Be cautious when betting on NBA streaks

I can’t cook, I’m terrible. If I was the head cook at Leavenworth Federal Prison, inmates on death row would turn down their last meal. Every time I go near the stove, our dog howls. Since I work out of my house (never late for work!), I do a fair amount of cooking dinner for my wife and I.

Before I went off to college (40 miles from home), my mom (probably the worst cook there is) tried to teach me everything I needed to know to survive on my own. Unfortunately, along with sewing buttons on a shirt, I never got the grasp of how to prepare a meal very well. However, last week was different.

On Monday I looked up a recipe for cooking salmon. I had never heard of putting mayonnaise on a fish before, but Rachael Ray swears by it, so who am I to argue. I mean, she has a TV show, I don’t. With some seasonings, it was surprisingly good.

Tuesday, I decided to finally pull the crock pot out of storage that my Aunt June (also, a terrible cook) had gotten us as a wedding gift. I cooked a rump roast that was so tender and tasty my wife thought I should open a restaurant. Three consecutive great meals, I’m on a roll!

That streak of fine food ended abruptly the next night cooking steaks on the grill. First, I accidentally seasoned them with taco spice instead of pepper. I went inside, got distracted by an intriguing episode of “Cops”, and forgot about the food. The asparagus and mushrooms had literally turned to ashes and the filet mignons were now part of the grill itself. I was on a streak, everything was looking great. But then I failed miserably, the streak was over.

There probably isn’t a sports handicapper out there that doesn’t look at streaks. Everybody loves to bet the team on the winning streak or against the team on the losing streak. And why not? That seems logical.

I had a friend call me Sunday saying he didn’t understand why the Lakers were only favored by 3.5 points at Atlanta. He stated the Lakers had won their last 5 games covering their last 4 while Atlanta had lost 2 games in a row. He wanted to back the truck up and put it all on LA. I tried talking him out of the wager saying that just because a team is on a streak cannot be the only criteria to use to handicap an NBA game.

I quickly did a database query and found that teams on a three-game or longer winning streak when playing a team on a two-game losing streak only cover the spread 42.9% of the time. I also looked at a team winning more than 60% of the time was on a 5 game winning streak and were away faves, just like LA. They only beat the number 14 out of 36 times, 38.9%. I know my friend didn’t like to hear what I was saying, but hopefully he listened as underdog Atlanta beat the Lakers outright by ten points.

To further understand how teams do when on a streak, I looked at teams who had lost three straight games. To get any worthwhile results, you have to know whether the team is at home or on the road. I did find a spot where betting against the losing team is correct, assuming they are playing at home. Betting against the 3 straight game losers at home is winning at a 57.0% rate, 151-114. Even more profitable is to take the Over in this situation, a 153-112 mark, 57.7%. Just the opposite results occur if our 3-game losers are on the road, they cover at a 54.0% clip.

I expanded the streak to include teams losing straight-up 3 to 5 consecutive games. Again, it depended upon whether the team was home or on the road. Betting against the home team streaking downward provided 57.6% winners with 54.9% of those games going Over the total.

Again, the other end of the spectrum prevailed if our bad streaking team was on the road, 56.2%, 318-248.To determine whether good teams perform differently than bad teams in streaks, I added a team’s winning percentage range to my query. Unless otherwise stated, all records start with the 2005 season and do not include playoffs.

Starting with the smallest of streaks, one game, I looked at how bad teams, ones with a below 40% season record, perform. Remember, a streak starts when you have the opposite result of the previous game. A one-game winning streak means the team lost their game before that. Bad teams that just started a winning streak cover their next game only 48.2% of the time. Bad teams beginning a losing streak of one do better and cover their next game 53.9% of the time.

Good teams, higher than a 60% record, have an unusual pattern after a one-game streak. There is nothing of note on the ATS side, but there is an interesting O/U trend. If our good team has a one-game losing streak and their game is at home, the Under has a 151-118 mark, 56.1%. Even better is if the streak is a winning one—gamer and the game is away: the Under cashes 57.8% of the time.

