3 NBA Player Prop Bets to Target on Friday 6/25/21

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.

Giannis Antetokounmpo Over 5.5 Assists (-122)

We saw a pretty big deviation from Giannis Antetokounmpo in the assist column in Game 1 when he racked up nine helpers. He has posted nine or more assists in only 12 games this season (16.4%).

But we don't need him to get there to get the over on this prop. Far from it.

Antetokounmpo is projected to rack up 6.2 assists across 41.7 minutes, per numberFire's model. That works out to 0.15 assists per minute, which is actually shy of his season average of 0.17.

If he maintained his full-season rate and played his projected minutes, he would be on pace for 7.1 assists, so there are plenty of reasons to like the over here.

Even using just the 6.2-assist expectation and using Antetokounmpo's game-to-game variance in assists, we can expect him to be around 59.6% likely to hit the over on this prop. That implies the over odds should be -148.

John Collins Over 9.5 Rebounds (-105)

I like Clint Capela's rebounding over (13.5), but the odds are -130, and John Collins' rebounding over (9.5) is just -105.

Collins went out and gathered 15 rebounds in Game 1 over 37.0 minutes, and that gives him five straight games with double-digit rebounds.

numberFire is projecting Collins for 9.6 rebounds tonight, which is right on pace with the prop. That projection works to 0.26 per minute, which is on par with his full-season rate.

However, he's been more active on the boards lately, as already mentioned, and he's got his rebounding rate up to 0.28 per minute over his past 10 games.

Across the 37.3 projected minutes and that new rate, we would be looking at a baseline of 10.4 boards.

Brook Lopez Under 10.5 Points (-104)

Similar to the Collins recommendation, numberFire's model is projecting for a close number here for Brook Lopez' scoring (10.3 points), so we have to look past that a little bit.

(Also, with one game of props to look through, we're usually limited. So keep an eye on our projections throughout the day for updates and betting opportunities.)

Lopez played just 20.3 minutes in the opener of this series and put up 7 points on 7 shots.

In Game 1, the Milwaukee Bucks were a -36.7 by net rating over Lopez' minutes and a 14.6 without him, so he could see limited opportunities to get up shots tonight.

He's projected for 10.3 points over 29.9 minutes, and it's hard to see him getting much more run than that (if he gets there), given what we saw in the first matchup.