NBA Betting Guide for Thursday 1/27/22: Back Both Home Teams Tonight
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 odds.)
Los Angeles Lakers at Philadelphia 76ers
numberFire's model is flashing green in this game.
It's viewing the Philadelphia 76ers as 76.8% (so close to perfection) to win and sees them as 7.9-point favorites, blowing the actual spread of Philadelphia -2.5.
The Sixers to cover is listed as a three-star suggestion; their moneyline (-136) is a five-star play.
My model is viewing it a bit closer at 4.0 points but still leans toward the 76ers' spread and moneyline.
Over the past 10 games, the Los Angeles Lakers are just 5-5 with a spread-adjusted point differential of -3.5 (ranking them 26th in the NBA); the Sixers are 7-3 with a spread-adjusted mark of +0.3 (15th).
In our database, teams representing the 76ers in the 25 most comparable games to this matchup won and covered at a 72.0% rate.
Minnesota Timberwolves at Golden State Warriors
The algorithm here likes the home side in this matchup, as well.
It rates the Golden State Warriors' spread (-6.5) as a two-star play out of five and their moneyline (-260) as a three-star option.
Golden State is numberFire's top-ranked team in the NBA with a nERD score of 72.5. That means they're playing like a team that should win 72.5% of their games. That implies a point differential of +6.7.
The Minnesota Timberwolves' nERD is 49.8, putting them a tick below the NBA average. Their expected point differential is -0.1.
Since 2016, home teams favored by 5.5 to 7.5 won at a 70.7% rate and covered in 50.6%.
My model has the spread at 6.8, so I'm preferring the Warriors' moneyline to the spread -- even at the heavy juice.
