NBA

3 NBA Player Prop Bets to Target on Friday 6/18/21

Marcus Morris' three-point prop can be had at plus money. Should we be willing to bet it?

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.

Trae Young Over 9.5 Assists (-108)

The Atlanta Hawks don't need a win tonight, but taking care of business at home sure would be nice, and that could lead to heavy work for their star point guard.

Trae Young's assist projection, per numberFire's model, is actually sitting at 10.5 over a projected workload of 40.2 minutes. That works out to 0.26 assists per minute, down a tad from his full-season rate of 0.28.

The point there is that at 40-or-so minutes (where he's been playing lately), he should be putting up double-digit assists if he plays like his usual self and his teammates hit the shots he sets up.

If we use that 10.5-assist baseline and simulate out the game a thousand times, he should be 64.5% likely to hit the over. That would mean the over odds should be -182.

Marcus Morris Over 2.5 Made Threes (+142)

I love plus-money props even if they take some talking ourselves into.

Marcus Morris is getting a baseline projection of 3.1 made threes on 6.8 attempts, per numberFire's model.

Morris sees his per-minute three-point attempt rate go from 0.19 to 0.21 without Kawhi Leonard, which sounds small but bumps his projected rate from 7.1 to 7.9 across his 37.5 projected minutes rate.

At his absurd rate of 47.3% from three, he would be projected to make 3.7. Using his career mark of 37.9%, he'd be projected to make 3.0 of those 7.9.

Even if we use the lowest of those calculated projections (3.0), Morris is rating out as 61.9% likely to hit the over, implying odds of -162. It's a good value bet.

Reggie Jackson Over 3.5 Assists (-110)

Our algorithm is way in on the over on Reggie Jackson's assist number, and it projects him for 4.4 dimes over 33.7 minutes (0.13 per minute).

Jackson sees a boost in his assist rate without Leonard: 0.11 assists per minute with Kawhi and 0.15 without Kawhi. Over 33.7 minutes, we're looking at the difference between 3.7 assists and 5.0 assists, so it's quite substantial.

Either way, that minutes rate puts him on pace for the over quite heavily.

Using the model's baseline of 4.4 assists, Jackson is rating out as 71.2% likely to hit the over on this prop.