NBA Expert Tips and Best Bets | January 11

Thursday, Australia time, looms as a super interesting day of basketball, with ten games set to take place in the NBA over the course of the day. It kicks off with perhaps the best of the lot, with the championship favourite Celtics taking on the Western Conference leaders in the Timberwolves, while the Thunder also take on the Heat, the Pelicans face the Warriors, and the Raptors face the red hot Clippers. With lots of interesting games there is plenty of value to be had, and these are our three best bets of the day.

Celtics -6.0 | $1.89 with GetSetBet 

The Celtics will get one of their best tests at home when they face the Western Conference leaders in the Minnesota Timberwolves, who will attempt to break what is now a 17-game undefeated streak at TD Garden. The Celtics are yet to lose a single game at home this season, but it’s not just that they’ve been winning that makes this line look tempting. With an offensive rating of 123.6 (second in the league) and a defensive rating of 108.5 (fifth in the league), their net rating on their home floor is a huge 15.1, nearly 50% than any other team on their home floor. They’ve been regularly demolishing teams there, and in 14 of those 17 victories have won by at least six points – the line set for this game. Of course, the Timberwolves aren’t just a league-average team – they’re sitting at 26-10 – but they’ll also be coming off a game the previous day, and will have travelled from Orlando to Boston between those games. Back to backs are tough at the best of time, let alone when you’re taking on the league’s best team whose quest to have one of the greatest home seasons in NBA history is growing traction by the day. The Timberwolves are a tough, defensively minded team who won’t make things easy for the Celts, but with Jayson Tatum set to likely return from a one-game absence and a full-strength team as a result, they look like a good bet to knock off the six-point line set by NBA betting sites. 

Bulls -2.5 | $1.90 with BlueBet

It doesn’t feel quite right to flag this as a good bet, but all signs point to it being exactly that. The Rockets have been one of the feel good stories of the year, already surpassing the relatively meagre expectations of them heading into the season and having nearly racked up as many wins not even halfway into this season as they have in any of the past three. The Bulls, in contrast, have made for depressing viewing for much of the year, with their ‘Big Three’ of DeMar DeRozan, Zach LaVine and Nikola Vucevic clearly not really good enough to do any damage and yet another mid-low finish in the Eastern Conference looking likely. But since LaVine got injured a few weeks ago, the Bulls have had a new lease on life, going 12-7 in their past 19 games to put themselves back into the playoff picture. LaVine is now back, but there is a renewed…not quite vigour, but more energy at least. And as any good real estate agent will tell you, location is everything. As good as the Rockets have been this season, that has been nearly exclusively at home. On the road has been a different story entirely – they’re a measly 3-11 outside of Houston. The Bulls’ home/road differential is not quite as stark but they still clearly prefer playing in Chicago, where they’re 12-9 on the season compared to 5-12 away. With the Bulls in an extended vein of solid form and playing at home, where they play a hell of a lot better and where the Rockets will, if their road form so far this season is anything to go by, play a hell of a lot worse than they do at home, this very small line set by betting agencies looks like one the Bulls will be able to cover comfortably. 

Over 216.5 total match points | $1.90 with PlayUp 

The Warriors aren’t quite the offensive juggernaut that they once were, but this is nonetheless an incredibly low line for one of their games. In fact, it’s bordering on absurdly low. In fact, in their past 24 games – I’ll say it again, twenty-four games – the Warriors have only twice failed to surpass this total, and the score on both of those occasions? Exactly 216. So for 24 games the Warriors have not had a game played which has yielded less than 216 total points, and yet the line for this game is set at just 0.5 points above that. And it’s not as though the Pelicans are the stingiest team in the league by any stretch of the imagination. Two of their past four games have gone under this, but going back further they’ve only gone under this total three of their past 20 games!! There is no way known that this line should be this long – even if for the Warriors alone, it’s hard to imagine less than 217 total points being scored, but the Pelicans too have a pretty strong history of going past this total. This line should be up to ten or more points higher in my view, and will likely go up as we near game time. As it is at the time of writing, for me this is the best bet of the day.