The All-Star Break gave players a chance to rest up, party, relax, or do whatever they so desire in the few days off they have. Coaches and general managers have the time to look more closely at their teams to come up with a strategy for the rest of the season. That strategy could even be more so for seasons to come through the addition or subtraction of players through trades or acquisitions.Will there be a team that makes a second half push to make the playoffs similar to the way Philadelphia did last season rallying from an 18-30 SU record with their 22-12 run to grab a playoff berth? The 76ers cashed tickets during that amazing turnaround at a 61.8% clip. Even more amazing was Houston’s second-half thrust going 33-8 SU, 27-12 ATS, in their final 41 games. They rallied from a 22-19 SU, 20-21 ATS mark at the half-way point.
Looking more at the norm, once an NBA season gets past the halfway point, there isn’t much left to the element of surprise. Squads that are outperforming their preseason expectations, such as the Atlanta Hawks, are now common knowledge. There is no sneaking up on the competition, no catching the other squad with their guard down.
Teams that haven’t lived up to what their outlook was before the season tipped off, like the Phoenix Suns, aren’t going to be feared by their competitors. There probably won’t be as many “look aheads” for teams who will be playing Phoenix in their next game after they play their current one.
While teams and players have some preconceived notions on what to expect from the competition based on what has transpired so far this year, so do the public and the oddsmakers. So does this mean there might be some advantages and betting edges that we can find which will help us win more wagers than we lose? Let’s see if we can find some.
I wanted to compare how teams do in the second half of the season using a few qualifiers to see if the first half is much different than the second half. The All-Star break comes slightly past the true 41-game halfway median with teams playing at least 50 games already. As my measuring stick, I called the first half of the season up to game #49 and the second half involved games 50 to 82. I went back in the exercise to the beginning of the 2003 season. Playoff games were not included in the data sample and I only looked at against the spread and Over/Under records, not straight-up marks.
I first compared a very basic situation: home favorites with no additional qualifiers. There was very little difference in the ATS numbers with home faves covering 50.9% of the time in the second half but not quite as good in the first half, 49.4%. The comparative Over/Under records were very close to the same.
I then made my home favorite a double-digit fave and we did get a little more differential with the home team in the second half improving to 51.7% versus 47.0% in the first half. Again, the O/U records were very close.
I then looked at home underdogs and got an opposite result as before. Instead of the home team doing better after game 50+ as compared to earlier in the campaign, the home team, the dog, now did worse, 45.0%, 302-369, compared to a 581-599 record, 49.2%.
Where I got some very distinct numbers was when I made the home dogs getting ten or more points. Again, an exact opposite depending upon which half of the season the game was played in. The first half saw home double-digit dogs cover the spread 61.3% of the time, with the second half HD’s suffering a huge drop to only covering the number 26.7% of the time. That is a very large dichotomy.
So far we have data supporting that favorites do a better job in covering the point spread in the second half of the season versus the first half with the bigger favorites doing even much better.
I next wanted to test the belief that as the season wears on, playing a back-to-back game has a bigger effect on teams than it does earlier in the season when players are fresher. When you factor in travel to an 82-game season, the number of games played has to have a cumulative effect on the players.
Home favorites with zero rest playing in the first 49 games covered the point spread 48.0% of the time of the season. This improved slightly to 50.0% from game 50 onward. Where there was a more significant second half of the season improvement was when a home fave’s opponent is playing without any rest. There our home fave jumped from a 49.1% ATS mark to a 54.2% success ratio.
Looking at the home underdogs having no rest in a game, there is a difference from the first part of the season covering the spread 47.0% of the time to 41.4% for the second half. Even a bigger swing is noted if you make this game between two conference foes. The first half ATS tally climbs to 52.2% ATS for the home dog while the second half drops to beating the number only 35.1% of the time.
Not having any rest clearly affects the underdog team much more in the second half of the season than the team that is favored. We can make the assumption that the underdog team is usually the lower quality team, especially if they are getting points at home. But let’s ignore who is favored or getting points in a game and just look at the teams’ winning percentages. Do higher quality teams win more games against the number against poor quality teams in the second half than they did in the first half?
The answer to that question is yes as teams with a 60% winning percentage playing a team who is winning less than 40% of their game covers the spread only 45.6% during the first 49 games. However, the good team’s ATS record improves to 52.2% from game 50 on. In this scenario of good versus bad team, there is quite a swing in the totals with the first-half games going Over the lined total at a 52.7% frequency. This is the opposite in the second half of the season with the Under happening 56.3% of the time.
Good teams improve in their ATS rate in the final part of the season when they are going against bad teams along with a dichotomy in Over/Unders.
Last year I wrote an article about a high number of teams at both ends of the ATS spectrum around the mid-point of the season. There were seven teams covering the point spread at a rate above 60%. In doing research I learned that beginning with the 2002 campaign, there have been a TOTAL of four instances when a team has finished the season with a 60% or better ATS winning percentage. And, what was even more amazing, two of those four times a team barely made it to that level with an exact 60% ATS winning percentage.
I stated it might be a good time to consider fading or avoiding betting on those seven teams as I did not believe that number of teams would maintain such a high rate of covering the point spread. Only three teams finished at 60%+ last season, which is still a high number in relationship to the past.
Last season at the time of my article there were four teams winning at a 40% or worst rate against the spread. And just like the number of high percentage winning teams, that is quite unusual. It had only happened a total of four times the prior five seasons that a team failed to cover more than 40% of their games! All four of those teams last season climbed above a 40% ATS rate, even though the Clippers came close at only 40.4%.
This season we only have two teams at or above a 60% mark covering the number, Orlando and Cleveland. However, we do have four teams below the Mendoza line of 40% ATS: Phoenix, Washington, Detroit, and Memphis, with a fifth team very close at 40.4%, Toronto. If history holds true, most of those teams should climb above the 40% ATS winning rate.
Jim Kruger is the man at Vegas Sports Authority.
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