NBA

NBA Betting Guide for Friday 4/30/21: 3 Totals We Should Be Betting Tonight

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 our oddsFire section of the site allows you to track movement in those lines and see where the action is coming from on particular games.

Where do our algorithm, our power rankings, and the betting trends identify value in tonight's games? (All odds from NBA Finals odds.)

Washington Wizards at Cleveland Cavaliers

Smart money trends are popping up on a lot of unders tonight, which makes sense given an injury report that reads like a Dostoevsky novel.

This game is one such instance. The Cleveland Cavaliers are quite injured, and the Washington Wizards are in pretty good shape overall.

oddsFire shows us that, while 73% of the betting tickets are on the over (228.5), just 54% of the money is on the over. That leaves a 19-point gap between the percentage of tickets (27%) and money (46%) on the under. So, the money is about even despite the large ticket differential.

numberFire's algorithm is showing the under as a one-star recommendation and considering it to be 53.8% likely to occur, which isn't that appealing, but wait: there's more!

What's more encouraging is that 21 of our 25 strongest predictions (the 25 games in our database most comparable to this one) wound up hitting the under on their posted totals.

Orlando Magic at Memphis Grizzlies

We're seeing similar betting action on the under (224.0) in this game.

A majority of the money (54%) is on the under despite just 31% of the tickets, a 23-point gap. So that's larger, even, than what we have in the Wizards/Cavaliers game.

The total is down only half a point since the open, leaving us room yet despite the betting trends.

Doing the best we can to adjust for the Orlando Magic injuries and departures without completely eradicating sample sizes, the Magic have a defensive rating of 118.4 and an offensive rating of 106.3.

Doing the same for the Memphis Grizzlies (112.2 offensive rating and 110.4 defensive rating) and then combining the two, my model anticipates an over/under of 219.5 points, 4.5 points under the current total.

Milwaukee Bucks at Chicago Bulls

How about an over (220.0) for a change? That's what the trends are pointing to in this game.

Our algorithm is all over the over (I did that on purpose; it's been a long season), rating it as a five-star recommendation out of five. The model views this game as 74.9% likely to rack up 221 or more points.

oddsFire's data lets us know that 73% of the money and 67% of the bets are on the over, a healthy majority of each.

Using data from the Milwaukee Bucks without Giannis Antetokounmpo (who left early last night with an ankle injury) and data from the Chicago Bulls without Zach LaVine (out) and with Nikola Vucevic active for some control, my model projects a median outcome of 222.6 points across thousands of simulations.