Suns seek to avoid bring burned by Lakers

You have to give Ron-Ron credit, of the 10 players on the floor watching Kobe Bryant’s shot attempt to win another game, he was the only that realized it was going to land short of its destination, ran towards the ball, grabbed it and put in the basket to set off wild celebration by the ultra-cool movie and TV stars who realized this wasn’t scripted.

Ron Artest saved the day despite faulty vision, “I thought Kobe got fouled on the shot, so I figured it was going to be short,” Artest said. “And it was a little short.”

The series moves to its first elimination matchup and Phoenix made be down, but they certainly are not out.

As the new Philadelphia 76ers coach and analyst Doug Collins correctly pointed out, it felt like the Lakers were ahead by 15 points when they led by just eight midway thru the fourth quarter.

Coach Phil Jackson made a series of key adjustments before Game 5, running unbalanced overload against the Phoenix zone and running cutters weakside once the ball was passed into the lane area. The Suns tried a 1-3-1 changeup, but players and coaches at this level crave up a cheap gimmick like that in no time.

Lamar Odom returned to being aggressive and he and Derek Fisher drove thru the Phoenix zone like “CHIPS” with traffic stopped. All this led to a procession of layups and easy buckets.
Coach Alvin Gentry’s zone isn’t designed to disable the Los Angeles, rather to hopefully force up bad shot attempts along with normal misses. The Lakers will head to the sun drenched desert 13-4 ATS after two straight games committing 11 or less turnovers this season.

The final minutes of Game 5 spoke loudly about both teams. Phoenix was unwilling to quit, especially Steve Nash. The Lakers had taken away aspects of the Canadien’s ability to use the screen and roll effectively, by jumping big men at him and setting up “wall” with Derek Fisher going underneath. Upon his return in the final minutes, Nash took matters into his own hands by taking and making shots, which caused vacillation by the Lakers bigs and gave him just enough room to operate.

Overall Los Angeles may be taller, but lack the lateral quickness to rotate back if Nash goes into the Lakers forest of tall timber. L.A. also showed a common flaw of this team, similar to the one that cost them to lose to Boston in the finals two years ago, a killer instinct. Artest’s ridiculous three-point attempt and other less the precise offensive sets enabled the more determined team late in the contest to almost steal one.

The Suns are 11-3 ATS at home off a road loss and need a few elements to occur to force a Memorial Day matchup.

Amare Stoudemire needs another bust-out effort like Game 3. A total of 40+ points isn’t required, however that same type of aggressiveness and rebounding desire is. Phoenix is going to shoot three-pointers regardless, thus the number made isn’t as important as the percentage, which has to be above 30 percent.

Channing Frye and Jared Dudley have found a comfortable rhythm in the West Finals; however Leandro Barbosa and Goran Dragic cannot be outscored by Shannon Brown and Sasha Vujacic like they were in the last contest (7-5).

The Suns are 1.5-point pick and are 9-1 ATS at U.S. Airways Arena after a loss by six points or less. The last game saw the first total go below the number in the series and the home team fail to cover. The oddsmakers have adjusted the total downward to 216, nevertheless Los Angeles is 7-0 OVER in the purple uniforms after allowing 100 points or more in exactly two straight tilts and Phoenix is 15-5 OVER at Planet Orange versus good shooting teams making 46 or more of their shots since the midpoint of the season the previous two years.

Game Six has been moved up to 8:30 Eastern on TNT as the Lakers try to close out the series. They are away 17-6 ATS away from home having lost two of their last three games.

Big Boys try to flex NBA muscles

Cleveland and the Los Angeles Lakers earned the top seeds in their respective conferences this season. One team has played deserving of that honor, the other, not so much. Both will hit the hardwood with the same goal in mind, thrusting their will on opponent to either finish them off or to gain the upper hand.

Lake Show in trouble of being cancelled

The Lakers players were telling anyone that would listen their late season doldrums were nothing to be concerned with, once the playoffs began it would be “go” time and they would take care of business.

