Where Sixers-Knicks Ranks Among Recent NBA ”Unders”
Where Sixers-Knicks Ranks Among Recent NBA ”Unders”
(Or, how the Vegas bookmakers have been reacting to the NBA's sudden downturn in scoring.)
Remember a few weeks ago, when all anybody in the NBA could talk about was too much offense and not enough defense?
Now the pendulum seems to have swung in the opposite direction — and fast.
As both
and pointed out, something odd has happened across the league recently. Scoring has dipped noticeably since the All-Star break, with the league average PPG falling from 115.2 through the end of February to 111.9 since the start of March. As Tom notes, that change has coincided with a seeming difference in the rate at which fouls (and, of course, trips to the free throw line) are happening.Perhaps there are other factors at play, too, like teams clamping down on D with the playoffs in sight. But whatever the cause, it seems to be sowing confusion among the people who make a living predicting how many points teams will score. Per data from SportRadar, the Vegas oddsmakers had been consistently aiming too low with their over/under point totals for the first few months of the season, but they had reached a point of equilibrium in January and February, mostly guessing in line with the totals teams actually produced:
Things changed once scoring dipped, however, and the oddsmakers have now been too high on the point totals for the past few weeks — meaning they were unable to foresee the sudden change in scoring, either.
The “holy shit” moment for me was on Sunday, with a Sixers-Knicks game that ended in a final score (79-73) that could have potentially passed for a halftime score earlier in the season. Not only was it the lowest combined point total of the season so far (152), but it shattered the previous low — set as recently as Friday between Orlando and the Knicks (172) — by TWENTY POINTS. The pregame over/under on Philly-New York was 211.5; that total missed the actual number by 59.5 points, the most Vegas had overshot any total all year by far:
Perhaps surprisingly, this was not Vegas’ biggest overall miss of the season, though. They had set an over/under that was off by 61.5 points on January 3, for the game between the Detroit Pistons and Utah Jazz — but that miss was on the low side, as the teams tore through the pregame total of 240.5 with 302 combined points! (Utah won 154-148 in overtime, though the teams were already clear of the over/under by 35.5 points at the end of regulation.)1
This fits an overall theme: It’s a lot easier to miss going too low than too high. The biggest regular-season error of any pregame over/under since 2015-16 belongs to this Kings-Clippers game on Feb. 24, 2023, which carried a pregame total of 238.5. The game ended at 176-175 in favor of Sacramento in OT, meaning a whopping 351 combined points were scored — or 112.5 more than what the books listed for the total.
That kind of outlier is rare, but in general, low misses actually happen with at least some regularity.
While Sixers-Knicks was tied with this 87-82 Heat-Pacers game from Dec. 2022 for Vegas’ biggest point-total overestimate in the league since 2015-16 (at 59.5 points too high), there were 27 (!) different games in the same span that underestimated the total by at least that many points. The tail cases in this distribution definitely skew more toward negative misses than positive ones, in no small part because overtime does happen.
But now, we do appear to be in a mini-era of point-total overestimates, just because the conditions of the game aren’t exactly what they seemed to be just a month or so ago. I’ll be curious to see how that trend evolves as the regular season approaches its end — and whether the bookmakers can once again zero in on the moving point-total target that the league is putting in front of them.
Filed under: NBA
Besides, the likelihood of overtime is already baked into the over/under totals anyway.