The NBA season rolls on with roughly 20 games remaining for each team in the regular season. Our Action Network NBA analysts Joe Dellera and Brandon Anderson break down their two favorite bets for Thursday, including on spread pick and a prop/moneyline parlay for Super Trey Day. Check out their picks and analysis below.
NBA Odds & Picks
Miami Heat vs. Brooklyn Nets
Kenny Ducey: With all due respect to Kevin Durant, don’t you think this line is a bit crazy? For one, we’re not entirely sure how much KD will play his return from injury, and we’re also not entirely sure how good he will look.
Durant will be returning to a team that has looked horrific in his absence, and he will have his work cut out for him if he wants to carry it to the playoffs. Since the beginning of February, Brooklyn ranks second-worst on the defensive end with 118.7 points allowed per 100 possessions and all the way down in 23rd when it comes to offensive efficiency.
Even the promising complementary players on this team have been playing ugly basketball; Patty Mills is shooting just 14.8% from the field in the last four games, and Cam Thomas is shooting 38.1%.
The former MVP is good enough to lift even the worst teams into relevancy, but in his first game since a long injury layoff — and one in which he may not even play more than 20 minutes — it’s unfair to expect him to have Brooklyn competing with the East’s top team.
Miami is fresh off a last-second loss to the Bucks, and I expect them to rebound in a large way here. The Heat are 14-6-1 against the spread coming off a loss.
Golden State Warriors vs. Dallas Mavericks
Brandon Anderson: March 3 is Super Trey Day, and it's all about 3s, so you just know we have to play a prop from the Greatest Shooter of All Time.
It's certainly been an up-and-down season for the GSOAT. Curry was molten lava to start the season before going into a long slump right as he chased the all-time record, then prolonged when Draymond Green went out injured. The volume dipped some too at Curry's lowest, when his confidence was perhaps a bit shaken, but it looks like he's come — or at least coming — out of the slump.
I still think a January game against the Pistons may have been the turning point. That was Klay Thompson's first genuinely good game back since his long injury absence, with 21 points for the other Splash Brother. The very next game after that, Curry exploded for six 3s and 39 points, and ever since that Pistons game, the volume has been mostly back.
In his last 17 games, Curry is averaging 3.8 makes on 11.1 attempts from deep. He's gone cold again out of the break, dipping his make rate to only 35% over that stretch, but we need volume, not efficiency.
The truth is that this line is flat out disrespectful. Curry's 3-point prop was at 4.5 for much of this season, even 5.5 at times. Now it's all the way down to 3.5, and it's not just down there, but it's at almost even odds. Honestly, I would take Curry over 3.5 3s blind against any team in any matchup at even odds.
And, well, that's probably good, because Curry has not been good against the Mavs this season. He's scored only 19.7 PPG in three games and gone under 3.5 made 3s in all of them at just 6-for-29 on the season. Dallas ranks first in the NBA in point guard defense and allows the fewest 3-pointers in the NBA at just 10.7 per game. Not great.
But that Mavs defense has faltered lately, ranking just 19th over the past two weeks, and it's not like Curry has struggled with the Mavs in the past. He hit the over on this prop in all three Mavericks games last year, making 20 treys, an average of 6.7 per game. Let's not make too much of a small sample size this year, especially with Dallas' defense starting to regress to the mean.
Curry has gone over 3.5 made 3s in 38 of 57 games, hitting this over 67% of the time. That should imply odds right at -200, not the near even odds we're getting. But here's how we can really bend this in our favor: in those 38 games with four-plus Curry 3s, the Warriors are an awesome 31-7, versus a very average 12-12 in all other Golden State games.
When Curry hits, the Warriors do too. That's why it's worth backing our 3-point king on Super Trey Day, but only if we parlay the moneyline too. Now we're getting +255, implying just a 28% hit rate. This season, Curry has made four or more 3s in a Warriors win 69% of the time. That's a pretty nice edge in our favor, so let's see if Curry can do his thing tonight and lead the Warriors to a win on Super Trey Day.
