NBA Basketball Betting

While most of the attention of sportsbooks patrons will be on college hoop this weekend, there’s still plenty of good NBA betting opportunities to take advantage of.  We’ll look at a Friday night game between the Indiana Pacers and Boston Celtics. The Celtics are in third place in the Eastern Conference biding their time for the playoffs to begin, while the Pacers are the worst team in the conference outside of the state of New Jersey.  The Celtics don’t have a great home record this year at 18-12 but the Pacers are a brutal 7-27 on the road.

BOSTON CELTICS VS. INDIANA PACERS:

The Dallas Mavericks came into this NBA season basically being considered a good team, but not a great team in comparison to the up and coming Denver Nuggets and the defending NBA champion Los Angeles Lakers.

In the offseason, the Mavs witnessed all the big dogs around the league like the San Antonio Spurs, Los Angeles Lakers, Cleveland Cavs, Boston Celtics and Orlando Magic upgrading their already dominate rosters with All-Star caliber players.

The defending champs lost Trevor Ariza to Houston Rockets through free agency, but ended up signing Ron Artest as a replacement, which some people believe was an upgrade. So far the signing has paid off even though Artest isn’t putting up the kind of numbers he was with the Rockets.

Despite the defending NBA champion Los Angeles Lakers struggling as of late with three straight losses coming into Tuesday night’s game against the Toronto Raptors, it would be hard to argue that Kobe Bryant and company haven’t been the one of the most entertaining teams to watch in the NBA this season.

When Kobe Bryant sat out basically the entire month of the February with an ankle sprain, amongst other injuries, the Lakers played brilliantly without their superstar winning four of the five games they played without the Black Mamba. The only loss came against their hated rivals in the Boston Celtics which was decided by just one point after Derek Fisher missed a last second shot.

Much like the defending NBA champion Los Angeles Lakers without Kobe Bryant, Cleveland Cavaliers have seldom had to play without their superstar in LeBron James.

LeBron is just one of those players that just doesn’t get injured is much as others despite his physical play and ability to play above the rim which have caused some players like Vince Carter to sit on the bench plenty of times with nagging injuries.

Unfortunately, the Cavs had to do without their MVP candidate LeBron James over the past two games as he has had to sit out after turning his ankle this past weekend. The injury isn’t all that serious, at least in LeBron’s mind, as he has said he is due to go, but with injuries to Shaq (finger) and now after this game against the San Antonio Spurs to Antawn Jamison (knee) the Cleveland Cavaliers are take any chances and want their superstar to sit out until he feels there are no ill effects to his injured ankle.