PELICANS Odds: Schedule, Matchups, & Stats

Next Matchup

November 9, 2026 10:00 PM ET NBA TV

515 Pelicans 4 - 5

Best Away Odds

+9.5 -113

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516 Warriors 7 - 3

Best Home Odds

-8.5 -116

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Previous Matchup

November 8, 2026

Pelicans

123

Clippers

139

 

New Orleans Pelicans Odds & Betting Guide: 2026-27 Season

Where the Pelicans Stand

New Orleans finished 2025-26 at 26-56, eleventh in the Western Conference and third in the Southwest, and the Knicks eliminated the team from playoff contention on March 24. The slide started early: Willie Green opened the year 1-12, the front office fired him in November, and James Borrego ran the bench the rest of the way. Anyone who tracked the NBA odds board last winter saw New Orleans post as an underdog on most nights, and the team closed the season losing nine of its final ten. A five-win bump over the prior year’s 21-61 moved the market very little.

Jamahl Mosley takes over as head coach after New Orleans hired him in May 2026. Mosley built a top-tier defensive reputation in Orlando, and the Pelicans handed him a roster that executive Joe Dumars and general manager Troy Weaver chose to keep largely intact. New Orleans made no first-round pick, signed no star in free agency, and ran back a group that won 26 games. The front office is betting on internal growth and better health rather than new talent, and the win total reflects exactly that read.

Health is the whole story for this roster. Zion Williamson played 62 games last season, only the third time in his career he has cleared 60, and he averaged 21.0 points on 60% shooting. Dejounte Murray played just 14 games while returning from a torn Achilles, and the team adds Bennedict Mathurin, who signed on September 10 after averaging 17.6 points across 54 games for Indiana and the Clippers. Jeremiah Fears and Derik Queen, the two 2025 lottery picks, headline a young core alongside Trey Murphy III. The ceiling depends on how many games that group plays together.

For bettors, the profile is clear. New Orleans owned one of the league’s worst defenses last season, giving up 118.9 points per 100 possessions, 25th in the NBA, and the offense ranked 21st. That combination keeps the team an underdog most nights and pushes game totals up. The books priced the Pelicans accordingly, and the roster did little over the summer to change the math.

Western Conference and Southwest Division Context

The Western Conference race, not the division title, is where New Orleans has betting relevance, and even that is a long reach. Projections land the Pelicans around 14th in the West, well outside the play-in picture that runs through the 7-through-10 seeds. Division winners have not been guaranteed a top-four seed since 2015-16, so the conference standing carries the weight here. You can track both markets on the Western Conference odds and Southwest Division odds pages.

The Southwest is a hard room. San Antonio enters the year with a win total near 60, and the Pelicans play every division rival four times, 16 of their 82 games. New Orleans splits the season series history closely with its neighbors, and the two most relevant matchups for pricing are the ones that recur: compare the board against the San Antonio Spurs odds and Dallas Mavericks odds when those games come up, because the division number swings on them.

Pelicans 2026-27 Win Total

Books opened the Pelicans at 27.5 wins, and the price sat close to even, with the over at -115 and the under at -105. The consensus has since nudged up toward 28.5 as the market absorbed the Mathurin signing and a healthy Williamson at camp. You can check the current line on VI’s NBA win totals page. Either number sits among the five or six lowest in the league.

One factor shapes how to read a number this low. The league reformed the draft lottery for 2026-27, expanding it to 16 teams and flattening the odds for the worst records, which reduces the payoff for losing on purpose down the stretch. That matters for a bottom-tier team: the old late-season tank incentive is weaker, so a non-contender has more reason to keep competing in March and April than it used to. For a win total near 28, that argues against assuming the roster folds once the playoffs are out of reach.

Pelicans 2026-27 Futures Odds

New Orleans sits at the bottom of the NBA futures board. The title price ranges from roughly +40000 to +100000 depending on the book, an implied probability near two-tenths of one percent, and the Western Conference number is nearly as long. The Southwest title is out of reach with San Antonio priced as a heavy favorite. None of these are bets so much as a reading of where the market places the team.

The award markets hold the only live tickets. Mathurin enters the year tied for around the seventh-best Sixth Man of the Year odds, a reasonable number for a scorer stepping into a mid-20s-minute bench role. Williamson has no realistic MVP case, and any individual futures ticket runs into the same wall that his game odds do: the 65-game threshold for major awards. A player who has cleared 60 games only three times is a poor bet to qualify, so the eligibility rule, not the talent, caps those markets.

Betting Pelicans Point Spreads

Books set a point spread to turn an uneven matchup into a roughly even bet. The favorite gives points, the underdog takes them.

