NBA Expert Tips and Best Bets | Mar 13

All eyes will be on TD Garden on Thursday, with a preview of what many think will be the NBA Finals taking place when the Celtics host the Thunder – continuing a big few days for OKC after back-to-back games against the Nuggets. But there are eight other games set to take place across the course of the day, and those are where our three best bets will focus, leaving the Celtics vs Thunder game for pure entertainment. Below, you can take a look at the two player props and one over/under which make up our day’s best bets.

Quentin Grimes to score 25+ points @ $3.30 with PlayUp

This will mark the sixth consecutive game that Tyrese Maxey has missed and the fourth in a row for Paul George, and with the Sixers now firmly in tank mode they won’t exactly be pushing them to return any sooner than they are ready. The major beneficiary of that has been Quentin Grimes, who has taken on a massively increased role in their absence and handled it with aplomb. He has played just 14 games for the Sixers after being traded prior to the All-Star break, and in the last six of those he has seen a major uptick in both minutes and production in the absence of his team’s more recognised players. In his last six games, Grimes has had games of 44, 35, 30 and 25 points, but despite that he is still at well over $3 with NBA betting sites to hit the 25-mark once again. In the Sixers most recent game, Grimes took a huge 25 shots, and justifiably so because he hit 14 of them (including five 3-pointers) and scored 35 points. He is all of a sudden his team’s primary source of offence, and is showing what he is capable of when given that responsibility. The 24-year-old has still been a little erratic over this recent period, with the two games in his last six in which he didn’t score at least 25 points yielding just 14 and 6 points. But it’s for that reason that this bet looks like such good value. His over/under is at around 21 points, but given that when he has been scoring 20 or more points he has generally been going well past that number, we might as well take the extra value for him to score a few more points. Given he’s scored 30+ points in three of his last six games, that would also be a decent bet at around $7 with PlayUp, but we’ll play it a little more safe and take the 25.

Over 237.5 total points at $1.87 with QuestBet

The Spurs have not been a particularly good defensive team all season long, with their defensive rating of 115.7 ranking them 24th in the league – and that’s with far and away the most impactful defensive player in the world roaming the floor. With Victor Wembanyama now out for the season, they have unsurprisingly fallen in a heap at that end of the floor. The numbers in recent games are alarming; their defensive rating in the last six games is an astonishing 132.2, easily the worst in the league in that time. Fortunately for them, they also have the best offence in the league in that time with a rating of 126.6, and the result has been a bunch of very high-scoring games. In that six-game stretch, the lowest total for a game they have played in has been 236, and most of the rest have gone way over the line betting sites have set for this game. In that time, the average totals in their games is a huge 256.3, nearly 20 points higher than this line. Incidentally, the Mavericks also happen to be missing one of the best defenders in the league in Anthony Davis, and they too have been a disaster defensively without him. During that same six-game stretch in which the Spurs have been conceding points like they’re going out of fashion, the Mavericks have the second worst defensive rating in the league at 127.2. They don’t have much in the way of offensive talent on the floor, but they have managed okay of late and against the hapless Spurs defence, managed to put up 133 points in their last game. That matchup saw a huge 262 points scored, so the 237.5 points bookies have predicted for their second consecutive match-up looks way too low. With both these sides playing defence like they’re in the All-Star game of late, this one should be flying over once again.

Duncan Robinson to hit 3+ three-pointers @ $1.90 with Unibet

Duncan Robinson has been an elite shooter since he burst into the league, and he is in some very consistent form from beyond the arc of late. Over his last eight games, Robinson has been getting good minutes and making them count, averaging 3.5 makes from long range per game in that time. But more importantly, he has reached that number by consistently hitting three or four per game, rather than as a product of a couple of streaky outings. He has hit at least two three-pointers in every one of those eight games, and in six of them he has hit at least three. A strike rate of 75% over his last eight games makes the nearly even money on offer for him to hit three long-range attempts in this one look like excellent value. Don’t expect this to be a particularly high-scoring game – the line has been set at just 210.5 by betting agencies – but Robinson has been getting six to ten looks from beyond the arc per game for a couple of weeks now, and there is no reason to think that he will not once again take around that number. As a 40% three-point shooter and hitting at slightly above that number in recent times, that should be enough shots to get him to at least three three-pointers for the seventh time in nine games.