The sports calendar was already full when Dr. James Naismith invented basketball in 1891. We had football, baseball, hockey, soccer, boxing, tennis, golf – how did basketball survive and thrive, while other inventions like field handball and roque failed to catch on?
Betting, of course. Basketball is perfectly suited for point spreads and totals, which formed the backbone of NBA betting after this league was launched in 1949 (1946, if you include the BAA as part of their history). And now that so many bettors are loading up on player props, the NBA is uniquely poised among team sports to take advantage, thanks to their individual star power: just five players per team, with no helmets or body armor to obscure their identities.
So how do you make money betting on basketball? By following these tried-and-true NBA betting strategies, starting with the most important strategy of them all:
1. Manage Your Bankroll
I can already see your eyes glazing over. Bankroll management is the least sexy part of being a sharp sports bettor, but guess what happens when you spend all your time and attention on basketball, and none of it on your money.
Here’s the first rule of NBA betting: never bet money you can’t afford to lose.
Keep your sports betting money separate from the rest of your money – that goes double if you’re an aspiring professional sports bettor, in which case you should also have a big pile of money saved up for those lean times when your picks just aren’t coming in. Speaking of which…
2. Manage Your Expectations
Here’s Rule No. 2: never put all your eggs in one basket.
Let’s say you start with $1,000 in your bankroll, you see the Los Angeles Lakers playing the Utah Jazz on the NBA odds board – and you bet all $1,000 on the Lakers. Whoops, they just lost. There goes your new career.
Nobody nails 100% of their NBA picks. You never truly know what’s going to happen once the whistle blows; you can only make educated guesses, and if you’re really, really good at it, you might be on the right side of the point spread about 54% of the time.
That’s enough to make a fortune in this business. However, you have to grow that fortune slowly, and risk smaller portions of your bankroll per wager to stave off bankruptcy. Ideally, you’ll use the Kelly criterion to calculate your bet sizes, but if you’re just starting out, consider dividing your bankroll into 100 units, and risking one unit per bet.
3. Look for Multiple Betting Angles
The top NBA sharps are always on the hunt for opportunities to flip that 54-46 coin as often as possible. Most NBA spreads will only give you maybe a 51-49 or 52-48 advantage, which isn’t enough to overcome the –110 vigorish you have to pay online sportsbooks to process your wagers. However, every now and then a game comes along with enough betting angles to make it profitable.
Is a star player on the injured list? Is that star’s fill-in actually an improvement? Has said star just returned to action after an extended layoff? You need to do a better job of answering these questions than your competition – which is the other bettors in the marketplace, not the sportsbooks. These angles exist because of all the casual NBA fans (don’t call them “squares”) who don’t really pay much attention when they make their picks.
Advanced stats like EPA (Expected Points above Average) will help you make better team and player evaluations than more traditional stats like points per game. You could even pay for proprietary stat-based game projections, and see which teams are “supposed” to win by more points than the NBA betting lines would suggest. If you find at least a 2-point gap, you might have a 53-47 coin flip or higher on your hands.
Don’t use these projections blindly, though. As lovely as these stats are, they can’t possibly capture everything that’s happening on the court; use your basketball noodle, find the games with the most angles in your favor, and keep checking in with us at Digital Wager Wire for more sports betting strategies.
