NBA betting odds: Thursday’s lines
By Jeff Glauser
A quiet evening of just two NBA contests to bet on will wrap up the slate of contests before the All-Star break.
The Washington Wizards will visit the Indiana Pacers, followed an hour later by the Chicago Bulls hosting the Boston Celtics. Coincidentally, if the season were to end today, those would be two of the four first-round playoff pairings in the Eastern Conference.
On the surface, the Pacers seem to have the upper edge, boasting a 20-9 home record, versus a 9-14 road mark for the Wizards. But a different picture is painted when digging deeper into the numbers. Simply enough, Washington — now standing atop the Southeast Division — has established itself as one of the league’s hottest teams, winning 17 of its past 20, with two of those losses by a margin of five or less.
Meanwhile, Indiana has been spiraling in the opposite direction as of late, but that’s nothing new for the NBA’s most schizophrenic team. The Pacers are currently mired in a five-game losing streak, which followed a seven-game winning streak, which was preceded three losses and, before that, a run of seven victories out of eight.
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The Celtics are all-of-a-sudden making a push for the top seed in the East. They are now just 2.5 games behind the Cleveland Cavaliers, who will be without star forward Kevin Love for at least six weeks. They’ve won 11 of 12, led by the Isaiah Thomas, who has become the most dynamic small man in the game since Allen Iverson. In Wednesday night’s win over the Philadelphia 76ers, he became just the 17th player in history to score 20 points or more in 40 consecutive games in the course of a season.
Which makes tonight’s line—the Bulls are now favored by a point—all the more curious. They have lost four of six and stand at 27-29 for the season. Perhaps Vegas knows something.
The following are the up-to-date consensus NBA odds, courtesy of VegasInsider.com:
Thursday, February 16:
- 7:05 ET Washington (-2.5) at Indiana
- 8:00 ET Chicago (-1) vs. Boston