Pelicans -6.5 (-110) / Hornets +6.5 (-110)

The Pelicans cover by winning the game by seven or more. The Hornets cover by winning outright or losing by six or fewer. The half-point means neither side can push. A winning $100 bet at -110 returns $190.91: the $100 stake plus $90.91 in profit. A losing bet returns nothing. Both sides here are priced at -110, and that is where the book earns. You risk $110 to win $100 whichever side you take. When books post a whole number instead, a game decided by exactly that margin pushes and both sides get their stake back.

New Orleans spent most of last season taking points rather than giving them, and the spread results split sharply by venue. The Pelicans angle: through 60 games last season the team went 19-13 against the spread at home but only 14-13-1 on the road, a gap that held all year. A road-weak, home-steady underdog is a profile worth pricing into live-dog and home-dog spots. Check the team’s full-season mark and league rank on VI’s NBA ATS rankings page before you bet the number.

Betting Pelicans Totals

Books set a total for the combined points both teams score, then let bettors take a side. Say books post Pelicans vs. Warriors at 226.5. The over cashes if the two teams combine for 227 or more. The under cashes at 226 or fewer. A half-point total cannot push. NBA totals follow pace. Two fast teams produce more possessions and more scoring chances, and that matters more to the number than either team’s shooting percentage. VI’s free picks desk posts its lean on games like this on the NBA picks page.

Why Pelicans totals move: New Orleans ranked 25th in defense last season and played at the 11th-fastest pace in the league, a combination that feeds the over. The home-road split showed up here too, with a clear majority of home games finishing over the number while road games stayed closer to even. When the Pelicans host, the total deserves a second look upward.

Betting the Pelicans Moneyline

The moneyline asks one question: who wins. Points do not matter.

Spurs -240 / Pelicans +200

Minus marks the favorite, plus the underdog. At -240 you risk $240 to win $100. At +200 you risk $100 to win $200. Converting to implied probability makes the pricing clearer. The -240 favorite implies 70.6%. The +200 underdog implies 33.3%. Those sum to 103.9%, not 100%. The extra 3.9 points are the book’s margin, and the book collects it whichever side wins. You can run any price through VI’s betting odds calculator to see the implied number yourself.

One thing worth getting straight: a short price is not automatically a bad bet. Bettors call heavy favorites bad value out of habit, but if the Spurs win this matchup 75% of the time, -240 is a price worth taking, because it only implies 70.6%. Value is the gap between real probability and priced probability. The size of the number tells you nothing on its own. When one side carries heavier juice than the other, that tells you where money is landing, not which side is correct. If the Spurs drift from -240 to -270, bettors backed the Spurs and the book adjusted its exposure. The team did not become more likely to win.

Pelicans Player Props

A player prop prices one player’s production in one game.

Zion Williamson points: 24.5 (over -115, under -105)

The over needs 25 points. The under needs 24 or fewer. NBA props respond to availability more than anything else. When a teammate is ruled out, his minutes and shots move to the players still on the floor, and books adjust within minutes of the news. Check the injury report before betting a prop, and check the book’s rules for a player who does not play, because they differ between books. VI tracks the current numbers on its NBA player props page.

This roster makes that availability note the central prop angle. Williamson and Murray both carry long injury histories, and a Pelicans rotation missing one of them redistributes usage in ways the opening prop numbers do not always catch quickly. The team also draws just four national TV games all season, with only the two European dates against San Antonio airing on a major partner, so most Pelicans props set with less public attention than a marquee team’s.

Pelicans Line Movement: Open Versus Consensus

VI’s odds board lists the opening line beside the consensus across books. The open is the first number a Las Vegas or global book posts, and the consensus is the median current line once the market has bet into it. The gap between them is the signal. When a Pelicans spread opens at +6.5 and the consensus settles at +5, the market has moved a point and a half toward New Orleans since the open, and the direction shows where money pushed.

The win total shows the same mechanic at the season level. The number opened at 27.5 and the consensus climbed to 28.5 after the Mathurin signing and a healthy Williamson reported to camp, so the market bought a full win’s worth of improvement over the summer. VI’s NBA matchups page carries that line movement game by game along with ATS history, which is where the open-versus-consensus read turns into a per-game edge rather than a season-long guess.

Prediction Markets

Prediction markets now price NBA outcomes alongside the sportsbooks, and the Pelicans appear across them the same way they do on the odds board: as a long-shot title and conference ticket with live value only in the award and win-total markets. Comparing a prediction-market price against the sportsbook consensus is a quick way to spot where the two disagree, and a gap on a Pelicans futures line is worth a look before committing. See the current board and sign-up details with the Novig promo code.

The two commercial options to have ready for Pelicans games this season: grab the Fanatics Sportsbook promo code or the Caesars Sportsbook promo code before you place your first wager.

VegasInsider Staff

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