NBA - 709 Chicago Bulls @ 710 Cleveland Cavaliers
Projected Line: Chicago by 6 points
Chicago is coming from a physical game against Sacramento, where the Kings actually showed that they can defend well at times. The Bulls struggled on offense a bit, but defended quite well while forcing 21 turnovers. I have no doubts Chicago will remain being an elite team on defense this season. They have a good coach, two great frontcourt defenders in Joakim Noah and Taj Gibson, a healthy Rip Hamilton and Kirk Hinrich, who is also a good defender. Their struggles this season will on poor spots and when they will need the weak bench to produce, but on decent spots like on tonight's game, they will be fine.
The Cavs are coming from a home win against Washington in the opening night, where they surprisingly crushed the Wizards on the boards due to an excellent game by Anderson Varejao. As I expected, Cleveland had a very high volume of shots from the backcourt, with Kyrie Irving and Dion Waiters combining 34 FG attempts. The Cavs also allowed Washington to grab 18 offensive rebounds and they committed 21 turnovers.
Now against Chicago, Cleveland won't have a rebounding edge, as it will be the Bulls who will have a rebounding edge on this contest. In fact, Chicago crushed the Cavs in the three games where they faced each other by 114-75, 112-91 and 107-75, with the common factor of those three wins being the huge domination on the frontcourt and rebounding, as Chicago grabbed 54.44%, 54.90% and 55.56% of the rebounds in those games.
Chicago will be an aggressive team tonight in forcing turnovers and the Cavaliers will struggle with that on offense. Even though the linemakers and the public aren't thinking that the Bulls aren't a top team anymore, the truth is that they are still a very good team, even though they will struggle a lot in tough spots due to lack of depth on their roster. However, that isn't the case for tonight and they have all the necessary conditions to have a quite comfortable win tonight. Therefore, I'll be taking the Bulls in here.
Pick: 3 units (Single Dime Play) on 709 Chicago Bulls (-3) @ -110 / 1.91 on Bookmaker
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