NBA

3 NBA Player Prop Bets to Target on Wednesday 10/19/22

Brandon Gdula  —  @gdula13 Oct 19th, 2022
Trae Young could pile up points in the Atlanta Hawks' opener. Which other props look valuable tonight?

Player props can be useful in a variety of ways, from taking advantage of them straight up within the betting market to measuring a player's potential to produce in daily fantasy basketball.

Here, we'll focus on utilizing daily fantasy basketball projections and a slew of other tools to help make money betting player props. For this article, we are focusing on the NBA odds at FanDuel Sportsbook to pinpoint spots where value can be had tonight.

The prop-betting experience on FanDuel Sportsbook is getting even more fun. You can track your player props with real-time updates and place in-game props with ease.

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

Trae Young Over 25.5 Points (-113)

Last season, Trae Young averaged 28.4 points per game across 34.9 minutes and did so with 46.0% shooting from the field (and a 38.2% three-point percentage).

His opening-night prop, then, seems too low.

His actual projection for tonight's game is 26.6 points over 35.2 minutes in a matchup against the Houston Rockets. Houston's non-garbage-time defensive rating last season ranked them 30th in the NBA, per CleaningTheGlass.

They didn't do much to slow down Ice Trae, either. In two games against Houston, Young put up 34.5 points per game (41 and 28 points, so an over in each contest).

Jakob Poeltl Under 11.5 Rebounds (-120)

A dozen rebounds for any player is a pretty high prop, and that's what Jakob Poeltl would need to ruin an under here on this one.

numberFire's model projects Poeltl for "just" 10.5 boards in tonight's game. At that baseline, he is only around 36.1% likely to go over and, thus, 63.9% likely to stay under 11.5 rebounds. That 63.9% rate implies -177 odds on the under rather than the -120 odds we're getting. In fact, he'd need to have a projection of around 11.7 to consider betting the over at that point based on historical ranges of rebound numbers.

In his defense, Poeltl did up his rebounds per game average from 8.4 to 9.9 after January 1st last season but still got to 12 rebounds in just 18 contests.

Jordan Clarkson Under 17.5 Points (-122)

It's true that Jordan Clarkson should put up shots in a new-look Utah Jazz offense in 2022-23. His projected usage rate tonight is 24.8%, and he's set for 13.2 shot attempts, according to our model.

Despite that, the expected scoring output is only 15.1 points over his 27.6 minutes.

The Denver Nuggets were just an average non-garbage-time defense last season but loved to slow things down. They were 26th in offensive seconds per play and just 19th in overall possessions per game. It all culminated in a league-average 110.4 points per game allowed.

The Jazz's implied team total tonight is a lowly 109.25, so the scoring efficiency will need to be astounding for Clarkson to drop 18-plus in this spot.