Portland Trail Blazers Head To Oklahoma City Hoping To Maintain Playoff Momentum

The general public and mainstream media is becoming more ‘sports betting savvy’ but the overall misunderstanding of point spreads remains. Whenever there’s a big upset in sports you’ll still hear the assertion that oddsmakers ‘got this one wrong’. That reflects a failure to understand how pointspreads are made and what they represent. The oddsmaker isn’t trying to predict the outcome of the game–he’s trying to hang a number that will bring betting action on both sides. There’s a predictive element involved but as long as the money balances out that’s a secondary concern. More than anything else, a pointspread is created based on the oddsmaker’s read of the public’s opinion of who will win and by how much. There are plenty of circumstances where the actual dynamics of a game matchup and what the public thinks about it are a complete disconnect and a betting line will reflect this.

It’s tough to understand how the betting public got the NBA first round playoff series between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Portland Trail Blazers so wrong. It is the only one of the opening round playoff series where the lower seeded team was the favorite to advance. OKC was a -160 choice to beat Portland (+140) even though the Blazers were a higher seed with a better record and home court advantage. The Thunder took 3 of 4 from the Blazers during the regular season going 4-0 against the spread but before this series began the Blazers were 7-5 SU/ATS against OKC over the last three years. Portland was a -3.5 favorite in the first game which is a reasonable number but a +1 underdog in Game Two. The Blazers were 32-9 at the Moda Center during the regular season tying them for the second best home court record in the Western Conference. It’s very tough to justify making them a home dog against Oklahoma City.

The Thunder have the ‘most famous’ player in Russell Westbrook but that’s off little consequence during the playoffs. LeBron James is likely the most famous basketball player on the planet but he’s at home watching the playoffs on TV. At the very least, these two teams are extremely evenly matched. You can make a case that the Blazers are the better overall team at this point. My power ratings have Portland ranked slightly higher and the Blazers were one of the hottest teams in the league in the second half of the season. Oklahoma City closed the year on a 9-19 run against the pointspread and closed the month of March losing 7 of 9 straight up. To be sure, a good team can perform poorly against the pointspread but that is a result of the betting public overestimating their qualitative status relative to their ‘true line value’. That’s exactly what appears to be happening in this series.

Sometimes you’ll see a NBA basketball pointspread correct itself over the course of a series but that isn’t happening here. The Thunder remain overvalued as a -7.5 home favorite. The urgency of this game for Oklahoma City is also ‘baked in’ to the line. It’s tough to come back from an 0-3 series hole in any sport. If you combine teams down 0-3 in baseball, hockey and basketball there have only been five times a team has come back from this deficit. It has happened once in Major League Baseball, four times in the National Hockey League–and never in the NBA. The ‘must win situation’ that OKC is in is also a component of this price. Teams down 0-2 playing Game 3 at home win that game nearly 60% of the time but that has nothing to do with their pointspread performance–and particularly laying this many points. In the last four regular season matchups on the Thunder home court they were priced as a -4 or -4.5 chalk. From a pointspread perspective, Oklahoma City was nothing special at home going 21-20 against the number this season. The Thunder were 19-20 ATS as a home favorite and 30-34 ATS as a favorite overall.

There’s not a way to justify this price based on the qualitative matchup alone. The Blazers are getting more points than the Detroit Pistons did in their last visit to the Chesapeake Energy Arena (Pistons a +5.5 dog on April 5). Portland was a +7.5 or higher underdog only twice during the regular season–they were +7.5 at Milwaukee on November 21 and +9 at Golden State on December 27. Oklahoma City simply isn’t in the class of either the Bucks or the Warriors yet they’re priced in this game (and really this entire series) like they are. The Blazers remain a great value even with the series shifting to the Thunder’s home court.

BET PORTLAND TRAILBLAZERS +7.5 OVER OKLAHOMA CITY THUNDER

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