Aaron Bruski’s 2026 NBA Playoff Betting Journal

  • By Aaron Bruski

    Last Updated on April 3, 2026 7:35 pm by Aaron Bruski | Published: April 3, 2026

    I’m going to keep it short and sweet heading into this season’s Playoff Betting Journal. All the ground rules are broken down below and save all the analysis for those sections, as well. LFG!

    (Last Year’s Playoff Betting Journal link: Here)

    ***SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM FOR THE LATEST PLAYS AND JOURNAL ENTRIES***

    To set this article up — this journal is my playoff betting journey, minus the game to game plays. So futures bets and series bets. It’s the type of thing that might have a different strategy from year to year. But before we dive into strategy let’s quickly acknowledge that playing a postseason in this manner is a constantly changing chessboard. Investing in the teams that you like and having early success, especially on underdogs that the public hasn’t caught up on yet, can give you ways to hedge into guaranteed profit or even leverage the guaranteed returns into huge upside in future plays.

    Let’s talk a bit about how I am handling units and overall strategy. Typically units mean whatever your standard bet is. Here, we set a target number of units to bet over the course of the entire postseason and ultimately set a total budget for what we’re willing to put up for the entire playoffs. Because we could either experience an accelerated betting strategy as the playoffs progress — one where we want to hit the gas on how much cash we put in the furnace, or conversely one where small bets actually make more sense, whether in profit or loss scenarios, we have to remain flexible on that front.

    Below you will see a loose framework and target unit distribution for each stage of the playoffs. Any team that we’re not investing in pre-flop I have listed as ‘out’ off to the right side. Basically if any of those teams keeps advancing toward an outcome, we’re going to have to hedge and otherwise recover later on down the road, probably at a loss.

    In the chart below you will see that I have 800 units I am targeting to play and just under 300 of them going in pre-flop on futures. Another 500 units will be planned for the rest of the journal on futures plays, and then I’ll toss some units at some series betting which I’ve found to be a pretty low volume marketplace.

    I recommend to set a total budget for what you’re willing to put up for the entire playoffs and then divide that by 800 to get your per-unit play.

    I’ve also shown what the ROI for your total investment would be in a segment (i.e. Finals futures, West futures, etc.) based on how much your units are worth ($1, $5, $10, $25).

    I will update this journal throughout the playoffs and try to be as explanatory as possible but be warned the document can get kind of long and fairly messy. Apologies in advance and best of luck to all of us!

    PRE-PLAYOFFS ANALYSIS

    While I know who I like and who I don’t like in relation to their pricing, the major wildcard right now is the Eastern Conference and it can be summed up in the fact that I like the Detroit Pistons but I’m not happy to bet my life that they make it out of the first round.

    Meanwhile, as it stands right now Cleveland could get Atlanta in round one and whatever team theoretically upsets Detroit in round two, setting them up for a puncher’s chance to go to the Finals against flawed Boston and New York teams.

    I don’t like Cleveland at all but Donovan Mitchell, James Harden, Evan Mobley are certainly credible and adding Keon Ellis and Dennis Schroder creates solid depth and simply put, while I would like to summarily discount them I can’t.

    The same goes for the New York Knicks. Karl-Anthony Towns and Mike Brown don’t have an answer for Jalen Brunson’s style of play, and in the case of Towns he’s simply not a big game player. Brown is a capable coach but he needs to be more than that with this group and find a way to solve the Brunson conundrum, which is to somehow create ball movement alongside a player who relies on multiple fakes in precarious positions that don’t create consistent gravity that can be built upon by a 1A or secondary creators. I like them to scrap but teams have several quick ways to knock them out shutting down one or two players who have already struggled for consistency all season.

    While I like Boston to compete and I’m not going to fade them completely, I worry about offensive balance with Jayson Tatum and what playoff refereeing will do to both he and Jaylen Brown, and the public likes them right now a little bit too much making them expensive.

    In the Western Conference, Oklahoma City is as weakened as we have seen them in the past two years with Jalen Williams hoping to forget regular season ever happened, and Isaiah Hartenstein as a question mark heading into competition against Nikola Jokic and Victor Wembanyama. Jaylin Williams and of course Chet Holmgren are easily actionable championship pieces in this puzzle but especially against Nikola Jokic, Hartenstein is one way you can pull the pin on Oklahoma City’s value proposition. Peak athleticism for centers can go quickly and that’s the concern here.

    The other issue is what San Antonio can do to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander with all of their athletes and overall the question about what he will get away with in a playoff setting, and finally, it wasn’t exactly a cake walk for them last season and San Antonio and Denver are more of a challenge this season in my opinion. And if Detroit can simply get to the Finals, they have the toughness to compete. Boston and New York would also compete.

    To sum it up for the case against Oklahoma City, the field just looks a lot better than the odds show.

    As for San Antonio, the only thing they lack is experience and De’Aaron Fox has played in a massive playoff series against Golden State as the featured guy, playing mostly big time basketball, and Harrison Barnes brings gravity to the locker room setting. Victor Wembanyama has unworldly confidence and his unworldly stature is fairly unprecedented and can help take on the experience gap. They are simply better than anybody else in pure basketball talent and they have already shown that against Oklahoma City. Still, questions will remain until they prove it.

    Denver simply has the best one-to punch in the game right now and in a playoff setting that’s undeniably actionable in a playoff betting journal like this. And we can talk about the lack of relative depth and injuries and defense and any number of questions the Denver media is moaning and groaning about on any given night, but they have experience and talent for days as well as the current best player on the planet.

    With all that said let’s take a look at the pre-flop betting!


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    April 3, 2026, 7:35 pm