Is this going to be the night Stephen Curry breaks the NBA's all-time record for career 3-pointers made?
The Golden State Warriors standout is just two threes away from eclipsing Ray Allen's mark of 2,973 makes from beyond the arc and will likely accomplish the feat Tuesday when he and his team face the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden.
Handicappers Kenny Ducey and Brandon Anderson have found their best bets from the Warriors vs. Knicks showdown, delivering their favorite plays that include a side and player prop tied to Golden State standout Draymond Green.
Check out their best bets for Tuesday's marquee matchup below.
NBA Odds & Picks
Golden State Warriors vs. New York Knicks
Kenny Ducey: It’s easy to overthink this game. The line has to be a trap, right? The Warriors got stuck in Indiana and will be tired here on the second night of a back-to-back, so the Knicks will stun the world.
Well, I don’t really want to big-brain this. Golden State is a short favorite on the road against a struggling Knicks team that’s missing three rotation pieces including R.J. Barrett and Obi Toppin, and even a sluggish Warriors team is more than five points better than New York.
Stephen Curry will be gunning for the three-point record, but he’ll hardly be the only one chucking up shots from deep considering the Warriors rank third in three-point attempts per game. The Knicks have allowed a poor 35.3% shooting from deep and on the whole rank 24th in defensive efficiency.
There are serious concerns on the defensive end, especially without Barrett and Toppin, and then there's the issue of scoring the ball. New York was incredibly flat without those two against the Bucks, and the man who drove the ship with 27 points — Quentin Grimes — has now been placed into the league’s COVID-19 health and safety protocols. Julius Randle is coming off an eight-point outing and bringing some pretty poor form into a matchup with the NBA's best defense.
I just don’t see a way where the Knicks get anywhere close to the Warriors, given Randle’s recent play and those three absences. They will need just about everything to go perfectly to even have a shot, and I think it’s likely Kevin Knox doesn’t score 18 as he did over the weekend, and pretty likely either Randle or Evan Fournier flops again given what Golden State brings on defense.
I'll go up to five points here for this pick.
Brandon Anderson: We talked about this one on Monday's "Buckets" podcast.
The way the Knicks play defense and the way teams have been defending the Warriors lately, they're likely going to try to force the ball out of Curry's hands, even if that means sending help well beyond the arc. Well, we've seen that movie before. That means a drop off pass to Draymond Green going downhill with a four-on-three and we know what happens from there.
Green is averaging 7.3 assists per game, and if I were making the lines, I'd put him firmly at 7.5 assist. We're getting him at 6.5 instead in this spot and that leaves real value.
He's has had at least five assists in all but two games, so that's a clear floor in our favor. He's had at least six in 21 of 26 games, putting us within one make of an over 81% of the time and he's connected on this over in 65% of his games this season.
The assist numbers are down the last four games, with three unders during that span, and that reflects this mini-slump we've been seeing. The Warriors feel like they've been forcing it, trying to get Curry the record.
Now that it's basically a foregone conclusion that he'll hit it in this game, I expect to see more Warriors basketball again and that should mean Green assists back to usual. That means this mini-slump has bought us value by dropping this line down an assist, and I have to take it. I'll play to -150 odds.
