NBA - 803 Brooklyn Nets @ 804 Washington Wizards
Projected Line: Washington by 4 points
Washington is coming from one of their best performances of the season. It's impressive how they have such a poor record, but at the same time they have been able to beat Miami, Oklahoma City, the NY Knicks, Denver and Chicago! John Wall dominated the game and their offensive looked really sharp, as he made sure the ball kept moving the whole game. Their three point shooters, especially Marcel Webster and Trevor Ariza were getting good looks because of this good ball movement. The result of that was 106 points scored, 53% FG and 55% 3pts! This wasn't a surprise to me, as I took the Over on this game, as I had already mentioned how good the Wizards's ball movement was on their previous game against the Clippers:
“The Wizards's ball movement was great and Garrett Temple was the surprising offensive contributor in the team's early run. Washington would end the game with 27 assists and just 13 turnovers! It was a balanced effort from them, as they had five players in double digits points and eight players had at least one assists!“
On this game against the Knicks, Washington had another great A/TO ratio with 23/11 and note that at least 8 different Wizards's players had one assist! Washington has been playing this way the whole season, but their problem has been actually making shots, especially from the outside. But when they shoot 11-20 3pts and Trevor Ariza 5-7 3pts, then Washington is a really good offensive team. The problem for them is to keep this consistency, as the Wizards shot 18-32 (56.3%) 3pts on their last two games, but just 21-75 (28%) 3pts on their four previous games!
After being humiliated at home by the Lakers, Brooklyn bounced back well on the road in Detroit against the Pistons. It wasn't a surprise that Brooklyn won the game, after all they lost just one game this season against teams with a losing record and it was that game against the Lakers. On this game, Brook Lopez and Greg Monroe just couldn't guard each other and so, both players had great offensive numbers, with Lopez shooting 8-14 FG and Monroe 10-16 FG, however Brooklyn took advantage of the fact that the Pistons's frontcourt players were on foul trouble plus Andre Drummond out of the game with a back injury to win the boards battle, while the Pistons really didn't help themselves with a poor outside shooting game: 3-17 3pts! The good news for Brooklyn is that they finally had a nice A/TO ratio! They had 23A/20TO against Orlando, 20A/19TO against Miami, 19A/18TO against Chicago, 16A/17TO against the Lakers, but they were able to have 22A/14TO against Detroit!
Washington has been very strong in transitions as usual and they scored 13 fast break points against the Knicks on 15 transition plays (1.13 PPP - Points Per Possession). John Wall and the rest of the Wizards's offense will have a great edge on transitions in here against a slow footed Brooklyn team. It's important to note that the Nets aren't a poor transition defensive team (#12 in the league with 1.13 PPP), but that's because they can set their slow paced basketball to their opponents, with the exception of games where their opponents come really focused to attack in transition, where the Nets struggle, as the Pistons scored 17 fast break points against them, while Miami scored 20 fast break points, Houston 27 fast break points and Atlanta 29 fast break points! Washington is #14 on fast break points with 13.6 ppg, but since John Wall returned to the lineup, they have been averaging 15 fast break points per game! Washington also has a good ball pressuring defense capable of forcing turnovers and even though they forced just 9 turnovers against the Knicks on their last game, the NY team is a top 3 team in turnovers. Today, the same won't happen, as Brooklyn is much more turnover-prone than the Knicks.
The Wizards's frontcourt with Emeka Okafor and Nene Hilario have been a good defensive team and they are in fact #3 in post up defense with just 0.77 PPP allowed. Therefore, it won't be easy for Brook Lopez to have a big game against Emeka Okafor tonight. Brooklyn's offense has been very inconsistent all season long and with Lopez having a tough matchup tonight, we will likely see them having once again some poor stretches on offense with their isolation ball being their most used play. The problem is that the Wizards have the most underrated defense in the league, as according to my numbers, they have the #8 best defense in the league!
I expect Washington to have a good defensive game tonight, while taking advantage of Brooklyn's problems with turnovers and transition defense to score a decent number of points in here.Therefore, I'll be taking the Wizards tonight for another good win for them.
Pick: 3 units (Single Dime Play) on 804 Washington Wizards (-1) @ -110 / 1.91 on Bookmaker
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