Portland Trail Blazers vs. Oklahoma City Thunder Prediction: Fading The Tankers
Portland Trail Blazers vs. Oklahoma City Thunder Prediction: Fading The Tankers
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1u - Oklahoma City Thunder Under 29.5 1Q PTS (-135) (Bet $135 to win $100)
*Odds Available at BetMGM at Time of Publishing*
This is just too many points. Lets take a look at OKC’s projected starters tonight. Tre Mann, Theo Maledon, Lindy Water, Isaiah Roby, and Aleksej Pokusevski. That doesn’t exactly strike any fear into me. All of these people made it to the NBA so I would never go on record of calling any of them scrubs. With that being said, compared to the average NBA starting lineup this is less than average by a mile. Portland are far from a defensive powerhouse and they have their own issues but asking for 30 points in one quarter from a team like this is a lot to ask. Let's get nerdy and into the numbers.
Oklahoma City will be without SGA, Lu Dort, Josh Giddey, Derrick Favors, Darius Bazley, Kenrich Williams, Mike Muscala and Ty Jerome. Some of these are probably legitimate injuries and others could be early vacations from the front office to better secure a top pick, either way we’ll take advantage of it. In the last nine games without SGA we have seen OKC go 29 points or below. Factor that in with the other injuries and there’s definitely value here. OKC is under in 6 straight and 3 of those even included SGA. Asking for 30 points is just too much for this shell of a team with not much to play for.
Although this bet is mostly based on my disbelief in OKC and not my belief in Portland we have seen them have flashes of brilliance definitely. They either look really bad or really good definitely to open games. In their last four games with this same unit we have seem them go 2-2 on this prop. They only allowed 22 PTS to Detroit once and only 24 PTS to Houston once but in the other two games allowed massive totals of 45 and 35. Which Portland we’ll see is a question mark but I will gladly roll the dice on it being a good defensive unit with no real scoring threats on the other side.