NBA Multi bet of the Weekend | Apr 20

The first round of the NBA playoffs is officially set, with the Heat and the Grizzlies the last teams to qualify after Play-In Tournament wins on Friday. The action kicks off with the 4 v 5 and 3 v 6 series in each Conference, with the Pacers and Bucks kicking us off before the Nuggets host the Clippers, the Pistons head to New York to take on the Pistons, and the Lakers take on the Timberwolves at Crypto.com Arena. Below, you can check out our three-leg NBA multi for the first day of the 2025 NBA playoffs.

Sunday 20th of April, 2.00am AEST, Gainbridge Fieldhouse

For the second time in as many years, the Bucks and the Pacers will face off in the first round of the playoffs, but this time around there will be a very notable difference in the form of 6’11”, athletic anomaly called Giannis Antetokounmpo. Giannis missed last year’s series through injury and his Bucks promptly lost that series 4-2 despite Khris Middleton and Damian Lillard’s best efforts. But this time around, those two will both be absent – Middleton having obviously been traded during the year and Lillard out injured – leaving Giannis to do the brunt of the work. Of course, as he has demonstrated for close to a decade, he’s more than capable of putting his team on his back and dragging them to victory – particularly against the Pacers. The Greek Freak has a frightening record against Indiana; last season, he played them five times and averaged a ridiculous 42.2 points, which included a 54-point game and a 64-point game. In four games this year against them he has not been quite that dominant but has still averaged 32 points per game, and all four of those were with Lillard playing. Without his number two alongside him, Giannis will invariably take on a much bigger role on offence, and that will be exacerbated even further by the fact that it’s a playoff game. Giannis’ dominance against the Pacers is no coincidence, either; they are a poor team at defending the paint, this season conceding 51.8 points per game in there, the fifth most in the league. Antetokounmpo, meanwhile, is the most dominant paint scorer in the league, with his 19.5 PITP this season beating all comers in that category. Giannis is the key to this series for the Bucks, and the man that the Pacers will be putting all their energy into trying to stop. But it has been proven time and again that they simply do not have the cattle to do that. Even were everyone fit and healthy Giannis would be primed for a big series, but with Lillard out, expect him to come out looking to absolutely dominate Game 1. It would be no surprise to see him put up a 40-piece or close to it, but for a bit more safety to start our NBA multi we’ll stick to 35 points at better than even money odds with NBA betting sites.

Sunday 20th of April, 4.30am AEST, Ball Arena

Nikola Jokic is another of the game’s elite who generally takes his game up a notch during the playoffs, but betting sites have not really adjusted to cater for this fact. The three-time MVP has seen a boost in a couple of major statistical categories every single time he has made the playoffs, which is in each of the last six seasons, and it’s been points where that has been most notable. In the 2019 playoffs, he went from 20.1 points per game in the regular season to 25.1 in the playoffs, an improvement of 5.0 points. The next year he averaged 4.5 points in the playoffs relative to the regular season, and in the four seasons since then he has seen points increases in the postseason of 3.4, 3.9, 5.5 and last season 2.3. Clearly he takes his game to another level in the playoffs, in part due to an increased usage rate and in part due to the fact that he is the best player in the world. This season, he averaged a career-high 29.6 points per game, yet betting agencies have only set his line at around 28.5. Likely they have factored in that playoff games are often more defensively-minded and scores can be a little lower, but the evidence over the past six years is that despite that fact, Jokic generally scores more heavily in the playoffs than he does the regular season. Based on past performance it seems likely that Jokic boosts his scoring this postseason and averages over 30 points, and while that does not mean he will hit that number every single game, it does mean he's a better chance of doing it than the odds would suggest. It would be no surprise to see him have a huge scoring game here, but we’ll settle for Jokic to score 30+ points to hopefully keep our NBA multi for the weekend alive.

Sunday 20th of April, 7.00am AEST, Madison Square Garden

The Knicks will head into this game as the comfortable favourite and deservedly so, but the Pistons are a better chance of getting close than the odds would suggest. They’ve been excellent for the second half of the season, and though they come into this game having lost six of their last eight games they have not been playing badly by any means. A lot of those have been close losses to good teams, and in their last three they have lost to the Bucks twice – once in overtime and once by six points – and beaten the Knicks. Interestingly, that was their third consecutive defeat of New York; they lost the first game between these two teams much earlier in the season, but since then they have won by 9 points, 5 points and 9 points again. The Knicks, meanwhile, are a well-rounded team on paper and have looked decent at times this season, but have not set anyone’s world alight. They have particularly struggled against really good teams, and while the Pistons probably do not quite fit into that category, they are more than capable of giving the home team a good run in this one. What’s more, the Pistons have been doing a lot of their good work of late without easily their best player in Cade Cunningham. Since returning, Cunningham has not looked like he has skipped a beat, and the Pistons are clearly a better team with him there. This is a really intriguing series and one in which the Pistons are more than capable of causing problems for their more highly fancied opponents. It would be no surprise to see the visitors give themselves a great chance to win.