There are a lot of things that have to be considered when pondering a totals play in the National Basketball Association. And we are going to discuss some of them as we analyze a Sunday night game.
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Here we go:
New York Knicks at Portland Trail Blazers Preview
Knicks vs. Trail Blazers ATS Pick
When: 10 PM ET
NBA Betting Odds: Blazers -3.5, Total 213
The first thing to mention here is that Portland will be without a couple of starters.Center Jusuf Nurkic is averaging 9.8 points and 7.7 rebounds. The bigger loss from an offensive standpoint is CJ McCollum, one-half of the most productive backcourt in the NBA.
McCollum tallies 26.7 points a game. That is the highest average of his career. So the Blazers will have to compensate for the points they’ll miss. We assume they’ll look to people like Carmelo Anthony (12.2 ppg, but a 40.5% shooter), Gary Trent (10.6 ppg) and Enes Kanter (10.1 ppg), among others.
The Blazers have thrown up the second most triples in the league this season. And they’ve connected at a 37.4% clip. This would seem to be a rough matchup for them against the Knicks.
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When Tom Thibodeau was hired as head coach, he pledged to create a defensive culture around this team, and you would have to admit he’s done so quicker than most people suspected he would.
Not only is New York third in the NBA in Defensive Rating, they are the stingiest team in the league, allowing opponents to hit just 43% from the field.
And for purposes of our discussion, it needs to be mentioned that they are the best at defending the three-point shot, allowing just 31% success. So it looks like they have the “Kryptonite” for what Portland wants to do.
There is no question that they are going to make it harder for the Blazers to do what they want to do. And then, of course, they’re without McCallum, who made 4.8 treys per contest (44% accurate).
Does this look like a pretty good setup for an “under”? Maybe, when you consider that not only have 12 of the Knicks’ 17 games gone under the total, that same number of games have gone under THIS posted total.
But guess what? Only ONE game Portland has played has gone below 213 points. Not only that, but the over-under on this game is ten points below any total that has been posted for them this season. This may become a question of “pace.” And while the Knicks play slow (the slowest in the league, in fact), the Blazers are tenth in the NBA in that category. And we don’t think they are slowing down to accommodate the New Yorkers.
In fact, they may speed things up, using somebody like Robert Covington to go “small” up front. Some of the other people we mentioned, in addition to Rodney Hood, will chip in, and hell, we know that Damien Lillard (28.1 ppg) is capable of going off for 50 if he wants to.
The oddsmaker has squeezed all the value of this number for the “under” bettors, and opened the door for us to go OVER.
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