NBA

NBA Betting Guide for Wednesday 6/16/21: The Data Points to the Home Favorites 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.)

Atlanta Hawks (+220) at Philadelphia 76ers (-270)

Spread: Philadelphia 76ers -6.5
Total: 223.5

The Atlanta Hawks evened out the series 2-2 after their 103-100 win on Monday, giving them wins by 4 and 3 points, bookending two 16-point losses to the 76ers in Games 2 and 3.

The home team has won five of seven games in this season series, and the 76ers have won four of the seven matchups and boast a point differential of 10.4 per game (they have wins of 44, 22, 16, and 16 points).

In the four-game playoff series, the 76ers hold an edge in a lot of key stats: assist-to-turnover ratio (2.06 to 1.64), effective field goal percentage (58.7% to 51.8%), and offensive rating (117.8 to 110.4).

As for tonight, numberFire's betting model is very heavy on the 76ers to take care of business in Philadelphia.

The -270 moneyline implies win odds of 73.0%, but our algorithm is giving them a 79.8% shot to get to 3-2 in the series. That makes the 76ers' moneyline a three-star recommendation out of five, per our model, and comes with an expected return of 9.3% on wagers.

Likewise, the 76ers -6.5 is the preference, then, by our model. The algorithm is rating the 76ers' spread as a two-star recommendation with an expected return of 11.2%.

The under is getting the love from the model here in terms of a three-star recommendation. The median projected point total for this matchup is just 216.4 points. The under is rating out as 64.2% likely with the largest expected return of the three at 22.5%.

The action on the 76ers is pretty heavy from the betting public. There is 63% of the tickets on the 76ers to cover and 82% of the tickets on the 76ers to win outright.

The public is always on the over, but with only 58% of the tickets, that's pretty low, meaning we can lean on the 76ers across the board and the under for this Game 5 matchup.

Los Angeles Clippers (+260) at Utah Jazz (-320)

Spread: Utah Jazz -7.5
Total: 221.0

The big news impacting this game -- and the betting market on it -- is that Kawhi Leonard is out with a knee injury.

Surprisingly, the Los Angeles Clippers own a net rating of 26.5 over 45 minutes in this series when Leonard has been off the floor (compared to 4.3 with him).

But over the regular season and playoffs, the Clippers' net rating without Leonard is 1.1, and if we look at full games without Leonard but with Paul George, we see that the Clippers are 6-5 with a net rating of -2.4.

With the massive line shift (the Jazz were -148 favorites at the open but now -320 and are now 7.0-point favorites after opening as 3.0-point favorites), the value has virtually dried up, leaving no picks from our model on the spread or moneyline.

My model, using that relevant sample for the Clippers in games without Leonard, the expected spread is still close to -4.0 for the Jazz, so the recommendation would be the Clippers +7.0.

It's just one of those where the data tells me to like it, but it's hard to get behind. (And the home team has covered in six of seven games in the season series.)

numberFire's model does like the under in the form of a three-star recommendation out of five. The under in this series is now 4-2-1 in the season series. I'll be prioritizing the under for this matchup.