Player props can be useful in a variety of ways, from taking advantage of them straight up (to the tune of cold hard cash) to measuring a player's potential to produce in daily fantasy basketball. Here we'll focus on utilizing our projections and a slew of other tools to help make money betting player props.

For this article, we are using the odds provided at NBA Finals odds to pinpoint spots where value can be had tonight.

Please note that betting lines and our player projections may change throughout the day after this article is published.

Russell Westbrook Over 26.5 Points (-116)

The Washington Wizards will be without Bradley Beal tonight (and all week), and while they have struggled in that split -- they're 1-7 in games without Beal but with Russell Westbrook -- we don't care about that for this prop.

Westbrook has scored 204 points over 296 minutes in games without Beal (a nice 0.69 per minute). That's similar to his overall rate of 0.70 without Beal on the floor (not necessarily in games when Beal didn't play), according to RotoGrinders.

Westbrook is projected for 39.4 minutes tonight, so at the 0.69-point-per-minute rate, he should get to 27.2 points, very close to what our algorithm is projecting him for: 27.4.

Eric Bledsoe Over 1.5 Three-Pointers Made (-115)

I initially wanted to detail Lonzo Ball's over prop (2.5) on three-point makes, but the juice is up to -184 on it. So I'll look to Eric Bledsoe instead.

The New Orleans Pelicans are without Zion Williamson and Brandon Ingram, and that leads to a bigger opportunity for Bledsoe. Without those two on the floor, Bledsoe averages 0.23 three-point attempts per minute, up from 0.17 with them.

Bledsoe shoots 34.3% from deep this year and is projected for 34.0 minutes, meaning we should expect around 7.8 three-point attempts for him (he's had 5, 7, and 9 in his past three games) and 2.7 makes.

Kent Bazemore Over 4.5 Rebounds (-110)

Kent Bazemore gets a tough rebounding matchup with the Utah Jazz, who rank fourth in rebounding rate over the past 15 games, but our algorithm anticipates 5.9 boards for him over 32.9 minutes.

Utah is actually pretty close to the NBA average in rebounds per game allowed to opposing small forwards over the past 10 games (6.4 compared to 6.7).

While Bazemore's rebounding rate does fall from 0.18 per minute on the full season to 0.16 against top-10 rebounding squads, that lower mark still gets him to 5.3 boards over his allotted minutes.

Using the even lower 5.3 number as the baseline, he should be around 60.7% likely to go over based on his seasonal deviation against better rebounding teams. At 5.9 as the baseline, that number jumps to 72.4%.