really good team. And there’s only so many wins to go around. We can’t have 30 teams win more than 41 games after all.

So it’s about relative placement, and the Suns have the second-highest betting line win total in the West (51.5). Next-highest in the West goes to Lakers and Warriors at 47.5 apiece.

DraftKings has had the Suns in the 51-win range for the past three seasons since the Finals appearance in 2021. We laughed at the 51-win prediction in 2021 and were right, as the Suns delivered a franchise record 64. Last year, they predicted 52, and the Suns delivered 45.

That’s a +13 and -7 over two seasons, with a whole lot of real-world context left out of how those actuals came about.

Who knows what the Suns will actually do in 2023-24 with a nearly-new squad — 13 new players across the standard contracts and two-ways (Don’t discount the two-ways. They played a TON the last two years).

On the top end, we can see an easy cruise through the regular season, evolving into a playoff chess match to survive each series. The Suns can absolutely win the whole thing, or they can fall on their faces like the last two playoffs.

But that doesn’t stop us from puffing out our chests right about now, does it? We can dream!

Make your prediction, Suns fans, before the ball goes up for opening tip.