NBA Odds, Best Bets and Experts Tips

Dallas Mavericks @ Utah Jazz

Lauri Markkanen under 20.5 total points | $1.85 with QuestBet

No one likes to bet on an under, but sometimes the stats are just too good to deny. Lauri Markkanen is generally a better than 20.5-point per game player – he averaged 25.6 in his first season with the Jazz in 2022-23 and 23.2 points per game the season after, but he has had a very slow start to this season. He actually flew out of the blocks with 35 points in the season opener, but since then he has not managed to pass this line set by betting sites on a single occasion. Granted he missed three games, but still – following that season-opener he scored 13, 17 and then 7 (the latter of which was cut short when he got injured), and since his return he has managed 8, 20 and 17. Markkanen has not been shooting the lights out, but even more importantly for the sake of this under he has not been taking all that many shots, with an average of just under 13 in the three games since his return. Markkanen is very capable of scoring more than this and really should be more often than not, but he appears laboured to start the season and is not playing nearly as significant a role on the offence of the Jazz as he typically would. It’s hard to imagine Markkanen continuing to score as low as he has throughout the entirety of the season, but for the time being these low numbers appear to be the norm. For the sake of this bet, we don’t need him to average sub-20 points for the entirety of the season – we just need him to do it in this one game. And based on the way that he has been playing with the exception of the first game of the season, that appears to be more likely than not.

Dallas Mavericks @ Utah Jazz

Keyonte George 3+ threes | $2.40 with PlayUp

Keyonte George has not had a particularly good start to his second season in the big league. He was not particularly efficient in his rookie season – not all that unusual for a first-year point guard – but his shooting has been wildly erratic to start 2024-25. He is shooting a horrendous 32.3% from the field, and just 29.3% from three – none of which appears to point to any sort of over bet for the 21-year-old. But the unflappable confidence that so often accompanies youth is plain to see in George’s game, because that sub-30% accuracy from beyond the arc is certainly not stopping him from taking those shots. He is averaging 8.33 three-point attempts per game, and it’s kind of been trending upwards excluding his last game. In that he took just five – his lowest number for the season – but that looks like an anomaly. In the five games prior, starting from the earliest, he took 10, 9, 11, 12 and then 7, the latter of which came in only 25 minutes. A number of the others were also blow out results, meaning that he didn’t necessarily play as many minutes as he could have. Even allowing for some bad shooting, if George takes 8 or more three-point attempts in this game then we are a pretty good chance of seeing at least three of them hit, and at $2.40 with PlayUp this looks like great value. Last game George hit only one shot from long range, but he managed three or more in each of his previous five; 3, 6 and 4 in those. Clearly he fancies himself as a shooter and the Jazz have given him something of a green light, so assuming the trend which has so far endured throughout this ten-game season continues, he should be getting up a lot of shots and giving himself a great chance of hitting this number at comfortably better than even money odds.

Dallas Mavericks @ Utah Jazz

John Collins to score 25+ points | $5.50 with Unibet

Let’s continue with the them of Utah Jazz players, making it three from three player props focused on one of the worst teams in the league. We will also continue with the trend of increasingly long odds, with this one a real outside chance based on the odds set by NBA betting sites. It’s easy to see why they are long – John Collins does not usually score 25 points, and never has been a regular 25-point scorer. But hear me out. Collins does have a tendency to really play out of his skins now and again, making him exactly the kind of guy who can hit these longer odds bets with reasonable consistency. For the season to date he is averaging 17.1 points and has scored more than 18 points on just two occasions out of ten – numbers that probably do not fill you with a great deal of confidence. But the two times that he has passed 18 points have both come within the past two games, and in those games he scored 28 points and 29 points – the latter of which was in his last outing. He is clearly feeling himself at the moment having hit 28 points or more twice in the past four games, and is the kind of player who, once he sees the bottom of the net a couple of times, tends to look a lot more confident and play a lot more aggressively on offence. It’s certainly possible that he comes out and only takes ten shots, as he does sometimes, and gets nowhere near this as a result. But equally, with his confidence high, this is a good opportunity to take advantage of the long odds betting agencies have set for him to have another big game – the kind of game that he has already had twice in the last few days.