David MJ is a statistics professor at Laval University in Quebec City who offers sports betting advice based on his prediction models.
Game
7s are always exciting. They’re even more interesting if you can profit
from them. Heading into Sunday’s Game 7 between the Utah Jazz and Los
Angeles Clippers, I found some great Game 7 betting trends by digging
into the past nine NBA postseasons.
With the public’s
tendency to overreact to recent games, my suspicion was that we might
get value from betting the team that lost Game 6, the previous game,
against the spread (ATS). This intuition turned out to be true: teams
coming off an ATS loss in Game 6 went 18-11 (62.1 percent) against the
spread in the seventh game of the series. That trend bodes well for
anyone leaning toward the Jazz +3.5 Sunday night.
That being
said, does it matter whether the given team barely lost or got crushed
ATS? For example, suppose a 3-point underdog in Game 6 ended up losing
that game by 25 points. Considering the market is likely to overreact to
this result (which will move the line in our favor), should we have
even more confidence in our bet on the team that lost by 22 points ATS?
Here’s
how we would have done betting the team that lost Game 6 ATS as a
function of the difference between the spread and the actual margin of
victory:
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