Hit the Road - Betting the NBA

NBA road trips have their own dynamics. A lot of beliefs on the effect of road trips, be they correct or incorrect, are incorporated into people’s handicapping of NBA games. Let’s look at the facts.

We’ll start with the basics. Since the start of the 2004 season, road teams overall win straight-up 40.3% of the time covering the spread in 51.5% of those games. If the road team is favored over the home squad, they have won outright almost two-thirds of the games, 66.0% while beating the linesmaker’s number at a 52.7% clip. Road underdogs don’t do as well, a 29.5% SU mark and 51.2% ATS. The Over/Under records had no significance.

In handicapping a sport so influenced by factors beyond the fundamental capabilities of the teams, I try to find situations that have occurred historically that will give me an advantage on knowing where to put my money. Let’s see if we can find some situations that give us a betting edge.

We’ll take our road team in any away game when it is laying points and add the qualifier of it playing an away game without having any rest, a back-to-back. These games the past three seasons are going Under the total 56.1% of the time. While this is not a spot where I would blindly bet the Under, it does make me examine very closely when I am considering playing the Over on a road favorite.

An even stronger situation for our team favored in a game on the road is when they have at least one day of rest before their game and the opponent doesn’t have any rest. In this case, our roadies have a 59.3% record against the point spread tally.

There is the often-heard phrase that a team wants to win all of their home games and win half of their road games. So when a team is on a four-game road trip and has lost their first two games, following this premise, this team would be one to bet on in game three of their trek. That’s not the case as it is almost an exact 50-50 scenario betting on the side of our visitor. However, it is a good spot for the Under in that third game coming in 58% of the time. If that third game is against a conference foe, the Under improves to 62.2%. Or, a real super spot for the UNDER, 87.5%, since 2001, is when that visiting team is favored in that third game.

You would think that a team who is on a four-game road trip would really bear down and be focused in the fourth game if they lost the first three games. That is the case over the past three years with the team trying to avoid the road goose egg covering 57.6% of that final game before heading home. A slightly better wager in this situation is on the Under with it being profitable 59.4% of the time.

The Under also comes through quite well at a 77.8% frequency in the last game of a four-game trip if our team won the opening match on the road but then dropped the next two. I had to go back ten years to get even more than a ten-game sample, but in this situation if our road team is favored they are 10-2 ATS.

One handicapping method some people use is to play on a team when they are playing the rubber match of a road trip to finish either with a winning trip or a losing one. You get a small advantage in the last game of a five game road trip betting on a team that has split their previous four games, 54.6%. The Under happens 54.5% of the time.

In three game road trips, teams that have split the past two games, do cover the point spread 55.5% of the time. If they are a favorite in the final game of that short trip, the visitor improves slightly to a winning pace of 59.2%. The best place to make money in this deciding road match, a 65% winner, is to play the Under if the visiting team has a winning percentage of over 60% of their games season to date.

I wondered how teams that are going on a road trip do if the first game they are playing is without any rest. Going back five years with teams starting a three-game road trip without a day of rest, it was a negative situation at 37-55 ATS, only covering the number 40.2% of the time. The O/U record is almost exactly the same, 37-57, 39.4%. If the road team lost their last home game before starting out on the road, betting against the visitor remains closely the same, but putting money on the Under improves to a 69.1% winner.

Interestingly enough, adding a game to the trip where teams are starting a four-game swing from home with the first game being played without any rest shows the visiting team slightly covering more games than not. However, the Under is still a good wager paying off 63% of the time. It is quite rare for a team to start a road trip longer than four games to play the first game with zero rest.

The first game of a road trip can have significance. On the initial match of a four-game trip, if a traveling team has a losing record, winning less than 50% of their games, but they won their last game before starting the journey, the Under occurs at a rate of 64.3%. Increase the longevity of the trip by one game and you still have almost exactly the same results, 65.1%. If you decrease the trip by one game to three-games or move it up to six contests long, there is no advantage at all.

Let’s change one parameter of the previous situation with that below .500 team on their first road game out of four consecutive away. Instead of winning their final home game before starting out on the road, if our team lost that contest, they cover the spread at a very healthy 65.6% rate since the 2000 season, 40-21. After a home loss, the team is motivated to avoid starting a road trip on a losing note.

We’ve looked at the first games of longer road trips. Shorter road trips also give us some good spots. In the first game of a quick two-game trip before returning home, teams that have a bad record winning less than 40% of their games do quite well against the spread, 61%, if they won their previous game at home. If you take the opposite of those two qualifiers, a good team winning more than 60% of their games but who lost their last home game, and is also in the first of a two-game road swing, the Under is the most profitable place to put your money, 77.3%.

Examining the initial game of a three-game segment away from home with no additional qualifiers, there was not an advantage large enough worth noting. However, if you make the visitor a favorite over the home team in that first contest, they are winning SU 71.4% of the games, 55-22, while covering 64.5% of the games. The Over is a winner in 57.9% of these contests. If the visiting squad is getting points instead of laying them, the Under comes up at a 56.7% frequency.

While we have only scratched the surface on edges present in road trips, we did find some advantages worth looking for. To summarize some of these:


Away Favorite without rest: 56.1% Under advantage

Away Favorite with rest vs. opponent without rest: 59.3% ATS advantage

Game 3 of 4-game road trip & visitor lost previous 2 games: 58.0% Under advantage

Same as directly above with it being a conference game: 62.2% Under advantage

Rubber match of 3-game road trip and Away Favorite: 59.2% ATS advantage

First game of a road trip and game is being played with zero rest: Play the Under

First game of a 4 to 5 game road trip by a team with a losing record: Play the Under

First game of a 3-game road trip and Away Favorite: 64.5% ATS advantage

First game of a 3-game road trip and Away Favorite: 57.9% Over advantage

Jim Kruger of Vegas Sports Authority makes writing contribution.