NBA Betting Guide for Wednesday 5/3/23: Will Boston Bounce Back?
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. You can also track spread bet percentages at FanDuel Sportsbook.
Where can we identify value in tonight's NBA odds?
(All offensive rating, defensive rating, and net rating splits come from PBPStats.com and account for medium-, high-, and very high-leverage situations unless otherwise noted. All injury news and notes come from the official NBA injury report unless otherwise noted.)
Philadelphia 76ers at Boston Celtics
Over 216.5 (-110)
The Philadelphia 76ers stunned the Boston Celtics at Boston in Game 1 by winning 119-115 as 10.5-point underdogs while MVP candidate Joel Embiid was sidelined with a right knee injury.
Embiid is doubtful for Game 2, and with Game 3 on Friday in Philadelphia, another game of rest with a 1-1 or 2-0 series should serve Embiid and the Sixers well.
[Update: Embiid is expected to play tonight, barring setbacks, via Shams Charania.]
Boston is listing Marcus Smart as questionable with a chest contusion, but their splits are actually stronger with him off the floor on possessions in games with both Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum both active, so there's no need to overreact to a potential absence of Smart.
Digging back into Game 1, the Celtics had a better effective field goal percentage (65.3%) than the 76ers (60.1%), but those are both elite numbers.
The big outlier was with turnovers. The 76ers won that battle 16-6, which helped them overcome a 38-28 deficit on the glass.
Ultimately, the underlying data suggested a 114.7-113.8 win for the 76ers in Game 1.
Update After Embiid News
My model (still) thinks this spread is appropriate at 7.5 (I have the Celtics by 8.1), yet numberFire's model likes the 76ers +7.5 for the night, so I'd lean toward that if necessary.
I do think that this spread could continue to shift (I saw it at -8.0 before it dropped to -7.5) in Philadelphia's favor, but the reality is that the 76ers were already pretty good without Embiid and are, perhaps, not as good -- statistically -- with him as we might think initially.
What my model likes better is the over (216.5).
The pace was down for Game 1 (89.5 possessions per team), though the 76ers played very slowly in their opening-round series against the Brooklyn Nets, which is typical for the 76ers.
Although there's room for the offense to scale back down, the pace itself couldn't even get much worse -- it was a second-percentile game across the full season in terms of total possessions.
