
Understanding Momentum Swings
Learn how to understand NBA momentum swings, when to predict them, and how to leverage them when making your NBA picks and placing your bets....
Read more Understanding Momentum Swings
Learn everything there is to know about NBA point spread betting including how to read NBA odds on the spread and make the best NBA picks possible.
After pro and college football, the most popular sport for bettors in the United States to place wagers on is pro basketball—the NBA. This guide will go over basketball betting, how you can do online betting on the NBA, and spread-betting strategies.
Like football, the most popular way to bet on the NBA is with a point spread. Many times, betting on the spread will put close to an even amount of money on each team and keep a game interesting even if the winner of the actual game isn’t in question. In fact, free throws at the end of the game will often determine the winner via the point spread.
Not factoring in over-under or prop bets, there are two ways you can bet on the outcome of an NBA game—the point spread or the moneyline. With the moneyline, you are simply betting on the winner of the game. While this is an easier concept to grasp, the more a team is favored, the less money you will win compared to how much you wager. With the lines set on NBA basketball games with a point spread, the odds are closer to even-money, so it’s a more popular form of betting on basketball because it’s more straightforward about how much you can win on a single bet.
Here is the step-by-step process of placing an NBA bet online:
As we discussed, betting on the point spread in NBA basketball means that you’re not betting on a team to win the game, rather betting on whether they will cover the point spread—a favorite winning by a certain amount or an underdog winning outright or not losing by the given number. Because it’s so easy to score in basketball, point totals get quite high, so this gives an opportunity for oddsmakers to develop point spreads for basketball games. The same logic applies to football, but in baseball and hockey, scores are so low that it’s difficult to create point spreads, thus the moneyline is a more popular wager in those two sports.
Using Sidelines will give you the most favorable spreads for each side of a matchup. For example, in this game featuring the San Antonio Spurs at Dallas Mavericks, Dallas is the favored team by the oddsmakers. The best spread available on Dallas is -4.5 at -109. We will go into what these numbers mean below. The best spread available on the Spurs is +4 at -110.
Using the example above, Dallas is set as a 4.5-point favorite (the minus sign before the number indicates the betting favorite), meaning that they must win by more than 4.5 points to cover the spread—or win a bet on them. The Mavericks winning by five or more points is a win for the bettor, and an outright loss of the game or winning by four points or fewer is a loss on the wager. The -109 after the spread means that you must bet $109 to win $100 on the bet. Bets on both teams are generally around -110, which is considered an even-money bet in the betting world. A true even-money bet would be +100, but oddsmakers set them at -110 for the vigorish, also called the vig or juice. This works in what amounts to a service fee for the sportsbooks for placing and guaranteeing to pay your bet if you win.
The best bet on San Antonio in our example is +4, meaning that they are getting four points added to their total in the final score. If they win the game or lose by less than four points, the bet is a winner. If the Spurs lose by five or more, it’s a loss. In the case of spreads that are whole numbers, a push (tie) is possible; if Dallas wins the game by four, anyone who bets on San Antonio at +4 would get the money they originally wagered back.
(Don’t use tables from the template… Caesars with -2.5 / -110 is a better bet than -3 / -110 where it says “best odds”)
If you’re interested in giving up some potential winnings for better odds, you can look into alternate lines. With alt lines, you can essentially buy points. So if Dallas is at -4.5 at -109, you may be able to drop that to -4 or -3.5, but the odds will drop to -120 or further, meaning you would have to bet at least $120 to win $100. With this example, you’re buying a point for the $11 difference in what you would have to wager in order to win $100.
We discussed how the team with the minus sign in front of them is the favorite, and the team with the plus sign is the underdog. But let’s delve a little deeper into how oddsmakers ascertain favorites and underdogs. First, there is a larger disparity between good and bad teams in the NBA than in other sports. Secondly, home-court advantage plays a big part in creating a point spread. Teams playing on the road are likely to be travel-weary and may also rest key players that they would normally play at home in front of their own fans.
Oddsmakers, however, know that the betting public believes in an inherent home-court advantage, so they are more likely to bet on the home team, and a game that could have a line of zero (called a pick ’em) based on the teams’ skill levels and how they matchup may actually have the home team set as a one or 1.5-point favorite.
If you look at the table below, you’ll see that underdogs actually covered slightly more than they lost over the course of the first half of the 2020-21 season, but road underdogs performed quite well, going 159-142-5, meaning you would have profited $254.55 if you bet $100 on every road underdog throughout the course of the first half of last season. This shows that point spreads on favorites could be inflated by a point or two.
We discussed how to win, lose, or push an NBA bet earlier. The hardest thing for novice gamblers to grasp is that winning the game doesn’t necessarily mean winning the bet. And teams’ strategies in the closing moments of a game depend on the score, meaning that every point is important when you’re making a bet against the spread in the NBA, especially if the spread is around six or less.
An example of this is say the Los Angeles Lakers are four-point favorites at home against the New York Knicks. If the Lakers are leading by more than three points and less than around nine, the Knicks will foul the Lakers when they have the ball in order to extend the game. The strategy is that the Knicks hope the Lakers will miss their free throws in order for the Knicks to have additional chances to score. Free throws can make the difference between a four- and five-point line extremely valuable. If the Lakers are leading by three with five seconds left on the clock and are fouled, they will have a chance to make two free throws to push the lead to five (and likely a winning bet at -4). Say they make only one free throw and the Knicks miss a shot at the buzzer to give LA a 104-100 win. A bet at -4 is a push, whereas a bet at -5 would be a loss
There are several strategies that experts employ that you can use to give yourself an advantage when it comes to NBA basketball betting. Remember, it’s the oddsmakers’ job to set a line that they believe will cause equal betting on each side; the line doesn’t necessarily mean that a certain team is expected to win by that amount. So if you can determine that a team should win by seven points but they are only a five-point favorite, you should place a bet on that game.
Here are the factors to consider:
Sidelines can help you with choosing the online sportsbook that is perfect for you. By researching each site, you’ll find some offer potentially lucrative promotions, deposit bonuses, and more favorable odds over other books. Also look into withdrawal options, as these can differ from vendor to vendor.
After choosing the right online sportsbook for you, it’s time to choose your NBA betting odds and place some bets!
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