Washington/Charlotte Under 233.5

Think we got some value here in playing the Washington Wizards/ Charlotte Hornets Under the total of 233.5  My gut told me a few reasons why I think this game will go under but then I also did some serious number crunching and I’ll give you a taste of exactly what I did later.

First, the Wizards had a crazy February going over in every single total, 10-0 for the month!  The perception of the Wizards is to bet the over regardless of the line and you’ll make money.  This month of March they are starting to come back to reality with an average 3-4 record vs the total.  Vegas already likes to shade totals over because of the public’s love to cheer for scoring in games, but now the totals are even more biased with the recent trend of Wizards hitting so often.

The 2^nd big reason I lean for the under is these games are starting to matter a lot more since the playoffs are right around the corner.  During the early and middle stages of the season a lot of teams have to pace themselves to some degree for the marathon of season and I think that will slightly favor teams being less intense on defense.  Now its crunch time and every win matters, and I think overall there will be some more intensity and effort on that side of the court.

***Warning if you don’t like math skip this section!***

I went digging into the archives and found some very detailed statistics, that break down the average length of possession down to the 1/10 of a second and average points scored by team per each possession.  I’ll give you one example. In February the Wizard’s average possession was 13.1 seconds during their 10 game over the total streak, and averaged 1.12 points per possession. I calculated in Charlotte’s defensive stats in the same manner and combined them into the average.  The total came to be 231.9 PPG which is remarkable that even during that stretch of 10 overs, if they played Charlotte at the same level it would still be 1.5 under the projected total for this game.  I further looked at the full season numbers for each team and the number got down to 225.  Looking even more closely specifically at March games approximately 7 each, its down to 223.9.  I would project a fair total to be around 224.5.  That’s about 9 points of value right there and some efficient data to back up my gut feeling!