HOW NBA HANDICAPPING HAS CHANGED IN THE 66-GAME SCHEDULE

Normally the lines for the next day’s NBA games start trickling out by around 3 p.m. ET. But for Thursday’s three games - Nets-Pacers, Celtics-Bulls and Clippers-Trail Blazers - there wasn’t a single spread posted within 24 hours of tipoff.

Welcome to the jam-packed, 66-game NBA schedule.

Here’s how the NBA handicapping landscape has changed during the 2011-12 lockout-shortened season:

Fear of the unknown

Thursday’s trio of games was a perfect storm. Five of the six teams played the night before, making handicapping somewhat dangerous because of a potential big injury suffered Wednesday or a multiple-overtime result that would leave a team drained the next night. It's always been a danger when taking the early odds for the second half of back-to-back games, but it's even more prominent in the NBA this season.

Injury bug infestation

And speaking of injuries, there were some vital ones that would have affected the spread for Thursday’s game.

Indiana’s Danny Granger was a game-time call on Wednesday – he didn’t play vs. Cleveland – and obviously oddsmakers weren’t about to put a number on the Nets-Pacers game without knowing the status of Indiana’s top scorer.

Ditto for the Clippers-Trail Blazers spread because Portland’s LaMarcus Aldridge, the Blazers’ top scorer, sat out with an injury Wednesday. And while the Bulls didn’t play Wednesday, the status of Derrick Rose remained up in the air for the Celtics game after Rose had missed the previous three games with back spasms.

Depth is the difference

Sometimes those injuries can torpedo a team, like the Nuggets, who have struggled since leading scorer Danilo Gallinari went down. Sometimes injuries, however, can be the impetus for a surge. The Knicks’ Jeremy Lin wouldn’t be a global sensation and leading New York to seven wins in a row if the injured Carmelo Anthony was out there stealing shots.

Making sure a team has a solid second - and even third - option behind an injured starter is even more important as the season wears on and more ailments pile up.

Forest through the trees

Because there are so many games squeezed into such a tight schedule there is a lot more work to do each day for cappers to find value.

With less time in between games, inside info from local papers and beat writers is harder to come by, especially if you’re trying to take advantage of the early lines. In past seasons, you could get two days of coverage on a team in between games. But with the frantic pace of the schedule, there is less time to learn about your bets.

Three’s a crowd

Basketball bettors are getting the chance to handicap teams playing back-to-back-to-back sets this season, a situation they haven’t seen since the last lockout-shortened season.

You can find nice value in overnight lines because often there is plenty of movement from when odds are released to where they sit in the morning.

The most unusual three-games-in-three-nights result this year was from Feb. 12-14, when Miami won and covered easily at Atlanta, at Milwaukee and at Indiana. That’s two potential playoff teams Miami beat as well as a Bucks club that had the Heat’s number twice previously this season.

The Heat became the first NBA team in 33 years to win three road games in three nights.

Running on empty

Perhaps the top trend this season is that tired legs usually equal lousy shooting, which then leads to low-scoring games and plenty of unders - although books have certainly adjusted totals accordingly.

Shooting percentages are down more than a percentage point and around two percentage points on 3-pointers from last season. Last year, 11 teams averaged at least 100 points, led by the Denver Nuggets (107.5). This season, just three teams average 100 or more points, led by Miami’s 103.5 points per game. The Heat are just 14-14-2 over/under entering the weekend.

No team averaged less than 90 points a game a season ago but four are below that mark this year, with wretched Charlotte at the bottom at 86.5 points a night.

Paying attention to shooting slumps and how the schedule will impact a team's ability to fix them is becoming more important for NBA cappers.

How are the lines set?

While the odds makers do to try approximate the median margin of victory between two teams, they also try to reduce their exposure to risk by setting lines such that the public money will fall evenly on both sides of a game, so that they can offset the bets against each other and earn a profit on the juice (cut of winnings taken by the house, explained below) without exposing themselves to large potential losses. Thus, odds makers are often in the business of gauging public perception rather than team performance, and therefore the betting public actually sets the line. If Georgia is 4 points better than Georgia Tech according to my advanced metrics and analysis, but the aggregate public perception is that Georgia is 7 points better than Georgia Tech, then the posted point spread is likely to be closer to 6.5 or 7 points (public perception) than it will be to 4 points (the realistic difference between the teams). This makes my job as a professional handicapper much less daunting; not only can I exploit lines where the odds makers leave an edge, but I can also exploit the uniformed opinions of the general betting public.

