All sports undergo waves of changes involving style or pace of play, rule modifications, and other tweaks. These lead to ever-changing expectations in scores and other key stats. We've experienced the years of juiced balls in baseball, hands-off rules in college basketball, the adoption of air raid offenses in college football, and rules changes for safety purposes in the NFL, among other things. All of these typically resulted in higher scoring totals. I'm not sure any of it compares, however, to the absurdity of the transformation we've witnessed in the NBA in recent years. For various reasons, average team scoring per game has gone from 96.3 points per game in the 2011-12 season to 114.3 PPG so far this season. That said, bettors still employing trends and systems built for the “old days” need to adjust to the new norms occurring on a nightly basis. With that in mind, I thought I'd share 10 different systems that have arisen over the last 4-1/2 s easons in this new style of play that bettors can employ to generate profits. They consider a team's extreme stats from the prior contest and how they react in the follow-up game.
I've always believed that one of the best ways to make consistent profits in NBA betting, and any other sport, is through the use of systems. These are different than trends in that trends tend to be team specific, thus shorter-lived and riskier to follow. Systems are league-wide, allowing similar teams from different seasons to fit into certain fundamental angles that have provided reliable predictability. We all know that nothing in sports betting is a lock, but I feel that systems provide the foundation on which successful sports betting is built. They come with no bias and, if built upon solid principles, typically perform consistently, and in some cases, spectacularly.
One of the key fundamentals I like to use in building systems for any sport is the circumstances of extremes and how teams react to them. On any given night in the NBA, there can be extreme performances, in scores, in results against the point spread, and in stats accumulated in the games. These will generate highlights on social media for fans to digest, but I'm specifically looking to find how teams fare in the follow-up contest when coming off one of these extreme situations. After all, unusual performances tend to sway oddsmakers, thus opening up chances for bettors to take advantage if they know how the teams will react.
Take a look at these 10 systems I uncovered using NBA results from the past 4-1/2 seasons. I used this time frame because the scoring per game jumped by nearly 5.0 PPG following the 2017-18 season and has stayed at this defenseless level since. It includes results through Sunday 2/5.