NBA Betting Guide for Thursday 5/25/23: Laying the Points With Boston's Momentum
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 specific betting lines hit. You can also track spread bet percentages at FanDuel Sportsbook.
Where can we identify value in tonight's NBA odds?
(All offensive, defensive, and net rating splits come from PBPStats.com and account for medium-, high-, and very high-leverage situations unless otherwise noted. Unless otherwise noted, all injury news and notes come from the official NBA injury report.)
Boston Celtics at Miami Heat
Boston Celtics -8.0 (-108)
The Celtics' main adjustment in Game 4? They just started hitting shots.
Boston was fourth in the NBA in eFG% during the regular season (56.6%) and still leads the playoffs in that category (56.8%) despite a dreadful start to this series. They had just a 51.7 eFG% in the first three games of this series.
The Miami Heat also played a part in the lopsided win. After amassing a 60.5 eFG% in the first three games, they sank to a 48.7% mark in Game 4. Now, based on Miami's regular season eFG% (53.0%), that's far closer to what we should expect -- especially when facing a Celtics squad that was also second in defensive rating this regular season (110.6).
Therefore, on Tuesday, we saw the juggernaut that was -550 to win this series on FanDuel before it began. The lone drama is if those results will hold through the remainder of the series, but oddsmakers are pretty confident Boston wins Game 5 convincingly again.
Despite over 80% of the bets and handle backing the Heat +8 in this spot, FanDuel's number hasn't budged. They're confident in these reborn Celtics in what should be a wild home environment, and so am I.
Under 215.5 (-108)
I saved Boston's eFG% in Game 4 for here. It was 61.9%, which was well above their marks from the regular season and postseason.
Therefore, we've still yet to get a game where both teams had "normal" playoff shooting. Miami was white hot through the first three games, and the Celtics took that banner in Game 4. Considering we saw 215 total points on Tuesday despite the Boston surge, this under is still appealing here.
After all, the 94.50 pace metric on Tuesday was the slowest of any game in this series thus far, and that's to be expected as the stakes heighten. The fourth-quarter pace -- as this game was decided -- was even slower (94.0). That is another vote of confidence in the under should the score be as lopsided as it was on Tuesday.
However, the most appealing part of this side is that below 25% of bets and cash are siding with it. The public (per usual) is all about the over, so at the very least, we'll have squeezed every last drop out of this number when we bet it.
