NBA Betting Guide for Monday 10/25/21: Will the Nuggets Cover a Heavy Spread?
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 you can track line movement within games and compare odds over at the oddsFire section of the site.
Where do our algorithm, our power rankings, and the betting trends identify value in tonight's games? (All odds from NBA Finals odds.)
Milwaukee Bucks at Indiana Pacers
Let's start off by dialing up an over/under bet in a game with a 7:00 p.m. Eastern tipoff.
numberFire's model rates the over as a full-on, five-star recommendation tonight, and the algorithm sees this game as 72.6% likely to get to at least 231 points.
The median projected total is 122.6 to 120.2 for a total of 242.8 (in favor of the Milwaukee Bucks, by the way).
In total, that over probability leaves room for a 38.5% return on investment as far as expectations are concerned.
Both the Milwaukee Bucks and Indiana Pacers have gone over in two of three games thus far this season, and they also went over in all three meetings a year ago (by an average of 20.2 points).
Chicago Bulls at Toronto Raptors
There are three-star recommendations across the board on this game, according to numberFire's algorithm, but I'm not looking at the spread and moneyline (which prefer the Toronto Raptors).
Instead, I'm looking once more at the over/under (212.0).
That over is getting three-star love from our algorithm, which anticipates a 62.7% probability of the game getting to 213 points or more. That's good for an expected return of 19.7%.
The over was just 1-2 in three matchups last season, but the actual results were all over the place. The games finished 18 points over, 17 points under, and 0.5 points under the total when the Chicago Bulls met the Raptors in the 2021-22 season.
Roster turnover probably makes that stat irrelevant, but it can't hurt to note.
More helpful is that the over/under has wiggled up and down (as high as 213.5 and as low as 211.5), so right now, it's on the lower end, and the model feels quite good about the over.
Also notable: the five most similar games to this one in our database all reached the over on their closing total.
Cleveland Cavaliers at Denver Nuggets
Let's move away from over/unders and instead look at a spread.
Well, firstly, let's look at a moneyline here.
Our model at numberFire is rating the Denver Nuggets' moneyline (-510) as a four-star recommendation out of five, which would imply an 83.6% win probability.
numberFire's win probability algorithm is actually seeing the Nuggets beating the Cleveland Cavaliers at an 89.2% clip. That leaves a good return of 6.7% for a near lock.
But instead of such a heavy moneyline, we can also look at the spread (Denver -10.0). numberFire's algorithm sees Denver covering at a 59.3% rate, which leads to an expected return of 13.2% given the better juice (-106) than the moneyline (-510).
Teams representing the Nuggets -- across the 25 most comparable games to this one in our database -- covered the spread 76.0% of the time (with a push) and won outright at a 92.0% clip.
