NBA Coach of the Year odds, best bets: History favors Donovan, McMillan as breakout candidates

In theory, the NBA Coach of the Year market should be one of the easiest to bet. There are only a handful of coaches who could be considered "the best" in any given season, and in a league where top-tier teams tend to remain there from year to year, there shouldn't be a ton to speculate.

In practice, that couldn't be further from the truth. This award might as well be named "the biggest overachiever" because that's all voters tend to care about when it comes to evaluating coaches.

Take a look at every winner since 2000-01 and how their team fared compared to the season before:

*adjusted for an 82-game pace

Of those 21 coaches, 12 led their team to a 14-win increase or better from the previous year - including eight with at least a 20-win jump. The nine coaches with smaller improvements? Their teams won at least 68% of their games, which translates to 56 wins across an 82-game season.

That trend has been consistent throughout the 59-year history of this award. The winner has improved his team's record by an average of 12.72 wins with a 55-win pace, and all but one of them has led his team to the playoffs. History spells out two clear paths to winning this award: carry a lousy team into contention or take a contender to the top.

With that in mind, here are the odds for this season's NBA Coach of the Year award and our favorite bets to win it:

Billy Donovan, Bulls (+1000)

Donovan is the archetypical candidate to win this award, and it's somewhat surprising he isn't the favorite. The Bulls are tied with the Lakers for the largest gap between their preseason win total (42.5) and previous record (31 wins), which gives Donovan a solid floor in a market obsessed with basic win-loss improvements.

This team may offer more than just a surface-level bump, though. Chicago's starting lineup is one of the better units in the East on paper, with three All-Stars and a boatload of scoring upside. Adding Lonzo Ball and Alex Caruso as perimeter pests should improve the team's defense in Donvan's second year.

The Bulls are -155 to make the playoffs, which is also nice padding for Donovan's potential resume. If Chicago snaps its four-game playoff drought behind a sizable bump in wins, Donovan will be a front-runner by year's end.

Nate McMillan, Hawks (+1500)

The Hawks' run to the Eastern Conference finals was unexpected, but it was hardly a fluke. They were 14-20 with 11 blown fourth-quarter leads before firing coach Lloyd Pierce on March 1. After installing McMillan in his place, Atlanta went 27-11 - tied for the third-best record in the NBA - with top-seven marks in net rating (plus-4.5) and true-shooting percentage (59%).

We've seen this story before. From 2003-04 to 2005-06, three coaches (Hubie Brown, Mike D'Antoni, and Avery Johnson) turned an interim tag into a full-time gig and parlayed that into Coach of the Year honors in their first full season at the helm. There's a clear path for McMillan to do the same, as we've already seen how good this team can be in a shorter sample.

If the Hawks kept up last year's second-half pace across an entire campaign, they'd finish with 58 wins - a 17-game increase from last season and likely good enough for a top-two seed in the East. That's probably too much to ask, but this price suggests it's a near impossibility. With this roster, it's well within reach.

Chauncey Billups, Trail Blazers (+3000)

Billups' ability to impress voters in this race is complicated by his messy off-court past and clunky introduction as the Trail Blazers' head coach. Strictly on the court, though, the former All-Star guard walks into a ready-made situation to win this award as a first-time bench boss.

Three of the last five winners were in their first year with a new club, and Billups takes over a talented group that simply ran its course under Terry Stotts, who was a perennial Coach of the Year candidate in his own right. Portland made the West finals in 2018-19 but slumped in two years since thanks to lousy defense and untimely injuries.

As our own Joe Wolfond laid out this week, this roster might be the best equipped in years to finally break through after improving along the margins - which includes a fresh voice at the top. With Damian Lillard, CJ McCollum, and a versatile roster around them, don't count out Billups as the leader of one of the West's potential overachievers.

Gregg Popovich, Spurs (+5000)

Popovich has already won this award a record three times and enters what could be his final season with perhaps the lowest expectations of his entire coaching career. How's that for the backdrop for a 50-1 long shot?

The Spurs are coming off back-to-back losing seasons for the first time since 1989 and are priced to win 29.5 games, which would mark this team's fewest victories since the year before Popovich took over in 1997. Yes, this group lost leading scorer DeMar DeRozan and veterans Rudy Gay and Patty Mills, but all three were negatives on defense, where Popovich's best teams tend to excel.

Those departures also create more opportunities for rising stars Dejounte Murray and Keldon Johnson, who both improved in bigger roles a year ago. If the Spurs can sneak into the playoffs for the first time since 2018-19 with one of the NBA's youngest rosters, Popovich will deservedly earn the lion's share of the credit, making him a tantalizing value at such long odds.

C Jackson Cowart is a sports betting writer at theScore. You can follow him on Twitter (@CJacksonCowart) or email him at cjackson.cowart@thescore.com.