Oddsmakers weren’t fooled and neither was the public. Los Angeles has a team of mostly self-satisfied players this year, not willing to do what it takes to be great and their visible weakness cannot be masked without all-out effort.

On the season the Lakers shot 45.6 percent from the field, they have not touched that figure once in the playoffs. Oklahoma City is receiving a great of credit for how they are playing defense against the triangle offense, but the fact is the Lakers players are being outworked in trying to run their offense and if say Lamar Odom doesn’t get open on the first option for him to receive the ball, he essentially takes himself out of the play or settles for three-point which is not his specialty.

Odom isn’t the only player with this general indifference, there are many others. It is of little surprise L.A. is 13-25 ATS second half of the season watching this kind of effort.

Kobe Bryant is playing a curious role in this series. Undoubtedly he is more injured that what most know. Other than Game 2 when he scored 39 points with his father in the stands, he at times is not even looking to being offensively assertive and is either trying to get the ball to teammates for them to become more aggressive or he is trying to prove a point by saying “you are either with me or against me” and is disgusted with their lack of performance and is being indignant.

When this has happened in the past Kobe always has an answer, just like this time.

“(Oklahoma City) is a young team that plays hard, that’s playing with house money, so they go in there and let it all hang out,” Bryant said. “It’s a series, it’s a challenge. It’s how playoff basketball should be.” We’ll see he and the Lakers really feel about their situation and are 13-3 ATS after a loss by 15 points or more.

Oddsmakers have the Lakers as six-point home favorites with total of 193.5. Los Angeles has won 17 straight games when the series is tied at 2-2 and are 17-5 ATS when tied in a playoff series at any juncture. The Thunder will try to use its growing confidence to pull the upset and have spotted the flaws in Los Angeles and will look to attack once again and are 19-9 ATS as a road underdog this season, losing by less than a point a game (0.9).

This is the late 10:30E conflict on TNT and the Lakers are 11-0 UNDER as a home favorite of 3.5 to 6 points over the last two seasons.

The end is near

The confidence which the Cleveland Cavaliers play with is flabbergasting. For three quarters of Game 3, Chicago took the action to Cleveland, holding a double digit lead most of the time. The Bulls were the aggressor and it appeared Cavs players were satisfied with their less than full effort. In the four quarter the Cavs came storming back with LeBron James taking over the offense and his teammates knocking down three-pointers, finally succumbing by just two points 108-106, as Chicago made their free throws late.

The most stunning aspect of the close of that contest was the reaction of James and his teammates, not long faces from losing a game they should have won by playing all 48 minutes, but they were smiling, with a almost maniacal grin of “Oh man, we almost got’em, we’ll take care of this later”.

There were no smiles before Game 4 as King James led a tyrant army of mercenaries into the United Center and blew away their Windy City counterparts by 22. Cleveland returns home to end the series and is 18-6 ATS after a blowout win by 20 points or more.

Cleveland is starting to reap the rewards for trading for Antawn Jamison, who scored 24 points in Game 2. Jamison is highly respected around the league and didn’t come to Cleveland to improve his legacy, but rather to get a championship ring. At 33, Jamison is sensing his basketball mortality.

“This is an opportunity of a lifetime,” he said. “I don’t have another five or 10 years left in this body. The sense of urgency is there, not only with myself but with the rest of these guys. That’s why I think it’s a great fit because we all have the same mentality. We are all trying to accomplish the same thing—right now. We’re not trying to wait until next year or the year after that.” The Cavs have covered 42 of their previous 66 playoff games.

Chicago is also sensing their mortality, about this season. Star guard Derrick Rose missed practice Monday to undergo an MRI on his right ankle and forward Luol Deng sat out with a sore knee and calf. The Bulls are once again a dozen points underdog and hope to hit enough shots to improve on 19-10 ATS record revenging a same season loss.

The Cavaliers will look to polish this series off and most likely face Boston and are 17-7 UNDER after winning by 20 or more points, with average margin of victory 13.9 points for this 8:00E TNT broadcast.

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.