NBA Sportsbook Betting – NBA Betting Picks For The Coming Week
The NBA regular season is winding down, with only seven to nine games left for the balance of teams in the closed world of professional basketball. Who will have enough juice to prevail?
NBA Betting Overview
Online betting gurus have to be realists when an NBA season comes to a close. The long, hard 82-game slog will produce aberrational results in some areas because teams are getting ready for the playoffs and don’t have much of an incentive to win, either because their seeding in the playoffs is set or because a slightly lower seeding (a six seed instead of a five seed, for instance) would be more favorable in terms of the full playoff draw. There’s an interlocking set of factors that sports betting analysts have to examine. This is more systematic and rigorous stuff than, for instance, the utterly chaotic and unpredictable world of March Madness betting, a tenuous place to be when results like Virginia Commonwealth over Kansas dot the landscape.
So, who will win and lose next week in the National Basketball Association? Let’s be realistic and zero in on four specific choices.
Next Tuesday, the Milwaukee Bucks visit Orlando to take on the Magic, while the Golden State Warriors venture north to play the Portland Trail Blazers. The Bucks are stumbling toward the finish line, having just lost to a depleted Charlotte team on the road to fall to tenth place in the Eastern Conference standings. The loss severely crippled the Bucks’ hopes of catching Indiana for the eighth and final playoff spot in the East, so the Bucks – in addition to being discouraged – will feel panicky as they realize how grim their prospects really are. Orlando is not a foremost title contender in the East, but the Magic are a generally well-rounded team that has Dwight Howard and, overall, too much firepower for the Bucks to handle. Later that night, Portland is much too physical and has way too much quality near the rim – especially in the form of LaMarcus Aldridge – for the tissue-soft Golden State Warriors to handle. Golden State can get hot at home in Oakland and scare some solid opponents when circumstances are exactly aligned, but in general, the Warriors are a terrible road team because they can’t get enough defensive stops. The personality of a mediocre franchise simply hasn’t changed that much over the past decade, so the Warriors are almost certain to drop another road game.
As the week moves along, Indiana is a very good bet to beat Washington at home on Wednesday. The Pacers are holding off Charlotte for the eighth and final playoff spot in the East. They just did defeat the Boston Celtics at home and will get the lowly Washington Wizards at Conseco Fieldhouse one night after returning from a road trip created by the presence of the Women’s Final Four (college basketball event) in Indianapolis. Indiana will relish the chance to return to its home court; it will relish even more the prospect of a highly winnable game against one of the bottom feeders in the East.
Finally, on Thursday, the Chicago Bulls should mop the floor with the Boston Celtics at home in Chicago. The Celtics idiotically traded away big man Kendrick Perkins before the NBA trade deadline, and they’ve become a soft and uninspired team as a result. Chicago is the best team in the Eastern Conference and should power its way to a solid victory over the Celtics.
Picks: Magic over Bucks (Tuesday), Blazers over Warriors (Tuesday), Pacers over Wizards (Wednesday), Bulls over Celtics (Thursday).
