Playoffs are finally here and we already had a taste for a slower pace, fewer possessions and better defensive games at a Play-In tournament. For example GSW finished regular season with a 102.81 Top 3 pace in the league but in these last two games they had a 96.95 pace – it’s almost same as the slowest team in the league New York Knicks. That’s a very big difference and we should exploit that in our favor. We have a pretty big sample to confirm our theory too – in the last 10 years of NBA playoffs 60.9% of Game 1’s have gone under the total (27o 42u). So even if we bet them blindly at opening lines we should be profitable.
After the All-Star game Clippers and Mavericks are one of the slowest teams in the whole league – 27th and 28th place respectively. And usually that’s a season segment in which we can reflect on seriously. Teams are gearing up for the post-season and with each game in the records we can predict what their style of play we should see in the Playoffs. Most of the teams are slowing down, but if we already saw a really slow pace compared to the League’s standards – we should target under bets even more. Of course there are downsides as both teams have really efficient offenses with Top10 effective field goals percentages and Top10 true shooting, but as I mentioned it before Playoffs are a very different story from the defensive side of the game. All of these high percentages should go down, especially after this compressed season as most of the teams were just moving on if the game got out of the hand.
Season series of 3 games finished with a 199.6pts average and a 93.83 pace. Just to give you guys an example 2013-14 season league’s average finished with a 93.9 pace. Both teams should be more physical too with a green light from the referees. Everything just screams under for me in this game and we already saw some line movement in our favor.
Best bet under 221.5
