How often do first basket and first field goal pay different players, and how do their prices compare?

First basket and first field goal look like the same NBA bet. They settle on different events. At some books a free throw that opens the scoring wins the bet; at others it does not count, and the bet goes to whoever makes the first basket from the floor.

That only matters in the games where the two are different players, and it only matters to your price if the two kinds of book quote that player differently. We hold the play-by-play for every opening possession of last season and the prices from every board we published, so we counted both.

The short version: 92 of 1,175 games last regular season paid different players in the two markets, 7.8%. On our boards for 22 to 25 October 2026, the best first field goal price was longer than the best first basket price on 115 of 290 players, and shorter on 131.

The two rules

On our board, First Basket prices come from two groups of books, read as their rules were on 22 October 2026:

bet365’s prices are read from its Ontario app. Every price in this piece is a listed price on our board, not a fill.

How this was counted

The settlement split. Our NBA opening-possession store records, for every game, the player who scored first (free throws included) and the player who made the first field goal. We took the 2025-26 regular season: 1,175 games had both recorded. A game counts as a split when the two are different players. A game where one player made a free throw and then the first field goal too pays the same player in both markets, so it is not a split.

The prices. For every NBA game on the 22, 23, 24 and 25 October 2026 slates, 29 games, we took the last board saved before that game’s tip. Each First Basket row on the board carries the first basket books’ prices and the first field goal books’ prices side by side. We compared the best price from each group, held quotes left out, and measured the gap in implied chance: +475 is 17.39%, +725 is 12.12%, a gap of 5.27 points. 294 rows had at least one price; on 290 both groups quoted the player.

How often the two markets paid different players

In 92 of 1,175 games, 7.8%, the first points of the game came from the free throw line by a player who did not also make the first field goal.

Where the first field goal went in those 92 games:

So in a split game, a first basket bet on the free throw shooter won and a first field goal bet on him lost, and the first field goal bet that won was on a teammate a little under half the time.

By team

The team is the free throw shooter’s. Seven teams had five or more:

The median team had 3. Milwaukee and Sacramento had none. Over a season of 82 games a team, a count between 0 and 7 is small: we read the top of the table as the teams whose openings reached the line a few more times, not as a pattern that has to repeat.

By player

66 different players opened a game from the line without making the first field goal, and 47 of them did it once. Five did it three times or more:

Four games across a season is a handful of opening possessions. The list shows who it happened to last year, not who it will happen to this year.

How the two kinds of price compared

On the 290 rows where both groups quoted the player, before tip:

The median gap was 0.00 points of implied chance and the mean was -0.07: over these four nights neither group was longer as a rule. When the first field goal book was longer, the median gap was 0.91 points; when it was shorter, 0.86.

By night:

Which books held the best price

On the first basket side the best price was FanDuel’s on 176 rows, bet365’s on 143 and Caesars’ on 30. On the first field goal side:

Ties count for every book at that price, so the columns add to more than the row counts.

The widest gaps

Where a first field goal book was longest:

And the other way, where a first basket book was longest:

The gap is in points of implied chance.

What the gap does not say

The two prices are on different bets. A first field goal price that is longer is not a better price for the same thing: it pays on another event, which in 7.8% of last season’s games went to a different player. This piece counts how the listed prices sat on four nights. It does not say which price is right, and four nights of one season’s first week is a dated count, not a rule for the season.

What it does say is that the two groups did not price the same player the same way most of the time: on 246 of 290 rows the best prices differed, in both directions. The cost of the market itself is counted in how much an NBA player prop costs you.

Where to find these

The Lab board, with NBA chosen and the First Basket chip, puts the first basket books and the first field goal books on one row for each player, the first field goal prices tagged FG. The player pages open on First Basket from these links: Bam Adebayo, Jarrett Allen and Josh Hart.