Magic vs Lakers NBA Picks Game 1 NBA Finals: It's taken seven months to get here, the beginning of the 2009 NBA Finals, a best of seven games series between the Eastern Conference champs Orlando Magic and Western Conference champions the Los Angeles Lakers. Game-1 starts tonight with tipoff set for 9 p.m. ET at Staples Center in Los Angeles. For the series,  Sportsbook.com is listing the Lakers as -260 moneyline favorites to win while odds on the Magic winning the NBA Championship are +210.

Thursday morning Sportsbook.com listed the Lakers as 6-chalk favorites over the Magic for Game-1 with a 205.5 total. Los Angeles is  -270 favorite on the Sportsbook moneyline while Orlando is gettng +230 moneyline juice as the road underdog.

Before this season started, Los Angeles was an obvious favorite to repeat as Western Conference champions. And in running away with the Pacific Division title with a West-best 65-17 record, beating the Utah Jazz in six games in the first round of the playoffs, and doing the same to the Houston Rockets in the conference semifinals and to the Denver Nuggets in the Western Conference Finals, they achieved just that.

On the other side of the bracket, Orlando also did about what was expected of them during the regular season, winning the Southeast Division by 12 games with a 59-23 mark. Entering the playoffs as the three-seed in the East, the Magic proceeded to beat the Philadelphia 76ers in six games in the first round, ousted the Kevin Garnett-less Boston Celtics in seven games in the conference semifinals, and knocked off the top overall-seeded Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference Finals four games to two.

The Lakers, as we recall, played in the Finals last year, bowing to Boston in six games. They also played in four Finals from 2000-04, although only Kobe Bryant and Derek Fisher of the current squad played in those series.

The Magic, on the other hand, are playing in their second Finals series, their first since 1995, when Shaq and Penny Hardaway got them there in the sixth season of the franchise's existence.

These two teams played twice this season with Orlando getting the best of LA on both occasions by a total of nine points combined. The Magic also covered the spread in both games, first as 1.5-point home dogs, then as 4.5-point road dogs.

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