A good situation to go against the streak is when you have a good team, over 60% winning percentage, which has a losing streak of 2, 3, or 4 games and is an away favorite. Their ATS mark in their next game is 32-12, 72.7%. Since the 2005 season began, a four game losing streak is as long as there has been with a team still favored on the road. If our good team had been a road dog in that exact same scenario, their ATS record has been 22-25.

To emphasize the dichotomy of wagering results home and away, let’s look at how a bad team, below 40%, does on a 5-game losing streak. If their game is on the road, betting on our losers to cover cashes your tickets at a 67.1% frequency, 47-23. Not too far behind is also betting the Over, 43-28, 60.6%. However, if our team is at home, just the opposite happens, they only cover 36.8% of the games.

I believe it is going to be worthy looking for a team that’s dropped 5 straight. Some cappers put more validity in an ATS streak: beating the point spread in consecutive games. They aren’t worried if a team is not winning straight-up, just beating the number. There is virtually no advantage on blindly betting against a team on a streak not covering the number or betting on one that is. I stopped at 5 game streaks, both winning and losing, with the only streak with at least a 5% edge being when teams have covered 5 straight games, 65-53 ATS, 55.1%.

Sometimes you should do the opposite of what seems like the correct wager. Instead of betting against bad teams, less than 40% W/L record, that are on an ATS losing streak of 1 to 5 games and are away, bet on them and you cash that ticket 57.4% of the time, 364-270. It’s kind of like when George Costanza on Seinfeld started doing the opposite of what he thought was right and everything worked out great.

Taking it a step deeper, how about teams that have won and covered in equal streaks: 3 straight wins and 3 straight covers for example. I did the losing side of these streaks also. The results? Goose egg, zilch, nada, nothing! To illustrate, a team that has a streak of 4 in SU and ATS wins has a 50-55 ATS record in their next game. A streak of 3 losses and non-covers has a 122-115 ATS mark in their following contest.

Using teams with correlating and equal streaks gives you no advantage if that is your only handicapping tool. Sure, it’s easy to believe that a team that has won and covered three straight is a good bet. The 3-year results of 131-131 says no.

A statement I hear frequently is to ride out the hot streaks and bet against the cold streaks. Only using a SU or ATS streak as your sole reason for betting on an NBA game is an extremely lazy method to handicap a game and will cost you lots of money.

Jim Kruger of Vegas Sports Authority created this article.

Bomb Pops and Three Point Bombs

Growing up during the summer, one of the biggest thrills was the arrival of the ice cream man in the neighborhood. The most popular frozen treat was the bomb pop, a popsicle shaped like something ready to drop from a B-17 bomber. They were big and came in a number of flavors including sky blue, which nobody could ever figure out what sky blue tasted like, but eating something with an aqua tint was pretty cool when you were eight years old.

Years later in high school, a friend, Hunter Leathers, asked if I wanted a summer job at Merritt Foods in Kansas City, KS. The owner, James Merritt, had invented and trademarked the bomb pop. I would be working at the only plant in the world that manufactured bomb pops! The job also came with the benefit of all you could eat for free!

The bomb pop syrup went into molds in a large wheel that slowly rotated. The bomb pops froze as the wheel turned. Towards the end of the rotation, an arm would come down injecting a stick into each bomb pop. For some reason, the last stick at the end of a row always went into the bomb pop crooked. My job was to sit there for eight hours a day straightening that last stick. I was a specialist at the factory, a “stick straightener”.

The NBA also has specialists. Some specialists are defensive stoppers, enforcers, or good ball handlers who can shoot free throws well late in the game. The specialist with the most influence on a game is the three-point specialist.

The three-pointer has seen a quantum leap in popularity these past ten years. To begin with, teams are putting up 36.5% more three-point attempts since the beginning of the 1998 season.

In the 1998-99 season, the league average was 13.16 three-point attempts per team in a game.
This season that average is 17.96 downtown shots going up by a team per game. Before you start thinking that part of the reason for the increase is the pace of the game has increased tremendously over the past ten seasons, be mindful that the number of overall field goal attempts in a game has gone from 78.2 to 79.9, an increase of 2.2%. Also, with the increase in attempts, the shooting percentage has improved significantly from 33.9% ten seasons ago to 36.6% this year. Has the players’ shooting improved or has the defense gotten worse over the past ten years? That’s a question for another day.

