NBA Betting Skills

By: SBR Staff
With the World Basketball Championships now concluded, the NBA season will be here before you know it. What better time to brush up on your NBA betting skills by taking a quick look back at last season?

Last year was a relative enigma for bettors if you actually go back and look at how teams performed Against the Spread vs. Straight Up. Here’s an illustrative example: Off the top of your head which team had the best record ATS last season?

Some of you may be tempted to go with the champs, the Miami Heat.

You would be wrong.

Other popular, yet wrong, answers may include the team with the NBA’s best record (Detroit Pistons), the best in the West (San Antonio Spurs), and the NBA Finals losers (Dallas Mavericks).

Out of those four teams, the closest team to the top was the Mavericks.

The correct answer to our trivia question, however, is the Charlotte Bobcats at 46-33-3 ATS. You might be wondering how a team that won only 26 games SU can be the best team ATS for the entire season? The easy answer of course, is inflated point-spreads. When you lose as much as the Bobcats did, the oddsmakers start setting the spreads against the team a lot higher, which as you can see results in an odd-looking record ATS vs. SU.

If you really want to be amazed, let’s take a look at the other side of the equation. The worst team ATS, the Portland Trail Blazers at 33-47-2, isn’t much of a surprise when you consider what a headache that team was both on and off the court last season. The second- and third-worst teams ATS may surprise you. The second-worst team ATS last season was the NBA-best Detroit Pistons at 44-53-3 ATS, while right behind them at third-worst ATS were the NBA champion Miami Heat at 48-55-2. The short version of our little story goes something like this: Basically you would have won more money betting on the Bobcats ATS in every game last season than you would have made betting the Pistons or the Heat ATS.

The rest of the top five ATS teams from last season ended up being a mixed bag that included winners like Cleveland (51-41-3 ATS/57-38 SU) and Phoenix (55-46-1 ATS/64-38 SU), as well as a couple of losers in the mix as well, such as Toronto (43-34-5/27-55 SU) and Orlando (44-36-2 ATS/36-46 SU). The lesson is that the spread is always more important than the team. And it’s bettors who don’t heed that advice that the sportsbooks love.

Total bettors had a much easier time placing bets last year if they kept their eyes on every team’s offense and defense. If you had to guess which team was the best over payoff last season, most people would probably guess the high-flying Phoenix Suns and this time they would be right. The Suns finished with a league-high 55 overs to only 45 unders. The Suns led the league in scoring, averaging 108.4 points per game, but that’s not the whole reason they were over kings.

The reason is their high-scoring offense combined with their lackluster defense. The Suns gave up an average of 102.8 points per game last season. This meant the total score in your average Suns game was 211.2 points. You don’t even have to know much about basketball to know that’s high.

A nice mixture of offense and defense also led to last season’s king of the unders, the Memphis Grizzlies. Except this time the combination was a rather low-scoring offense paired with stellar defense. The Grizzlies only scored an average of 91.7 points per game last season, fourth-worst in the league. Their defense is what helped them win games, as they held their opponents to an average of only 88.9 points per night, which was best in the league. That translated into a 38-48 over/under mark.

Remember when you’re betting the total in basketball, make sure you take both a team’s offensive and defensive capabilities into account. All you have to do is look at last year’s results to understand the impact of that equation.