Isn't gambling risky?

I don't believe that the term 'gambling' applies to what I do. I sell information to subscribers, with which they can take positive expectation positions in uncertain markets. With correct financial optimization and bankroll management, long term risks are nominal compared to the risks of investing in other, more conventional markets. Just as a single stock may go up or down in a day, any one team may win or lose a given game. But as long as the investor maintains a long-term perspective, understands variance, and doesn't over-extend themselves or bet more than they can easily handle, risk can be highly mitigated, and they can earn a very attractive risk adjusted return.

Juice, and the power of 56%

Even though most sports bettors are losers in their own right (as a whole, bettors actually win an average of only 48% of their bets - less than they would expect to win if they just flipped a coin for every game), their losses are compounded by the fact that the house takes a cut of winnings, also known as the 'juice' or 'vig.' Most sports books charge a 10% commission on wins, which means that a bettor must actually win 52.4% of his games just to break even. (Wagering $100 per game, a bettor loses $100 with a loss and wins $90.91 with a win, so he must go 11-10 (11/21 = 52.38%) to break even). Recently, some online books have started to offer lower juice, betting exchanges and deposit bonuses, which reduce the house edge.

In order to beat the juice and win in sports betting, a bettor must employ a disciplined approach in their analysis of each game using methods that have proven to be successful in the long run. I discuss my math models and analytical metrics in my Handicapping Methods essay, but you must realize that only the best and most knowledgeable handicappers can win 55% of their games. In their 2007 two page article about my handicapping success, the Wall Street Journal wrote, "...fewer than 100 people can sustain (win rates of 55%) over time. Most of them belong to professional betting syndicates that hire teams of statisticians, wager millions every week and keep their operations secret." Even fewer bettors can hit 56-57% over a 20 year period as I have.

Touts often claim to be able to hit 60% or higher, but as I explain in my essay on Bayesian Probability, anyone who tells you that their long term expected winning percentage is higher than 60% is deluding themselves. For a bettor to claim a greater than 60% long term expected win percentage, that would be mean that Vegas would have to consistently release lines with egregious errors, and that simply just does not happen often enough for claims of greater than 60% long term expected win percentages to be caused anything other than blind, short-term luck.

I often hear amateur gamblers erroneously claim that winning 56% of games isn't even enough to beat juice. As demonstrated above, a bettor only needs to win 52.4% to break even, and a 56% bettor will be profitable in the long run if they pursue an optimal money management strategy.

Of course, as in any game of chance, there is variability in the actual results and just because you have won 56% in the past and expect to win 56% in the future doesn't mean that you're going to win 56% this upcoming season. There is variance in sports betting, as there is in most investments, and I calculate the standard deviation to figure out how much of my bankroll I can safely wager on each game during the season to accommodate potential negative swings while having very little chance of exhausting my bankroll. I have extensively quantified the variance that exists in sports betting, and use mathematical formulas to dictate the exact optimal amount to invest so as to maximize the ratio of profits to variance.

A football season with 56% winners (my long term percentage) on 400 units or 'stars' would on average yield +30.04 stars ( (400*.56) - (400*.44)*1.1 ). Even using a very conservative 1.5% per star (in the past, I have recommended 2%), that's an expected return of 45.06%.

A basketball season with 54% winners (my long term percentage) on 1,050 units or 'stars' would on average yield +35.7 stars ( (1050*.54) - (1050*.46)*1.1 ). Using a conservative 1.1% per star (in the past, I have recommended 1.5%), that's an expected return of 39.27%. So, despite a lower overall winning percentage, I expect a season's worth of basketball wagers to be almost as profitable as a season of football in the future. Over the last ten years, my basketball wagers have actually been more profitable than football, but I have done a lot of analysis this summer and I expect my football wagers to be even better next year than they have been in the past.