The gap between the worse three-point shooting team to the best in the league has narrowed measurably from 10.9% ten-seasons ago to just 7.3%. Interestingly enough, in the 1998-99
season the Philadelphia 76ers were the team clanging the most 3’s off of the rim, a paltry 26.4% average. Philly resides at the bottom this year at 32.6%.

Many of the better teams in the league this year are hitting a high accuracy in their bombs from downtown, 39% or better. These include the league leader, Orlando at 39.9%, and San Antonio, New Orleans, and Boston. Phoenix, Cleveland, and Portland are the next three from the top. Except for Phoenix at 57.1%, all of these teams are winning above 60% of their games.

In looking at the worst five teams in shooting the three, only one, Philadelphia, has a winning percentage above .350. The other four, Washington, LA Clippers, Memphis, and Minnesota all shoot 34% or worse on their three-pointers.

Those facts obviously raise the question of the influence on a team’s success in defending behind the arc. Are the bottom teams in the NBA also on the bottom in defensive ability against the three-pointer and visa versa? While the bottom five does include Golden State, Sacramento, and Washington again, a near .500 team, New Jersey, is down there along with a 60%+ squad, Portland. Four of the top five in defending the arc were all 60%+ winners, Orlando, Houston, Boston, and Cleveland, but it is interesting to see the number one defensive squad is the Chicago Bulls, a team several games below .500.

With the weight of importance of the three-pointer increasing over the past decade, how can we profit from this?

Since the beginning of the 2005 season, the team who made more three-pointers won straight-up 63.4% of the time while covering the point spread at a 61.8% rate. That makes sense.

However, if a team made more 3’s than their competitor in a game but the opponent shot a higher percentage on their three-pointers, the team who made more baskets but shot worse only won 41.9% of the games straight-up and covered just 38.1% of the time. Those games went over the lined total 55.3% of the time. The percentage of shots made has a larger influence than the number of 3’s a team drained. If the optimum happens and you make more 3’s and shoot a better percentage than your foe in a game, your winning percentage improves to 69.5% and your ATS mark is a sweet 68.5%.

It seems like common sense to anticipate a game between two poor shooting three-point squads, 33.0% or worse for their season-to-date average, to have a tendency to go Under the lined total. In reality, the exact opposite occurs. Such a game between two poor three-point shooting squads has gone Over the total 57.1% of the time since the start of the 2005 campaign. That mark can be improved to 61.5% going Over, 75-47, if the home team went Over the total in their previous game. One last final improvement to a 65.8% winning rate for playing the Over is if both teams have at least a day of rest from their last game played.And, if you think a game between two good shooting long-range clubs, 36.5% or better for the season, will be a good bet to go Over the lined total, you should think twice. There might be other reasons to bet the Over, but just because both teams can drain 3’s at a good rate isn’t enough as the Under actually happens in 53% of those matches.

A team having good success in their previous game from long-range has some good wagering advantages in their next contest. If a team made more than ten 3’s hitting over 50% of their attempts winning the game by more than ten points, they are 91-69 Over in their next game, 56.9%. We can bump that up to 63.8% if our team happens to be a home favorite in that next game. Instead of being a home fave, if our team is an away dog the Over still does well, 64.4%, and they also cover the point spread 60% of the time.

A similar situation with our team making more than 10 three-pointers at a rate over 50% in their previous game but lost that game, has done poorly in their next game, only winning 39.1% of the time and covering the spread just 41.7% of the time. Having both teams hitting 50%+ from deep with each squad sinking six or more 3’s has produced a poor next-game ATS rate of 36.2% for the loser of the previous game if he is a home favorite.

The Under is also a good play winning 60.4% of the time in those contests.Another example to remember is that a team who shoots over 50% on 3’s two games in a row only covers the point spread 41.3% of the time in their next game.Logic says that a team who does well from downtown in their previous game will have expectations of continued success hoisting shots deep from the perimeter. False expectations of being able to maintain that high of success level leads to failure more times than not. The influence of the three-point shot has increased over the years. The most successful teams are the ones who can both shoot it well and defend against it.

Jim Kruger fires from deep for Vegas Sports Authority.