3 NBA Player Prop Bets to Target on Friday 4/23/21

Player props can be useful in a variety of ways, from taking advantage of them straight up (to the tune of cold hard cash) to measuring a player's potential to produce in daily fantasy basketball. Here we'll focus on utilizing our projections and a slew of other tools to help make money betting player props.

For this article, we are using the odds provided at NBA Finals odds to pinpoint spots where value can be had tonight.

Please note that betting lines and our player projections may change throughout the day after this article is published.

Kevin Love Over 7.5 Rebounds (-115)

The model at numberFire projects Kevin Love to secure 8.7 rebounds over 30.2 minutes (0.29 per minute), which is exactly his full-season, per-minute rebounding rate.

The matchup with the Charlotte Hornets, though, should allow us to bump that a tad because they are a subpar rebounding team over their past 15 games, gathering 49.1% of available rebounds. Also, over the past 10 games, the Hornets are just 24th against power forwards in rebounds allowed per 48 minutes.

Elevating his rate for the Hornets' recent performance, Love is projected for north of 9.0 rebounds pretty comfortably at his expected minutes workload.

Outright, is rebounding rate is a little higher (0.30) against bottom-half rebounding teams, which equates to 9.1 rebounds over 30.2 minutes. There's a lot of room against that 7.5 number.

Theo Maledon Under 1.5 Made Threes (+108)

This is a nice plus-money opportunity on Theo Maledon's three-point prop.

Yes, the Oklahoma City Thunder are in a game with a high 231.0-point total, but the Washington Wizards, despite all their full-season defensive issues, are pretty good at defending the arc. On the season, they are eighth-best at limiting three-point attempt rates (with an opponent three-point attempt rate of 37.2%, around 94.7% of the NBA average).

That's down to 36.1% over 12 games in April, so they aren't even tailing off, and their defensive rating ranks 4th in the NBA over the past 15 games.

Maledon is averaging just 0.17 three-point attempts per minute and converts at a 34.3% clip (and 31.6% since the trade deadline).

We can project him for around 4.9 three-point attempts, which would lead to 1.7 makes at his full-season rate and just 1.5 at his number since the deadline.

There's no reason to be high on Maledon sinking two from deep tonight, so we can target the plus-money opportunity as a result.

Damian Lillard Over 3.5 Made Threes (-118)

Our algorithm is projecting Damian Lillard for 4.1 made threes tonight against the Memphis Grizzlies, which makes the over on the 3.5 made threes prop appealing at -118.

Additionally, the more we break down the matchup, the more the over seems like the right call.

Lillard averages 0.30 three-point attempts per minute, and the Grizzlies allow 40.3% of their opponent's field goal attempts to be from beyond the arc, around 3% higher than the NBA average.

Since February, that number is bumped up to 41.4%, so they allow a pretty high rate of threes over a large sample of games this season.

We can use that information to boost Lillard's expected per minute rate a few ticks, and at his season-long make rate (37.5%), his projected minutes load (36.1), and the positive matchup, he should make around 4.3 threes tonight, giving him some room for error to splash 4 from deep.