NBA - 715 Houston Rockets @ 716 Minnesota Timberwolves
Projected Line: 206 points
Houston is coming from a great road win in Chicago last night, where they absolutely crushed the Bulls with 11-15 FG on transition plays, 7-13 FG on pick and roll ball handler plays and 6-7 FG on cuts. As expected, Chicago's defense continued to be poor on pick and roll ball handler and transitions, with the Rockets pounding them with these two kinds of plays for an easy blowout win. Still, four of their starters (Omer Asik, Chandler Parsons, James Harden and Jeremy Lin) played at least 34 minutes and Chandler Parsons injured his knee and he is questionable for tonight.
The Rockets will now play at Minnesota, a team much better prepared on defense to stop their offense than the Bulls were. Minnesota is #9 on pick and roll ball handler defense, #2 on spot up defense and #15 on transition defense, therefore I clearly expect the Wolves to be able to stop the Rockets offense that clearly underperforms on back to back spots (113.37 offensive rating this season vs 100.41 on back to back games). With their starters being on court for a lot of time yesterday and with Chandler Parsons banged up, I don't expect these back to back numbers for Houston to improve tonight.
Both teams are very good on defensive rebounding (Minnesota is #1 with 75.7% and Houston is #3 with 75.2%), therefore I don't see these two teams having a lot of second chance points tonight, as there will be a low number of offensive rebounds tonight. With the Wolves traditionally struggling on offense on fast paced games (as that's not their normal style) and with the Rockets struggling on back to back games and having a key piece banged up on a roster that doesn't have a lot of depth, I believe this game will have a relatively fast pace, but it won't have great offensive efficiency, leaving this game a bit far from the very high number of points required for this game to go Over the total posted. Therefore, I'll be taking the Under in here.
Pick: 3 units (Single Dime Play) on 715/716 Under 210,5 @ -110 / 1.91 on Bookmaker
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