NBA

NBA Betting Guide for Friday 6/4/21: Will the Mavericks Finally Win at Home?

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 our oddsFire section of the site allows you to track movement in those lines and see where the action is coming from on particular games.

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

Los Angeles Clippers (-148) at Dallas Mavericks (+126)

Spread: Los Angeles Clippers -3.0
Total: 217.0

The trend in this series has been that the road team wins. That's been the case for all five of the first games, and actually, in the regular season, the road team was 2-1, as well. Therefore, the visiting side is 7-1 in this series on the full year. While that's probably just randomness, it's interesting.

numberFire's algorithm is expecting that trend to change tonight, though, and it views the Dallas Mavericks as 59.0% likely to close out the series. That makes the Mavericks' moneyline (+126) a three-star recommendation out of five.

The public data does show some slight smart-money on the Clippers' moneyline. Just 36% of the bet slips are siding with the Clippers to win, but that comes with 49% of the money, a 13-point differential. Still, the majority of the public bets and money are on Dallas, agreeing with our algorithm.

As for the spread, our model sees Dallas covering 63.5% of the time, good for an expected return of 21.2%. The public is a little more eager to take the points for Los Angeles to cover the spread rather than to lay the moneyline juice: 48% of the spread bets are in Los Angeles' favor, and that's tied to 55% of the money.

Either way, the spread is rating out close with the public, so we can defer to the model and appreciate Dallas +3.0 at home. The Mavericks have covered in five of their eight matchups with the Clips this season, if that means anything to you.

Now, as far as the over/under goes, the public is -- very, very unsurprisingly -- siding with the over: 81% of the bets and 78% of the money are on the over.

However, numberFire's model sees the under as a slight, one-star recommendation and views this game as 54.4% likely to stay under 217.0 points. There's not a lot of wiggle room, but that's what the model says.

Notably, only two of the eight games between these two teams this season hit the over on the closing total, and the average matchup has wound up 11.3 points under the over/under.

I'll be siding with the Mavericks getting the points and the under in this matchup.