Now that every team in the NBA has played at least six games, we start to have a big enough sample size to analyze some early-season betting trends. Whether they’ve consistently gone under, failed to cover as a favorite or played much better on the road, we can start to determine whether or not these trends are likely to sustain over the rest of the regular season.
All 30 teams will be featured in this series over the next couple of weeks, but today we start out with the five Pacific Division temas.
Golden State Warriors
Since their opening night 121-114 victory in LA over the Lakers, the Warriors have gone five of their last six games. In those games, the under has hit all six times.
The face of this team is clearly Steph Curry. He’s a superstar having an MVP-caliber season – there’s still excellent value to take him at around +600 btw – but his stellar play has clouded the true foundation of this team’s success.
Frankly, the Warriors are not an offensive juggernaut. They’re just 16th in offense but their third-fastest pace has polluted us into seeing this as a top-tier offense. Instead, this team has started 6-1 on the back of its defense.
They currently have the best defensive rating in the league, holding opponents to just 97.1 points per 100 possessions. Draymond Green is having a DPOY season and the rest of this roster is packed with high IQ, switchable defenders who know the system inside and out. Eventually swapping Klay Thompson in for Damion Lee will only help this defense get better.
I see this being a pretty sustainable trend. The public will continue to root for incredible Curry performances, while the majority of the time this team will ride their defense to victory. Unders won’t continue to hit 86 percent of the time, but they should continue to be a strong play in Warrior games.
LA Clippers
The Clippers have been favored in five out of their first seven games but are sitting with just a 3-4 record. Despite the books liking them, they’re just 14th in net rating a +0.6. This has been a perfectly average team for the first two weeks of the season.
Through seven games, it feels like Vegas is handicapping the Clippers through the lens of past performance. Will that continue? I doubt it. Pretty soon they’ll be seen for what they are: average.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a bad basketball team. They play good team defense and Paul George is having an All-NBA season, but they just don’t have the top-end talent around him or the depth to play consistently at anything above a Play-In level.
If the opponent doesn’t show up ready to play, the Clippers have the ability to beat anyone. They’re well-coached and extremely competent. But they don’t have the ability to hang with good teams who bring their A or even B-level games.
In general, I think fading this team when they’re favored and backing them as dogs will be a sound strategy. They’re going to cover quite a few games when they’re getting 6-8 points, only to follow it up by beating the Thunder by five in a game they were favored by 12.5. They’re that kind of team.
Los Angeles Lakers
As is commonplace for a team as public as the Lakers, they’ve been favored in six of their eight games to start the season. So far, they’ve covered just once in those six games as favorites.
This is the easiest trend to predict moving forward. No, the Lakers won’t continue to cover 15 percent of the time they’re favorite. There are plenty of basketball and handicapping reasons to believe that will be the case.
We knew the Lakers were going to take time to sort out their mismatched, geriatric roster. We’ve seen amazing games from LeBron and we’ve seen games where he looks old. Russell Westbrook looked completely misplaced in the first handful of games and has looked far more settled recently. DeAndre Jordan is no longer starting which is a win in and of itself!
This team will improve over the course of the season and start to cover some of these games against inferior teams. The public will, eventually, also catch on to this trend. The lines will start to correct and more accurately match the reality of these games which should even this trend out in the long run.
Phoenix Suns
The total has gone under in five of six Suns games so far this season. While I don’t expect that to continue to hit at quite that pace, I’m not sure this is a trend that’s going to flip.
Phoenix plays fast. Or at least faster than you’d assume for a team led by Chris Paul. They’re ninth in pace, up from 24th last season. Maybe they’ve decided they want to run more this season, but this feels like a number that will sag back down to expectations. Eventually, CP3 is going to rein this team back in and I expect they’ll be in the bottom half of the league in pace by Christmas.
This defense has also really struggled to start the season. DeAndre Ayton has missed time and this bench has really struggled to defend, both of which have contributed to this being the 19th-ranked defense in the NBA. As the pace slows down I also expect this defense to improve which feeds into more unders.
The offense has also been lackluster and, while I expect it to improve in combination with the defense, I don’t think this is a top-ten unit in hiding. They refuse to take threes – and don’t make many of them anyway – and the new foul rules have somewhat limited Devin Booker and Chris Paul’s abilities to get to the line. This is probably a league-average offense in hiding, but I don’t see a regular-season juggernaut waiting to awaken.
As the Suns recover from their playoff run and warm up to the season, I’m confident they’ll improve. I think the totals will begin to catch up with Phoenix in the short term, but the under should hit more often than not for the Suns this season.
Sacramento Kings
Sacramento is 3-0 ATS in games that have hit the over and 2-3 ATS in games that have gone under so far this season. To me, that backs up a lot of the preconceived notions I had about this team.
The Kings are going to win by outscoring their opponent. I know that sounds dumb, you obviously only win games where you score more than the opponent, but I mean that they are going to win high-scoring games and lose low-scoring ones.
This defense is clearly improved over what was the worst unit in the league last season, but that boost has only lifted them up to 26th. Davion Mitchell has been spectacular, but Off Night (which might be the best nickname in the league) can only defend one player and a guard can only do so much to impact team defense.
This offense is going to carry Sacramento this season. A lot of their success is going to simply come down to whether or not their offense can be effective that night, so I expect a pretty clear correlation between overs and the Kings covering over the course of the season.
Pacific Action 
Leave a comment