Emotion is a big part of following sports — the excitement, the showdowns, the offensive shootouts, the rivalries. However, if you want to win at the sportsbook consistently, emotion must remain on the sidelines. Wagering on emotion will bring heartbreak and a lot of losing tickets, and winning requires using your head with calm, cool discipline. NBA betting systems are a way to keep emotion out of the loop. A sports betting model is a systematic data-driven strategy using cold, hard numbers such as defense, offense, three-point shooting percentage, and home/road breakdowns. You root for a team on emotion — you win sports betting on teams without it.
The NBA Home/Road Edge
An easy-to-understand betting model would be examining NBA home/road play during the NBA season. Basketball has the most significant variance of all the sports when it comes to home-court advantage. Bad teams usually play well at home, keeping many games competitive even as an underdog. It's easy to assess why: they're playing games in front of their home fans who pay good money (and the players' salaries) to see a victory or at least a reasonable effort. The best NBA teams usually have outstanding home records but far less so on the road. When the Warriors beat the Celtics for the championship, they were 22-19 on the road but 31-10 at Golden State. Two years later, when Boston won the title, the Celtics were an impressive 27-14 on the road but a dominant 37-4 at home. That same NBA season, the Nets were 12-29 on the road but a respectable 20-21 at home. A betting model metric can be used to calculate points scored and allowed based on home/road breakdowns. This helps bettors assess what the NBA point spread should be. There could be enough wagering value for a play if there's enough variance with the actual line.
Anomalous Performance
Another betting model is when an NBA squad is off an extreme performance. For instance, a .500 team or one with a losing record routs one of the best teams in the league. They're often in the home underdog role, but everything goes their way in pulling the upset. The crowd gets into it, and the players feed off it, hitting shots from everywhere and playing strong defense. It's a perfect performance in a mediocre season. But what happens in the next NBA game? They can quickly return to mediocrity or worse, as it was an anomalous performance. Over several years, a betting model can track all NBA teams off extreme performances, such as winning as double-digit NBA underdogs. The oddsmakers will likely give them a few extra points they don't deserve. And those teams can return to earth with a thud after such a surprising, euphoric upset.
Travel Fatigue
Road travel is a key aspect of NBA situational handicapping. Situational handicapping is less about stats and more about what situations could give teams edges or bring disadvantages. Road travel is a grind for even the best-conditioned athletes. Players are taking bus and plane rides, staying in unfamiliar hotels, changing time zones, and disrupting their sleeping patterns. If one of the best teams in the NBA is on a long road trip, these factors can be a mental and physical drag. An athlete must be in optimal condition to compete in the NBA at such a high level. A common NBA betting model is tallying how teams play on road trips of four games or more. How do they play in the final game of a long trip? How do they perform when flying from one coast to another? How do they play in the first home game following a long road trip? The Miami Heat had a six-game road trip on the West Coast, losing and failing to cover the last two in Los Angeles against the Clippers and Lakers. They then came home to play Denver. Working on one day of rest following the trek, the Heat was blown out of the building by the Nuggets, a 133-113 loss. Home court made little difference as the jetlag was evident. These are examples of betting models to study a large sample of teams in challenging situations.
Coaching & Style of Play
Coaches don't score any points, but they play a massive role in a team's style. A coach might have a history of preferring uptempo offensive attacks. His teams score a lot of points, but they can give up a lot, too. When matched up against a similar run-and-gun opponent, it's a good matchup for a potential offensive shootout that sails OVER the total. Other coaches preach a defensive-first approach. Those teams might not score many points, but they play suffocating defense every year, or slow the pace down. When defensive teams clash, it's an opportunity for handicappers to anticipate a low-scoring affair. Since oddsmakers partly base their numbers on stats, a game featuring two slow-down styles might end up being even lower than the overall team stats suggest.
Fading Joe Public
Public bettors wager with too much emotion and too little effort. That's a recipe for losing tickets. A NBA betting model can be constructed to identify and utilize which teams the public likes. This is where watching line movement factors in. Some betting websites and sports books detail how much money is coming in on each game. If 80% of the bets are on the favorite and the line barely moves, that's Joe Public. Would you wager on the advice of the average bettor? Or would you be inclined to run the other way? Showman P.T. Barnum reportedly said, "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people." He implied it's easier to succeed financially by going against the gullible masses. The same thing applies to a betting model that fades public opinion on sporting events with betting lines. Many sports bettors believe by fading the NBA betting public you can maximize your bankroll.
NBA Totals Betting Model
The second most popular kind of wager in basketball is OVER/UNDER betting. A model to gauge totals can be, "What happens when two Top 10 defensive teams meet?" One can plug in different categories, such as points given and field goal shooting allowed. Looking back at the last four or six meetings between the teams can provide insight into whether it was a defensive war, what the previous totals were, and whether the current total is similar or undervalued. A similar model can look at previous meetings' halftime scores. Betting the First Half UNDER can be a safer totals wager. If the game goes into overtime, you won't get burned turning a winning fourth quarter ticket into a losing one in OT.
Humiliated Squads
This is a fun NBA betting model. What happens in the next game after a team gets routed? A model can plug in 15-point losses, 20-point defeats, or 25+ blowouts and see how teams respond. In theory, the incentive is there for an angry coaching staff and a humiliated bunch of professional athletes to exhibit pride and come back with a determined effort in the next game. And while these teams off a humiliating loss are only 40 percent likely to rebound with a winning effort straight up, there can be good value with the dog when getting enough points. In addition, one can augment the betting model with such variables as, "What happens in the next game after a favorite loses by double digits?" Or, "What happens when a team gets embarrassed on the road but comes home for the next game?"
Adding it Up
Betting models can be simple, such as home/road breakdowns, or more complex, such as an anomalous performance or identifying when to go against the betting public. It encompasses data collection around the coaching styles and situational factors such as travel fatigue and bouncing back from an awful performance. NBA sports betting models can be valuable tools as they're built with data and analytics plus have handicapping reasoning behind them.
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