Effects of Blowing Leads in the NBA

When I was a freshman at the University of Kansas, one day while gazing out my dorm window trying to decide whether I was going to my chemistry lab, I saw a group of guys running around like they were playing tackle football without any pads on in a football field behind the dorm.

When it dawned on me they were playing rugby, I went down to investigate. During a break, I spoke with the head guy and ended up signing up to play on the University of Kansas Rugby Club. We weren’t officially sponsored by the school but we did get enough money to buy a year’s supply of balls. We mainly played other schools or clubs in the Midwest and had to drive ourselves to the games. The parties after the games made up for the not-so-exciting drives to Nebraska or Iowa looking at fields of corn in full bloom.

We had a match in Des Moines against Drake. Drake wasn’t a very good squad and we had a sizable lead at halftime, around 20 points or so. A win would keep us tied with the Kansas City Blues Club for first place in the league. Don’t know what happened, maybe the Drake coach gave his team the “ol’ Knute Rockne” at halftime, but we came out flat in the second half and ended up losing the match. We were stunned.

Our next match the following week was against the KC Blues, the #1 team. Before the match started, we were still talking about how we had blown it at Drake and we couldn’t let that happen again. We didn’t need to worry about that as we were the club down by 20+ at break. We didn’t rally, we lost.

Was our team typical of other squads who have blown a big lead in the previous contest? Is a team so concerned about their previous poor performance they fail to focus on the match at hand? Or perhaps in our case, we were just worried on whether we had enough Newcastle for the party after the match? How do NBA players handle blowing a lead and losing the game?
I started looking at games since the beginning of the 2005 season where a team was ahead by 15 points or more at halftime and lost the game. There wasn’t a large enough sample size so I cut it back to a 10 point lead at halftime. We had some results worth noting.

If the game was on the road after the bad loss, the team who blew the lead saw their next game go Under the total 60% of the time, 60-40. If our team is a dog in that road game, they are 49-32 ATS, 60.5%, after the blown lead beat. And if our road dog doesn’t have any rest, they are going Under the total 78.6% of the time.

I like to add different variables to try to find some real sweet spots for wagering. One that I like to use is how good teams perform in certain situations as compared to bad teams. Would a team with a winning percentage over 60% bounce back stronger in their next game after blowing a 10+ halftime lead than a low-quality squad, one with less than a 40% winning percentage?

Logic would say the better team, the playoff contender, has the greater potential to give a good showing in this situation as compared to a team with probably not too much hope on making it to the post-season. Well, that logic is incorrect as our good team only covers the point spread 51.4% of the time after blowing that halftime margin as compared to our bad team who beats the number at a 67.2% clip, 41-20. Sometimes handicapping requires you to be illogical in order to cash some tickets. A profitable trend the good team did have was a 75% Over frequency if the follow-up game was being played at home.

How about just the opposite situation where a team is down by double-digits at half and rallies to win the game? Are there any type of situations that give us a betting edge?

I had to dig a little deeper, but I did find a trend that is a nice winner to play against the comeback team in their next game. If that team’s opponent was a divisional squad in the first game, then it is a 70% trend to play against the comeback winner in their next game. Obviously, rallying to beat a divisional foe gives a team a “hangover” that takes awhile to recover from.

Giving my hand at trying to use logic in handicapping, I assumed a bad team, below 40%, who rallied from a double-digit deficit at halftime to win the game would have more of a letdown in their next game compared to a 60%+ winning team. This time my logic was correct. Our bad team, one with a 40% or lower winning percentage, who rallied in their previous game covered the point spread only 40.5% of the time in that next game. They also failed to play very good defense and maybe even had a little more run and gun attitude as their follow-up games went Over the total 64.7% of the time.

Trying to stay on a roll using logic, I hypothesized (that’s a word I used a lot in chem lab at KU) that teams who came from behind would post poorer results against non-conference teams in their next game versus playing conference teams. After all, conference games, in theory, mean more to a team than non-con ones do.

Unfortunately, my hypothesis was wrong. There was no noticeable difference between playing conference or non-conference teams against the spread after a team put their rally caps on. However, there was a significant difference in the results in playing the Over/Under. Nothing worthwhile with conference games but in non-con action, if that follow-up game was on the road for our winning team, the Under put money in your pocket 68.7% of the time while home non-conference games went Over the lined total at a 61.1% pace.

I recently ran across a Super Situation on the StatFox FoxSheets that involved a team with a 20-point or more lead at halftime in their previous game playing against a team that had scored 60 or more points in the first half of their prior contest. This super-winning angle was 25-8, 75.8%, Under the total the past three years.

Instead of limiting our lead to one at halftime, let’s look at how teams do in their next game after coming back from a huge deficit in a game. It has happened sixty times over the past three seasons when a team has won a game after falling behind by 20 points or more. In their next game, they have an ATS mark of 37-23, 61.7%. If they also happen to be a home favorite, that mark moves up to 13-5, 72.2%.

I realize some of these situations are difficult to always be on top of unless you follow the NBA rather closely. So, let’s look at one that is pretty easy to follow. We start with teams that give up 103 or more points per game on average this season. The play is on the Over if one of these teams was down by 15 points or more at halftime in their previous game and now they are favored in their next game. It doesn’t matter where the game is being played or whether our team won or lost the previous game. The record for this play is a hot 80%, 36-9, over the previous three seasons.

It’s time to start paying attention to margins at halftimes.


Jim Kruger's rugby days drove him to sports betting.