NBA Season Totals: Clippers & Pacers could surprise
The Los Angeles Clippers may have traded away Chris Paul, but that just makes them more likely to go OVER their regular season win total. How? Jason Lake will tell you.
We’re getting very close to that special time of year on the sports calendar: the Nexus. On Tuesday, Oct. 17, the 2017-18 NBA regular season tips off, and that means all four of the major North American professional sports leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL) will be running at the same time. It’s the busiest time of year here at the home office — especially with college football, soccer and almost every other sport imaginable still in progress.
Today, we get to talk hoops. The 2017-18 win totals were posted on the NBA odds board in late August, and they’ve been tweaked here and there to account for all the player movement this offseason. In a volatile market, we should be able to find some bargains for your basketball picks. All we need to do is look at some reliable projections, compare them to the NBA win totals, and see where the value is.
Don’t believe the hype
You could pay for those projections, of course, but all the data we work with here is available for free, and it’s certainly good enough to point us in the right direction. Last week, Andrew Johnson from Nylon Calculus did most of the work for us when he posted his Highly Plausible Win Projections for 2017-18 and compared them to the win totals at Pinnacle. If you’ve been betting on the NBA for a while, you won’t be surprised at the results: In general, the teams who traded away big stars are projected to go OVER their totals, and the teams that received those stars are projected to go UNDER.
If you’re new to NBA betting, on the other hand, you might be wondering why that would happen. In short, people tend to overvalue the impact of these star players. Few of these famous names live up to the hype. And the teams they leave behind don’t suffer as badly as people expect. This dynamic is very much on display when you look at the big Paul George trade between the Indiana Pacers and the Oklahoma City Thunder:
Thunder get: Paul George
Pacers get: Victor Oladipo, Domantas Sabonis
With their MVP candidate gone, the Pacers (42-40 SU, 39-42-1 ATS last year) saw their win total dip all the way to 31.5 at Pinnacle. However, Johnson projected the Pacers to win 36.6 games this year. Odds on the Thunder (47-35 SU, 45-36-1 ATS) were pending when Johnson crunched his numbers after Oklahoma City acquired Carmelo Anthony from the New York Knicks, but at press time, they’ve got a win total of 50.5. That’s well ahead of Johnson’s projections at 45.6 wins.
From Serbia with love
There’s another team that stands out even more on Johnson’s list, and that’s the Los Angeles Clippers (51-31, 40-41-1 ATS). After that massive multi-player Chris Paul trade with the Houston Rockets, the Clippers have a much smaller win total of 43.5 at Pinnacle, but Johnson still has L.A. winning 53.6 games in 2017-18. That’s a difference of 10.1 wins, the biggest difference between the totals and projections for any team.
Next: Highly Plausible Win Projections for the 2017-18 NBA season
Paul has been a tremendous player throughout his NBA career, but the Clippers still have a pair of All-Stars in Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan. They also have a new and very special point guard in Serbian veteran Milos Teodosic, the 2010 Euroleague MVP. Teodosic has already been seen threading insane passes during the NBA preseason. He’s going to offer a lot of the things Paul did, and now the Clippers finally have the bench strength (Patrick Beverley, Lou Williams, Montrezl Harrell, Sam Dekker et al.) they’ve been lacking all these years. We’ll buy that for a dollar.
Free Pick: Clippers OVER 43.5
Best Line: Pinnacle