Saturday Night NBA

By Divol

Cleveland Cavaliers v Boston Celtics



2nd May 01:00 GMT

Both teams know how to play defence, but they had pretty high scores in the last three times the teams met. Still, it only makes me lower my units on the Under bet, that I still believe has got value. Cleveland and Boston had pretty offensive series in the first round and both had three Over and only two Under results. Still, for both teams both their Under came in the first and the last game of the series. I can add that the only Under the two teams had this season playing each other, was in the season opener. That, much like the series opener was a game that both teams know they can recover from.

Another important point is that the teams met four times as I said, scoring 184, 196, 197 and 230 points. In the two games with the lower score, Shaq played and the two games with the higher score, Shaq didn't play. Two best games of Shaq in the series against the Bulls were games 1 and 5, the only two games in the series that ended in Under. Cleveland didn't really need Shaq to beat the Celtics. Boston is the one that needs the slower tempo. They don't want to get Cleveland going in front of their home crowd and Cleveland have got much more arsenal in their offense than Boston.  Cleveland had too many games where they played the pace that their rival team wanted them to play. Maybe it's because Cleveland has enough tools to play in any tempo and Brown doesn't want to waste energy trying to change the pace and maybe they don't know how. If we add the fact that LeBron might still have some trouble shooting, we can easily see this is end with no team scoring 100 points and at least one team won't make it to 90 points. 93 - 88 sounds about right to me tonight.

I decided to split the bets for the game and 1st half only until I learn this series better. One more bet I will take is a prop and that is Over 16 points for Ray Allen. Ray shot the ball well against Cleveland this season and did a solid job against Miami in first round of the playoffs as well.  He should score today 17 - 20 points, so it is a decent bet.



Picks:

Allen Over 16 points, 1.85 odds - 1.5 units play - Nordicbet / Triobet

Under 191.5 points - 1.91 odds - 2 units play – Bwin

Under 96 points at HT - 2.0 odds - 1.5 units play - Pinnacle

Divol