NFL football betting players don’t have a clue who is going to play in the Super Bowl, but in the NBA, it looks as though the defending champions from Los Angeles and the new-looked Miami Heat are the front-runners, and the matchup that everyone is waiting to see.

Who are we giving the edge to? That would be the Lakers, because, well, they’re the champs until someone else says so. The Heat are a perimeter-based team with LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and a host of three-point shooters (when Mike Miller comes back, they’ll be even better), but the Lakers have Ron Artest, Matt Barnes and even Shannon Brown to come off the bench and play some defense. Not to mention, that Kobe Bryant guy can play some defense as well and we all know he relishes a challenge. On the other end of the floor, the Lakers will be able to use their advantage in the post against the Heat with Pau Gasol, Andrew Bynum (if he ever gets healthy again, and even Lamar Odom, who we forget is almost seven feet tall because he handles the ball so well. Let’s keep it real: Udonis Haslem can guard only one person, and Chris Bosh is no interior defender.

But the Lakers also have championship experience by leaps and bounds, which is why the Heat tried so hard to wrestle Derek Fisher away from Los Angeles. Also, they have the game’s best closer in Bryant, and until someone proves otherwise, there is no one else we want in the clutch, which is why

we’d take the Lakers at most sports betting sites.

Houston’s NBA odds aren’t any better after their Game 2 loss to the Lakers on Wednesday night, but the best part of it all wasn’t even the confrontation between Ron Artest and Kobe Bryant, or even the tangle between Derek Fisher and Luis Scola, but it was Artest’s post-game interview.

Oh man, so classic. Dude’s talkin’ about people gettin’ stabbed in the chest with table legs. We (old-school sportsbook players) all know the NBA isn’t the game we grew up watching, the one with the “Bad Boys” and the heated Bulls-Knicks/Bulls-Pistons rivalries, but apparently they weren’t nothing compared to what Artest saw in Queensbridge, New York.

I was thinking that there should be some sort of NBA odds on how many, or how long, it would take for Bryant and Artest to get into it. Both are hard-nosed competitors, and Bryant DID elbow Artest in the throat. He shouldn’t have been ejected from the game, even Bryant said so himself, because I think Kobe likes the challenge as proven by his 40-point explosion. They didn’t even make it out of Los Angeles. The NBA odds for another Bryant/Artest square-off? EXCELLENT.