By Dan Rivera
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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.
Suns @ Lakers (1st Half Under 102)
Stop me if you've heard this before: we're going back to the first half under for the Suns-Lakers game on Thursday night (Chris Dell must be sick of reading this by now). We now have five games in this series, which in turn means that we can leave the regular season data behind and just focus on this series.
After that beatdown by the Suns in Game 5, I believe the Lakers came out focused in Game 6 here back in Los Angeles. Anthony Davis is a big loss for the Lakers - this offense simply looks lost and LeBron James doesn’t look like he has much help. We've seen 98, 100, 83, 104, and 102 points scored in the first half.
In the second quarter we've also see both teams struggle to score above 30 each - the Suns did have a particularly good shooting night when they put up 115 points in Game 5, but other than that, both squads are still struggling overall. This bet first-half total bet simply comes down to both teams struggling to score, and I keep looking at this because I believe this first half number should flat out just be 100.
If AD does play by some small chance, I also believe that he'll be a liability on offense (this could vary on defense depending on how healthy he truly is). But nonetheless, his offense will be bad coming back from multiple leg injuries in a short timeframe, and he could put up a lot more missed shots than usual.