3 NBA Player Prop Bets to Target on Thursday 11/4/21

Player props can be useful in a variety of ways, from taking advantage of them straight up within the betting market 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 and simulations 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.

Bam Adebayo Over 18.5 Points (-118)

The Miami Heat are 6.5-point favorites over the Boston Celtics, and the 214.5-point over/under is enough to want to get to the over on Bam Adebayo's points prop.

numberFire's model projects Adebayo for 20.1 points across 34.4 minutes against a Celtics defense that ranks 18th in defensive rating.

A mid-level matchup isn't anything to be too concerned about, though it's worth noting that the Celtics have faced the second-lowest rate of shots within three feet of the rim.

Conversely, however, they're sixth in frequency from 3 to 10 feet.

Given the 20.1-point projection, my simulation model views Adebayo as 57.7% likely to go over, meaning we could bet this over up until -136.

Jaylen Brown Under 5.5 Rebounds (-105)

On the flip side of that game, we can target a rebounding under for Jaylen Brown, who has averaged 6.3 rebounds per game thus far. We get nice juice at -105 for the under.

The Heat have the NBA's best rebounding rate by far (56.4%), and the Celtics are just 28th (47.5%).

That puts the Heat around 113% of the NBA average in rebounding rate, so we should anticipate a drop in Brown's per-minute rebounding numbers within this matchup.

Brown, this season, has hauled in 0.17 rebounds per minute, the same mark as his four-year rolling average.

That rate at his projected workload puts him on pace for just 5.5 rebounds across 32.9 minutes.

If we scale back his per-minute rebounding rate accordingly, we could set a baseline of 5.1 rebounds for him in such a tough spot.

Kent Bazemore Over 3.5 Rebounds (+128)

numberFire's model is pretty heavy on the plus-money prop here on Kent Bazemore's rebounding number.

I'd imagine his per-game rebounding number (2.3) is why the juice is so heavily on the under, but Bazemore's rebounding rate is 0.08 per minute this year.

His four-year average is 0.16, so yeah, we should probably expect more fruitful rebounding days for Bazemore.

Bazemore also has averaged 6.3 rebound chances per game, and at a league-average conversion rate, he should be averaging 3.6 rebounds per game instead of the 2.3 he has.

At his four-year average, we should anticipate 4.4 rebounds for Bazemore across his projected minutes (27.0), and numberFire's outright projection for him is 4.1.

Using the lower 4.1 threshold, my simulation model views Bazmore as 64.0% likely to go over his prop.