England BBL Betting Odds & Lines

British Basketball League: A Unique Format and Intense Competition

The British Basketball League, or England BBL, is the highest level of men’s professional basketball in Great Britain, with representation from Scotland as well as England. There are ten teams in the British Basketball League and is a part of the FIBA Europe Confederation. These ten teams are member franchises, which means there is no automatic promotion or relegation which tends to be a popular system in European countries, but with franchises, you can’t promote or relegate to lower levels. 

The ten franchise British Basketball League games are as follows:

• Bristol Flyers 
• Cheshire Phoenix
• Glasgow Rocks
• Leicester Riders
• London Lions
• Manchester Giants
• Newcastle Eagles
• Plymouth City Patriots
• Sheffield Sharks
• Surrey Scorchers 

There will be a new team in the 2022-2023 season, the Reading Rockets. The British Basketball League was founded in 1987, so there is a history behind this league compared to other international basketball leagues. 

The most successful team in the British Basketball League is the Newcastle Eagles who have seven championship titles. The Leicester Riders earned their fifth title in the 2020-2021 season and are reigning champions this year. 

The BBL Championship competition consists of a double round robin where each team will play all other teams twice, once home and once away. This doesn’t mean a huge swath of games like you’d see in other leagues, but the season is quite long, from September to April, so there aren’t a huge number of games to be played in a close time frame. 

What sets this league apart from other basketball leagues is that there is no actual playoff round to determine who the BBL Champion is. The team at the top of the standings at the end of the season wins the championship title, much like in British and European soccer leagues. This is essentially winning your division, if you were playing in other leagues. 

Once that title is earned, the top eight teams head to playoffs, which is a knockout tournament, but with three-game series. These teams are competing for a different honor – the BBL Cup. The BBL Cup wasn’t introduced until 2003 and allowed for the league to introduce a playoff tournament without actually compromising the original league championship.

Bet on the British Basketball League with Confidence!

If you want to get in on the action and bet on the British Basketball League, you will want to know everything you can about betting on this sport. Luckily, we have you covered. 

If you like to bet on simple outcomes, choose a moneyline wager. You can find moneyline odds on every game in the regular season as well as the BBL Cup playoff round. All you have to do with a moneyline wager is a bet on the team you believe will win the tournament outright. This is a simple wager which will pay out based on how likely the team is to win the game. 

Another simple betting option you can use if you aren’t overly familiar with either team is the totals wager. This allows you to bet on the combined total points of both teams but added together. The oddsmakers will set the line based on what the predicted score is, and you will decide if you think that the score for both teams added together will be over or under the oddsmaker’s line. 

Point spreads allow you to make things a little more complicated, where the sportsbooks essentially give the underdog team an imaginary head start before the game starts. The favored team needs to win by that many points, and the underdog team can lose by less than that many points, or win the game. 

There will be fewer prop betting options on the British Basketball League than what you’re used to. There will be a few options for bigger games, but for the most part, you should stick to NBA or college basketball for your basketball props. 

The most exciting wager of the year will be the two futures wagers you can place on the British Basketball League. You can bet on which team will win the league, at any time of the year, but where the league champion is decided by standings, you will see the odds lose value towards the end of the season or when a team starts to pull ahead of others. The other wager is to bet on the BBL Cup, which allows you to bet on which team you think will win the championship tournament title. 

If you think you’re ready to bet on the British Basketball League head over to the sportsbook and start placing your wagers.