Legal sports betting in Arizona: 3 futures bets you can place on the Suns, Sun Devils and Cardinals – The Athletic

Legal sports betting is coming to Arizona. Starting Thursday, it will be legal to deposit and bet within the state.

If youre looking for hometown bets to place, a few of the local teams are in position to have good years, and we have three futures bets below you might want to consider. If you want to go bigger, please feel free to peruse our Sports Betting section, which features strategy advice from Jeopardy James Holzhaier, advanced statistical prediction models for the NFL and NCAA football, and everything in between.

Arizona users can register with The Athletics betting partner, BetMGM, and receive up to $200 in free bets. If you sign up for BetMGM and bet $1 you will receive $100 in free bets and a free year-long subscription (or renewal) to The Athletic.

The NFC West is going to be loaded this year. All four of the teams are in the top seven odds to win the NFC this season. The Cardinals are 16-1 to win the conference, but only 6-1 to win the division. Our Distributed Power Rankings (an advanced statistical model developed by Ethan Douglas)has the Cardinals as the second-best team in the NFC West and projects them to be right in the mix in the division.

The Cardinals arent the favorites, but they are good value at 6-1.

The Pac-12 South is a wide-open division on paper and Arizona State appears to be in the mix. The Sun Devils are ranked in both polls with a 1-0 record after beating Southern Utah 41-14 in the opener last weekend.

Arizona State only got four games in last season and lost to both USC and UCLA before beating Arizona and Oregon State. The Sun Devils will have to turn those results around to win the division, but both those were one-score losses. This year, ASU goes to UCLA on Oct. 2 and hosts USC on Nov. 6.

Junior quarterback Jayden Daniels is back with Rachaad White and DeaMonte Trayanum, who were the top two rushers last year. White and Trayanum each had two touchdowns against Southern Utah.

ASU has tricky crossover games at Utah and Washington, but Washington just lost to Montana so maybe the schedule isnt as bad as expected.

The Suns made it to the NBA Finals last year with a (mostly) young team. Yes, Chris Paul is 36, but he didnt show signs of slowing down and Devin Booker and Deandre Ayton are the faces of the franchise.

Phoenix is third in the odds behind the Lakers (+170) and the Warriors (+425). The Warriors might be overvalued a bit. That team hasnt been full strength in two years and is very different from then. Klay Thompson has suffered a torn ACL and an Achilles injury that cost him the past two years. Will he be the same player he was before?

The Lakers may be a justified favorite, but the Suns just knocked them out of the playoffs (with an injury to Anthony Davis helping). The Suns show good value at 7-1 after having the second-best record in the regular season and making it to the Finals.

(Photo of Kyler Murray: Christian Petersen / Getty Images; The Athletic may receive an affiliate commission if you open an account with BetMGM through links contained in the above article.)

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Legal sports betting in Arizona: 3 futures bets you can place on the Suns, Sun Devils and Cardinals - The Athletic