NBA Multi bet of the Weekend | Mar 22

Saturday’s list of games in the NBA is lacklustre to say the least – at least, for most of the day. But it gets better as the day goes on, with three intriguing games between playoff contenders; the Suns hosting the Cavaliers, the Trail Blazers welcoming the Nuggets to Portland, and the Grizzlies heading to Los Angeles to take on the Clippers. We’ll kick off our weekend multi with a couple of those less interesting games, before hopefully hitting the winning leg with a former MVP player prop in the Clippers vs Grizzlies game. Take a look at our three bets below.

Saturday, 22nd of March at 10.00am AEDT, Capital One Arena

Alexandre Sarr has quietly gone about having a solid rookie season, and though he’s a fair way back in the market with most betting agencies, is making a late push to be considered for the Rookie of the Year award. As expected, he has looked very raw at an NBA level, but the Wizards’ plain lack of incentive to win this season – not that they really could have if they wanted to – has meant he was always bound to get plenty of opportunity for the worst team in the league. For the season he averages 12.6 points per game on pretty inefficient shooting – not exactly mind-blowing numbers – but in the past few games something appears to have clicked for the very talented number two pick. The Frenchman has put together easily the best stretch of his season over the last four games, putting up at least 19 points and averaging just a tick under 24 per game in that time. Even more impressively, in each of his last two games, in which he has scored 20 and 22 points, he’s played 23 minutes or less as a result of his hapless Wizards getting blown out. That means that in his last three games, he’s scored 76 points in just 77 minutes, which is well beyond the numbers that he has been putting up for most of the season. In-season improvement is not uncommon for rookies in the NBA, particularly when they get as much opportunity as what Sarr has, and often betting sites are a little slow to adjust. In this case, they have a little bit, putting his line up to 15.5, but given he has blown past that the last four games – and the last two of those in very limited minutes – that still looks way too low. He wouldn’t be a bad bet to get 20 at decent value in this one, but we’ll play it safe to hopefully ensure our multi gets past the first leg and stick to the over 15.5 points.

Saturday, 22nd of March at 11.00am AEDT, Kaseya Center

Considering the vast difference in form of these two teams at the moment, the line of 5.5 set by betting sites for this game looks pretty low. For while the Rockets are arguably the most in-form team in the league right now, the Heat are at the complete other end of the spectrum, having lost nine games in a row in a complete late-season capitulation. We admittedly missed out going them with a similar line when they played the Pistons earlier in the week, but they still lost that game and that was the closest they had got to anyone in some time. Prior to that they had lost four in a row by at least 12 points and an average of over 20, and while they were pretty good teams that they played in those games, so too are the Rockets. After falling down the Western Conference standings a little throughout the season, Houston have bounced back emphatically in recent weeks and are currently in the midst of an eight-game winning streak which has seen them fly back up to second in the West. It has admittedly been a pretty friendly run of games, but they have had plenty of impressive wins nonetheless and are playing with a renewed confidence not seen in this team for many months. This is their second consecutive game in Florida, but they have had three days between drinks and had six in a row at home prior to that, so there is no reason to think they won’t be firing on all cylinders in this one. Houston are a far better team than Miami at the worst of times (they have a 45-25 record playing in a much more competitive Western Conference compared to the Heat’s 29-40), and at the moment the gap is even more substantial. With the Heat’s offence the worst in the league during this recent stretch and the Rockets consistently one of the best defensive teams all season, the Heat will likely again struggle to score in this one, and the visitors should be looking to win it by a double-figure margin.

Saturday, 22nd of March at 1.30pm AEDT, Intuit Dome

It’s taken some time, but Kawhi Leonard appears to be ever so slowly creeping back to the Kawhi of old. The former MVP, now 33 years of age, may never return to the absolute peak of his powers, but with a good run of games behind him he is still more than capable of being an extremely effective NBA player. He has still missed games here and there of late, but by and large he has been fit and healthy for around two months now, and it’s beginning to show. Leonard has been eased ever so slowly back into the league by the Clippers, with his minutes hovering around the mid-high 20s for a good few weeks upon his return in January, but for the past few weeks he has been playing 35-40 minutes most games, and that continuity is beginning to pay dividends in terms of his on-court production. Leonard has been getting slowly more consistent in his output, and his last four games has been his best stretch of the season by some way. In that time, he has averaged 27.5 points per night and scored at least 23 in each of them, with that 23-point game coming in only 26 minutes as he helped his Clippers absolutely torch the Hornets and sat the last quarter as a result. Leonard has only averaged around 23-25 points per game for a few seasons now but at his best has been in the high-20s, a number he is still capable of averaging in the Clippers’ run to the playoffs. But NBA betting sites have not yet adjusted for this uptick in production, setting his line at 22.5. Leonard has always been very consistent and at worst will go close to this number, but based on how comfortably he has been surpassing it over the last week or two, and the fact that this should be a high-scoring game against the Grizzlies, Leonard should be able to once again push 30 points in this game to round out our NBA multi.