By Dan Rivera
Editor's Note: This article is a free preview of our new Betting Predators NBA Premium Package, which was built to deliver you the best NBA information, 7 days a week, for player prop betting and DFS. Our main goal is to give you the most actionable, high quality content that you need in order to win, period.
As an NBA Premium playoffs subscriber you'll get at least two pieces of premium content seven days per week, including DFS Top Plays and best bet player prop every single day from the Betting Predators team, delivered straight to your inbox for the upcoming day's main slate, with all results/records tracked here.
You'll also get access to weekly player prop strategy and player line value rankings from Mackenzie Rivers, futures betting strategy from J-Smoove, and team totals/trends to know from Dan Rivera, in addition to our live betting Discord channel for NBA Premium active subscribers only. We'll also include bonus DFS/player prop content for PGA, MLB, UFC and NASCAR from now until the end of the finals.
Primer/Intro: Our goal is pretty simple with these articles - to help find some you some winners. We will be doing approximately two of these data deep dives per week (until the end of the Finals) and are pulling most of the information from Oddshark's 1st half/1st quarter stats. Despite some of the notable trends and numbers you'll note in this article, we cannot stress this enough - don’t blindly bet every single game.
Rule 101 in betting the NBA (profitably, in the long term) is that you shouldn't be betting strictly off trends (especially mainstream media trends). These trends, however, can still serve as a baseline for what to avoid - or what to target - on a given slate or given round/matchup during the NBA Playoffs. Use these trends as a guide to shopping around and finding the best numbers in regards to your props, sides or total bets etc.
Please note that all of the trends/data points listed below are based on who is home and who is away and also includes a sample of each team's last 10 games, regardless of the venue.
Suns @ Lakers (1st Half Under 103)
Stop before you have heard me say this before - we are looking to an under. The Phoenix Suns are 19-16-1 to the first half over on the road, their games scoring a combined average 109.89 ppg in the first half. The Los Angeles Lakers, on the other hand, are 16-19-1 to the under at home with their games scoring 111.19 ppg in the first half. Luckily for us, that is all in the regular season, and unlike then, we are now seeing both teams struggle to score a lot of points in the first half of these first-round games.
The Lakers and Suns have now managed to score a combined 98, 100, and 83 so far in the first half of their three games this series, and I believe that without Chris Paul being healthy the Suns will continue to struggle to score. I also don't believe that the Lakers will be dropping nearly 60 in the first half like they have already, and I expect both of these teams to actually keep it below 50 each in the first half in Game 4.
We have seen either one or both of these teams score about 30 points in the first quarter at times in this playoff series, sure, but all three games so far have also shown that both of these teams struggle to score in the 2nd quarter and I expect that to continue on Sunday afternoon at the Staples Center in L.A.