I'm staying away from this one. As The Dark Passenger pointed out to me, Atlanta is 1-7 ATS at home and hasn't necessarily blown its opponents out of the water. Meanwhile, Denver's road record is not impressive whatsoever.
One statistic stands out to me however - rebounding. Atlanta ranks as the third worst in the league for allowing rebounds and we all know how well Denver rebounds the ball, notably Kenneth Faried. This will likely generate plenty of second chance points for Denver.
With a gun to my head, I think this one's Denver's
Atlanta do have a terrible ATS record at home, and I would say that is because they play down to their opponents. They've played a lot of scrub teams at home and we as bettors have to remember that teams don't go out there to cover spreads, they go out to win. Atlanta don't care about beating Washington and Orlando by 10, they care about racking up the W. In this one though with a -1 spread, if they don't win, they don't cover. There's no middle ground.
Denver have a so-so road record, but you need to look at their schedule in order to determine why it looks that way. Denver have played 18 games so far in the season, 12 of them on the road. Their next 5 are on the road. So after 23 games, Denver will have played 17 on the road, and 6 at home. How the NBA scheduled that I don't know, but I think people overlook how good their record is when they've played 2/3rds of their games on the road. Flip their schedule and I think they'd be sitting somewhere around 13-5 straight up (they lost @ GSW by 1, @ Utah by 2).
I'm going to roll with Denver in this one. We'd all have boners for them if they'd played 12 of 18 at home instead of on the road.
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