NBA

NBA Betting Guide for Monday 12/6/21: We Must Adjust

Brandon Gdula  —  @gdula13 Dec 6th, 2021
Injuries are plaguing a lot of games tonight, so it's important to make adjustments. Where, then, does value emerge?

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 you can track line movement within games and compare odds over at the oddsFire section of the site.

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

Memphis Grizzlies at Miami Heat

This game is full of key injuries and adjustments to make.

The Memphis Grizzlies will be without Ja Morant, Brandon Clarke, and Kyle Anderson, and the Miami Heat are without Bam Adebayo and Markieff Morris and list Jimmy Butler as questionable (but expected to play).

The Grizzlies, in non-garbage situations, have actually been quite good without those three players listed. Their net rating is a +8.7 across a 158-minute sample. But a big part of that has to do with shooting luck.

PBPStats lists their shot quality allowed at a 0.54 (basically expected field goal percentage based on defender distance and court location), but opponents shot only 47.1% in terms of effective field goal percentage. Their own shot quality is 0.53, so they've been outplayed in terms of underlying data in this sample.

The Heat are a +2.3 without Butler (again, expected to play), Adebayo, and Morris in non-garbage situations with poor defensive luck.

Overall, numberFire's model sees the Heat as 72.1% likely to win. That makes their moneyline (-186) a pretty heavy three-star recommendation (meaning we can go with a three-unit wager there). Their spread (-4.5) is also getting one-star love. Our model views them as 56.0% likely to cover.

Philadelphia 76ers at Charlotte Hornets

The Charlotte Hornets will be playing tonight without LaMelo Ball and Terry Rozier, so the ball-handling will be a bit suspect for them against the Philadelphia 76ers, who list Tobias Harris as questionable.

Adjusting for all this news, my model has the Hornets -- with home-court advantage -- as just 3.5-point underdogs. A big part of that is a slow pace from the 76ers, which narrows their edge in the underlying data.

The model at numberFire actually sees a similar spread. It projects the Sixers to win 112.9 to 109.7, a gap of 3.2 points.

That makes the spread (+7.0 points) a two-star recommendation in favor of the Hornets, per numberFire's model. There is a one-star lean on the Hornets' moneyline (+220), as well.

Atlanta Hawks at Minnesota Timberwolves

We don't have to do much adjusting for the Atlanta Hawks, and we'll have to wait and see what happens for the Minnesota Timberwolves with both Karl-Anthony Towns and D'Angelo Russell questionable.

But the early indication is for us to back the Hawks (+2.5), which is a two-star recommendation.

Adjusting for the potential Minnesota injuries, the Timberwolves likely have a relevant sample of a -3.1 net rating.

Teams representing the Hawks across the 25 most comparable games to this one in numberFire's database won outright at a 60.0% rate and covered at a 72.0% rate.

Also, road teams who are four-point underdogs or tighter on no rest against home teams with two days of rest have covered by an average of 1.0 points and at a 52.1% rate since 2016.