NBA - 501 Houston Rockets @ 502 Washington Wizards
Projected Line: 213 points | Houston by 5 points
Washington had a nice home win against Denver last night, on a run and gun game where they had a great offensive rating of 120.91! They shot very well from the outside, however they struggled a lot in the fourth quarter, as they went from a 98-80 lead with 10 minutes to go into a 113-111 situation with just 30 seconds to go! We are talking about a 15-31 run! Washington keeps being very prone in committing turnovers, especially when John Wall rushes things too much. They committed 18 turnovers last night, while they had already committed 19, 17 and 17 turnovers on their previous three games. As obvious, after beating Denver yesterday, while scoring 119 points (2nd highest mark of the season), the Wizards won't be focused in stopping Houston's offense. They will try to outscore them, just like it happened on their game against Sacramento, the following game after scoring 120 points against Orlando (their highest score of the season). That didn't go very well for the Wizards, who lost the game outright, even though they were favored by 7 points!
So, Washington will have their mindset into outgunning the Rockets tonight. However, the Wizards will struggle in making the right adjustments. Houston is playing with Chandler Parsons and Carlos Delfino at the PF position, while Washington is using Nene Hilario at that position. If at first sight, it might look that Nene would have a big edge on this matchup due to his size, the truth is that on a run and gun game like this one, it won't be easy for Washington to feed their big men, as this implies to slow down things and Washington doesn't have a high team IQ to make this kind of adjustments. In fact, Denver also used small lineups during most of yesterday's game and Nene Hilario wasn't a major force on this contest with just 5-11 FG, 14 points and 4 rebounds in 30 minutes. Ty Lawson did whatever he wanted to do on this dribble penetrations, while today James Harden and Jeremy Lin will do the same thing to the Wizards, especially with Bradley Beal playing heavy minutes. So, the question in here will be to know if Houston will have such a poor outside shooting game like Denver had last night. The Nuggets shot 1-7 FG from 16-23 feet and 4-22 treys for a combined of 5-29 (27%) FG! However, Houston is completely on fire on their perimeter shooting right now, as they have made at least 10 treys in five of their last six games! The only game where that didn't happen during this span was their contest at LA against the Clippers, where both James Harden and Jeremy Lin didn't play.
Therefore, I don't expect to see Washington having the same success today that they had yesterday against Denver. This should be a close game, but James Harden should lead his team down the stretch to a nice win, while Washington should once again get very tight in the last minutes of the game. In the game played between these two teams in Houston earlier on the season, the Rockets were on a 3-games losing streak and they had just played an overtime game at San Antonio, while Washington was playing with Jordan Crawford at the PG position and Nene Hilario was still playing limited minutes and coming off the bench. This is why that game was a low scoring game (99-93). This time, I expect both teams to have great offensive production tonight, therefore I'll be taking both the Rockets and the Over in here.
Pick: 3 units (Single Dime Play) on 501/502 Over 208,5 @ -110 / 1.91 on Bookmaker
Pick: 3 units (Single Dime Play) on 501 Houston Rockets (-1,5) @ -110 / 1.91 on Bookmaker
No comments:
Post a Comment