As the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers are set to continue their quests to the glory, the only stain on their otherwise dominating runs to the NBA Finals is that both teams faced somewhat weaker opposition as the teams that they’ve easily defeated suffered from injuries to some of their main players.
Treating the players’ injuries in wagering on NBA games
The Warriors faced Portland without Nurkic, late acquisition center that had a big hand in helping the Trail Blazers turn their season around and get to the playoffs. Their next opponent was the Utah Jazz, but they too missed an important piece. Starting point guard George Hill couldn’t play in three of the four games in the Western Conference Semis. Finally, when the Warriors seemed to have encountered a formidable foe, MVP candidate Kawhi Leonard’s series was cut short by an injury in the third quarter of the first game. The Spurs have already played without veteran Tony Parker and more rotation players on both sides suffered some injuries.
On the East side of the bracket, the Cleveland Cavaliers faced Raptors team that had to play most of the series without Kyle Lowry (who wasn’t healthy in entire playoffs to begin with) and the Boston Celtics team that lost their arrowhead Isaiah Thomas after two games.
Golden State is the first team to go 12-0 in the NBA playoff history (but not the first to sweep first three rounds). The Cavs almost matched it with 12-1 to set this duel.
Considering on how little resistance the two finalists have faced from their shorthanded rivals, a fair question is how much a single player’s (or multiple players) absence can alter a series or a single game. This question is even more significant if you are investing your money in NBA wagering. It’s also one of the most difficult questions to answer, as there are so many different circumstances to account for. Players miss different portions of schedule. Some of the missed games are played late in the season where some teams don’t care much about a game’s outcome. Teams are better covered on some positions than on the others. There could be multiple DNPs across the roster.
With all that noise, and with the fact that injuries (fortunately) don’t happen too often for the same player, there’s no way to create an accurate mathematical model to provide us the answer for any player in any scenario. It’s a manual job for punters to do, so it’s best to do in a form of an adjustment to the fair odds. It takes a few steps of doing it properly, so I’m going to introduce you to each of them during our joint quest to find an answer on how to treat players absences from the games we are looking to place out bets on.
Keeping an eye on team news
Evaluating player’s worth begins with a tedious job. Monitoring the team news is an everyday job for the regular punter. Luckily for us, expansion of fantasy leagues and Twitter and league’s efforts for transparency have allowed us to get the news very quickly and very accurately. Once a player is announced as out (or doubtful, questionable), the market reacts. If a player is very significant, the bookies take away the offer and place another within minutes. Punters can also react to the news, so it’s important that you stay ready and make use of the sudden value if it appears.
Of course, if a player or players are known to be out before the game day, this needs to be calculated in your market opening number.
General categorization of players
Disclaimer: The following paragraphs will show only general guidelines for some groups of players for a solid starting point, do not use the number presented without taking other factors in consideration, some of which will be explained later in this article.
For an easier read, I’ll separate all NBA players into four groups: star players, starters, rotation players and rarely-used players. There are some players who you might belong to somewhere in between, but the group are not exactly a distinct categorization, as you’ll about to see.
To place any NBA player in a certain group, a punter has to have good knowledge of the game, all teams and have to constantly watch games and understand how someone’s game might evolve or fade. That’s the reason why bettors who base their decisions largely or solely on statistics – no matter how advance one is – usually lose money on sports betting markets. It’s ok to look for some stats verification to lose any subjectivity, and when you do, I recommend using the plus/minus statistics, as it’s a rare stat that incorporates defensive contribution as well. This doesn’t mean that you can take a look at Leonard’s +20 in Game 1 against the Warriors and see that the Spurs were outscored by 30 after he got injured and take the conclusion that he’s worth 50 points. You’d need much big sample to operate with any statistics.
I have no intention of categorizing the entire NBA for you here, and even if I would, you have to understand that it’s a fluid thing – some star players are now merely a useful bench players and others might see their roles significantly increase on changing teams. To give you a general idea on which players belong to where, here are a couple of examples:
Star players – James Harden, LeBron James, Marc Gasol, Giannis Antetokounmpo …
This group gathers players that are highly skilled and very important to their teams. I’ve purposely included some of the names to show you that it’s a wide range of players, not just the MVP candidates.
Starters – Tristan Thompson, Dirk Nowitzki, Eric Gordon, Jeff Teague …
It’s mostly self-explanatory by the group name, but make sure that you include players that may have lost their star impact of the past, as well as the players that nominally play off the bench, but have starter’s roles.
Rotation players – Kelly Olynyk, Boris Diaw, Enes Kanter, Bobby Portis …
Players in this group play every or most of the nights, usually off the bench. Their impact is usually minor, might be sort of a specialist or a future prospect that gets some playing time.
Rarely-used players – James Jones, Paul Pierce, Sasha Vujacic, Cole Aldrich …
The rest of the NBA, basically. These players mostly play minor minutes and have very little impact on the game even when they show us their uniforms. The might be decent players, but the facts that they are given very little time to operate puts them in this group.
Ok, with the groups set, I’ll give you some basic values to work with.
– Star players are usually worth somewhere between 2.5 and 4.0 spread points.
– Starters values are about 1.0-2.0 spread points.
– Rotation players are worth 0.5 spread points.
– You don’t have to adjust you base spread number if players from the last group are declared out.
The intervals given above are the ones that should be used for most players within a group, but there are some extremes that fall out of this range, especially with the superstar players. However, even if you dedicate a certain number to a single player from any of the top two groups, you should understand that this number is not player’s fixed value. You still need to go through the most important step in evaluating player’s worth for a single game.
Fine tuning
This is not only the most important step, but it’s the most difficult one as well. You’ll need to put the base player’s value number in perspective, and do it quickly – before sharp punters eat all the value.
First thing I usually take into a consideration is how long the team has been missing the guy. If an injury or another reason for players absence is fresh, his team doesn’t have much time to get acclimatized to his absence and will likely suffer more than if they had a couple of games to try what’s working for them. Depending on how dynamic your mathematical model is, it will eventually catch up with the player’s absence after a period of time and you won’t have to account for him at all. So the number is actually a function of time.
Further, it’s very important for you to look at the available roster. Does a team miss another starter? Is the first next option on the injured player’s position available? Maybe he’s 40 and can play 30+ minutes. Maybe the team is on a lengthy road trip with a short roster and won’t have energy to make up for a player’s absence. All these things affect on how you approach the price. Some trigger small adjustments but sometimes even these adjustments can make a difference between placing a bet or refraining from it. It’s also very important for you to understand that if more than one player is missing, it’s not a simple math anymore. 1+1 does not equal two here, as the teams are significantly weaker without few guys combined.
Finally, player is not equally important to a team against opponents of different strengths. Great players are more important against good teams. It might be counterintuitive at first, but when you think that bad teams get blown out more frequently and that great players usually play about 60 percent of their usual minutes in such games, it’s easier to understand it.
There are many other factors of course. Some teams respond to an injury with extra energy to make up for it while others might get down. Players in question might have played poorly for a stretch prior to this injury. There are some players that teams actually benefit from not playing (I’m serious).
But let’s keep it at there for now. It won’t be too long before you can test your skills in evaluating how much a player is going to be missed. If you can do it right, you will more frequently be close to figuring out how much the market has adjusted. If you get a large value, do it again, you probably overreacted to an injury (or underrated the player). Public tends to overreact to star players injuries and that usually opens up some gates to bets, while also doesn’t care too much to absences of some less known players that might be important for their teams in certain moments of the season. It’s how it goes, and with a little practice, you could get the edge, an edge that mean profit in the long run.
