NBA Betting Guide for Tuesday 12/21/21: Can Injured Teams Overcome and 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 Miami Heat
I know this sounds weird, but our model is liking the Miami Heat tonight despite the fact that they're without Jimmy Butler, Bam Adebayo, and P.J. Tucker.
It rates their spread (+1.5) and their moneyline (-102) as four-star suggestions. That means it recommends a four-unit wager. We can understandably scale that back a bit if we're concerned, but there is promising data for Miami despite all of these injuries.
They have played 244 minutes this season without those three aforementioned players, minutes that qualify as medium-to-high-leverage situations (i.e. non-garbage), via PBPStats. Their net rating in that sample is +0.3.
That won't blow you away. I get it.
But paired with the Indiana Pacers' data, it's pretty nice. Their non-garbage net rating in games with Domantas Sabonis and Malcolm Brogdon is only +0.8.
Accounting for all of this, my model actually has the Heat as slight favorites, too, so taking the points works out here.
Detroit Pistons at New York Knicks
The injury list in this game between the Detroit Pistons and New York Knicks is longer than a seven-year-old's list to Santa (nailed it).
With that, the model at numberFire is siding with the Knicks both with the spread (-7.0) and moneyline (-300).
Our model here sees the Knicks as 78.6% likely to win, outperforming their moneyline odds (75.0%). The expected return is 4.9%, putting this into the two-star territory, given the high probability of a win.
My model views the spread here as 9.5 rather than 7.0, so it's also preferring the Knicks at home.
The Pistons are just 2-12 on the road with an abysmal -11.6 point differential. Now, the Knicks are only 5-10 at home with a point differential of -5.0, but that's quite the gap, still.
Across the 25 most comparable games to this one in our historical database, teams representing the Knicks won 80.0% of them. They covered in 52.0% (with an abnormally high 12.0% push rate).
Minnesota Timberwolves at Dallas Mavericks
This is one of the best betting spots of the night, according to numberFire's algorithm.
It's siding with the Dallas Mavericks's spread (-1.5) and moneyline (-120), rating them as three- and four-star recommendations, respectively.
Wait, even without Luka Doncic and Kristaps Porzingis? Yep.
In non-garbage situations without those two, the Mavericks have a net rating of +6.5.
The Minnesota Timberwolves, without Anthony Edwards and Patrick Beverley but with Karl-Anthony Towns, have a non-garbage net rating of +2.2 (in just 79 minutes) while allowing a 53.8% effective field goal percentage and a high shot quality (0.54 -- basically their estimated effective field goal percentage allowed).
My model sees the spread here as 4.0 points in favor of Dallas and views them as 62.4% likely to win.
