And, no, we’re not going to have a picture of Billie Jean King who reportedly inspired Elton John to write this song. Nor are we going to have a picture of Sir Elton himself. Thankfully, the Philadelphia 76ers have made this easy for me and compiled a cheesecake calender of their cheerleaders…er…’dancers’.

Not a lot going on at your local sportsbooks and/or bookmaker except NBA hoops on Friday, so we’ll look for a solid NBA betting position on a decent sized schedule of games. And as you’ve probably figured out by now we’ll be taking a look at the Philadelphia 76ers game against the visiting San Antonio Spurs.

SAN ANTONIO SPURS VS. PHILADELPHIA 76ERS:

All season long some of the easiest money to be made in the sports betting arena has been to simply bet against the Philadelphia 76ers in *their* arena.  When a team is 9-17 SU/7-19 ATS on their home floor it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure that out.  It also doesn’t take sportsbooks long to figure that out, meaning that anytime Philly steps onto their home floor the line is shaded in their favor since bookmakers don’t like to give out ‘no brainer’ 73% winning plays like ‘play against the Sixers at home’.  Post All Star break expect the Sixers to have their home prices shaded even more in their favor since by now even the most clueless parlay card playing degenerate knows that Philly is a ‘go against’ at home.  And if you’ve read this fine website for awhile you know what that means for us–we’re going to start looking for situations to play *on* the Sixers.  This isn’t some sort of prediction that the Sixers are going to all of a sudden pull it together on and go on a winning run; its just an understanding of how the linesmaking process works and using it to our advantage.

On the surface this looks like a no-brainer play on San Antonio.  You’ve got a highly professional, veteran team against an underachieving home side.  It’s not quite that easy.  The Spurs have already won but didn’t cover a road game at Indiana since they resumed play after the All Star break, and they’ve got a couple more uninspired teams to face on this East Coast road swing in Philly tonight and Detroit before returning home to play Oklahoma City.  If you look at the statistics behind this matchup, however, it paints a drastically different picture.  The Spurs are 10-13 ATS on the road and 2-5 this season as a road favorite of 3 or less.  And for whatever reason they’ve struggled to cover numbers against the Atlantic Division going 2-4 ATS this year and 7-17 ATS the last three years.

But its the head to head matchups against Philly where things get really interesting.  First of all, the Sixers are 6-2 ATS against the Southwest Division this year which is one of the few winning ATS categories on their stat sheet.  The Sixers played the Spurs tough in San Antonio, losing but covering the pointspread.  Which is the same thing they did last year.  And the year before.  In fact, the Sixers have now covered five straight in the series and have a pattern of playing tough but losing in Texas and winning at home.  Overall, the Sixers are on a 16-8 ATS run in the series including a 9-4 ATS mark at home where they’re also 8-5 SU against San Antonio.  So in a tough matchup for the visiting team we’ll take the home team getting points.

PLAY PHILADELPHIA +3′ OVER SAN ANTONIO