NBA Betting Guide for Wednesday 10/27/21: 3 Home Sides Primed to Cover
Betting on the NBA can get a little overwhelming throughout the season because there are games every day, and there's just a lot to track throughout the season and entering every night -- spreads, over/unders, injuries, and so on.
But you can rely on numberFire to help. We have a detailed betting algorithm that projects out games to see how often certain betting lines hit, and you can track line movement within games and compare odds over at the oddsFire section of the site.
Where do our algorithm, our power rankings, and the betting trends identify value in tonight's games? (All odds from NBA Finals odds.)
Indiana Pacers at Toronto Raptors
We're getting points (+2.0) on the home side in this matchup for the Toronto Raptors against the Indiana Pacers, and numberFire's algorithm views that as a three-star (out of five) opportunity. That means we can go in for a three-unit bet here.
The model sees the Raptors winning this game outright 61.0% of the time (thus making the Toronto moneyline [+108] another three-star recommendation) and covering the spread at a 59.3% clip. Those imply returns of 18.5% and 13.3%, respectively, on investment.
The Raptors have a +1.5 point differential through their four games despite a 1-3 record, and the Pacers are a -0.3 with an identical record.
Adjusted for spread, my data has the Raptors as a +4.4 in terms of point differential, and the Pacers are just a 0.1. Taking the points -- and possibly siding with Toronto outright -- looks like the right call.
Minnesota Timberwolves at Milwaukee Bucks
The Milwaukee Bucks have injuries to deal with, and the Minnesota Timberwolves are playing good basketball overall thus far, but it's still the Bucks -7.0 that our model is keying on.
The Bucks list Jrue Holiday and Brook Lopez as out, yet we can also point out that the Timberwolves' defense is a bit overrated to start the season, too.
Their 96.2 defensive rating (a top-three mark) comes with a 50.0% effective field goal percentage converted by opponents on wide-open shots (a bottom-four rate) and just a 31.1% three-point conversion rate on wide-open threes.
According to the 25 most comparable games historically to this matchup, teams representing the Bucks won outright 92.0% of the time and covered at a 76.0% rate.
Those are in line with our actual simulation odds for the Bucks to win (90.2%) and to cover (69.6%).
Cleveland Cavaliers at Los Angeles Clippers
For the final game we're highlighting, it's another home side to cover that the algorithm likes.
This time, it's the Los Angeles Clippers (-8.0) against a Cleveland Cavaliers team that is 2-2 with a spread-adjusted point differential of +5.9.
That spread-adjusted differential still isn't as good as the Clippers' number of +6.3. Further, the Clippers' +7.3 point differential overall doesn't mesh with their 1-2 record.
Our model likes the Clippers to cover the 8.0-point spread 65.9% of the time, leading to an expected return of 25.9%. The teams representing the Clippers also covered 80.0% of the most comparable games to this one in our database.
Also, since the start of last year, the Cavaliers have covered in just 37.3% of their games, the lowest rate in the NBA.
