Player props can be useful in a variety of ways, from taking advantage of them straight up (to the tune of cold hard cash) to measuring a player’s potential to produce in daily fantasy basketball. Here we’ll focus on utilizing our projections and a slew of other tools to help make money betting player props.
For this article, we are using the odds provided at FanDuel Sportsbook to pinpoint spots where value can be had tonight.
Please note that betting lines and our player projections may change throughout the day after this article is published.
The Sacramento Kings get a positive matchup for Buddy Hield tonight, and that’s against the Charlotte Hornets.
Hield leads all players with at least 10.0 field goal attempts per game in three-point attempt rate: 72.2% of his shots are from beyond the arc. The next-highest rate is “only” 66.5%. The Hornets give up a ton of three-point looks and are second in three-point attempt rate allowed at 46.1%. We should expect Buddy to get the green light and have a good shot to splash some treys.
numberFire projects Hield for 18.9 points over 37.3 minutes. He scores an average of 0.47 points per minute on the season, and at that projected minutes number, he is right on pace for the 17.5.
Against a weak perimeter defense and a middling adjusted defense overall, we can expect that per-minute number to tick up for Hield tonight.
The New York Knicks get the weak defense of the Brooklyn Nets for their matchup tonight. The total is 223.0, and the spread is 8.5 in favor of the Nets. He has been on a bit of a tear, as well, with 21 or more points in five of his past six.
That’s a solid top-down situation for RJ Barrett, but our algorithm is projecting him for just 16.0 points over 32.0 minutes.
Why? Well, partly because regression would be at play.
Barrett has a 49.4% effective field goal percentage on the full season but is up to an unsustainable 64.8% over those past six games.
It doesn’t make initial sense that he’d start trending back to earth against such a bad defense, but our algorithm sure views it that way. And for what it’s worth, his 0.52 points per minute rate on the season is mostly unchanged even against bottom-10 opponents (0.53).
There are a lot of point totals that look juicy tonight, so I’m highlighting a third straight. Montrezl Harrell is projected for 17.7 minutes against the Golden State Warriors over 31.8 minutes.
The Warriors allow above-average points per game to opposing frontcourts and the sixth-most points in the paint (while allowing the second-highest rate of field goal attempts from 3 to 10 feet). Harrell’s shot chart jives with that type of matchup.
Harrell has averaged 0.56 points per minute against the 10 teams that allow the most points in the paint, which would total 17.8 over his projected 31.8 minutes — right in line with numberFire’s projection.
