NBA Expert Tips and Best Bets | March 13

There is a pretty entertaining eight-game slate in the NBA on Thursday, with the Clippers taking on the Rockets early in the day, the Bucks facing the Warriors a couple of hours later and the day’s action concluding with the Kings visiting the Lakers. A couple of those games are included in our best bets of the day, but on this day the focus is purely on players rather than the teams. All three bets for the day are player props banking on a few players in really good form continuing that trend, so check them out below. 

Jalen Green over 19.5 points | $1.87 with BlueBet

There is no doubting Jalen Green’s raw scoring ability, but nearly three full seasons into his NBA career he is still wildly inconsistent and very inefficient. In recent games, however, he appears to have found his groove. He’s hit a really nice patch of form over the past three games, scoring 34 points twice and 23 points in the other game for an average of 30.3 points. He’s been relatively efficient in that time – certainly compared to what he’s dished up over the course of his career – but importantly he hasn’t been scoring at an unsustainable rate. Instead, he’s just been taking a hell of a lot of shots. In his two 34-point efforts he took 28 and 23 shots having not taken more than 17 in any of his previous six. He hit 13 threes across those two games, which is not as sustainable and would have me a little more concerned about his ability to pass the 19.5 point total set by NBA betting sites were it not for the fact that he went 1-10 from long range in his latest outing, and still got into the 20s. That 1-10 from three-point range was accompanied by 10-13 shooting from inside the arc, and though it will be a different kettle of fish against the Clippers, the volume of shots he is taking at the moment should still see him get past 20 points relatively comfortably. Relative to his season average this is a reasonable enough line, but it isn’t factoring in recent performance enough. 

D’Angelo Russell over 2.5 three’s made  | $1.72 with PlayUp 

Dare I say it, the NBA world seems to be on the D’Angelo Russell train. Subject to a lot of criticism throughout his career, the former number two pick was everybody’s tip to be traded out of Los Angeles to make way for someone like Dejounte Murray. But clearly, D’Lo heard the rumours, and has appeared to be pretty eager to show the Lakers that they would be silly to trade him ever since. He’s put in plenty of big performances and, importantly, actually been reasonably consistent, and his 26-point effort in the Lakers’ impressive win against the Thunder in their most recent outing gathered plenty of attention for the three consecutive difficult threes he made, and the resulting celebration from his teammates. But that wasn’t a one-off; Russell is a legitimately excellent shooter and has been draining them for some time now, and the line of 2.5 for his three’s made for this game – even if it’s with a bit of juice – is too low. The five three-pointers he made in that Thunder game marked the sixth time in seven games that he’s had at least three of them – beyond the line set by betting agencies for him in this game – but we can go back a lot further than that too. He’s also hit at least three from beyond the arc in nine of his last 11, and 20 of his last 25 going all the way back to the beginning of January. That’s a strike rate of 80% for more than two months, a rate which should have his odds to hit three three’s sitting at around $1.20. Even if this number is a little shorter than even money, it’s still a whole lot longer than what it should be. 

Collin Sexton over 21.5 points  | $1.89 with GetSetBet 

As the old saying goes, why change a winning formula? I had Sexton over his points total last game as a result of Lauri Markkanen’s absence, and lo and behold he went and scored 29 points, passing that total easily. The same applies in this game. The theory in the previous one was that, with Markkanen absent and his 15-20 shots a game needing to go elsewhere, Sexton and Keyonte George would pick up a fair bit of the slack. Sexton had previously been taking 10-15 per game, but earlier in the season when he was required to do more he was taking closer to 20 and being nice and efficient with them. There was no reason to think he wouldn’t do the same in Markkanen’s absence, and sure enough he took 19 shots, hitting 11 of them. Granted that was against the hapless Wizards, and the Bulls slow game style and decent enough defence should present a bit more resistance. Even so, with Markkanen again set to miss, Sexton should take close to 20 shots once again and roll past this total with relative ease.