Last season, the NBA instituted a new player participation policy. Strict rules now dictate how teams report injuries and when teams can rest players. If it was enough of a problem to cause league intervention, it was a downright nightmare for NBA prop betting strategy.
(Sorry to conjure up those traumatic memories for anyone who got destroyed by load-management shenanigans a couple years back.)
One player unexpectedly sitting close to tip can have a huge ripple effect up and down the lineup, neutralizing a whole night’s worth of bets. The NBA is a different beast, and prop bettors need to adjust the approach they may take in other sports.
Unabated NBA is designed with the specific needs of the NBA prop player in mind, with tools for prop projections, breaking player news and dynamic conditional projections that quantify the fallout of in-or-out decisions.
So how do you put the puzzle together and use Unabated NBA for maximum effect in your NBA prop betting strategy during basketball season? And why is the NBA uniquely suited for this approach?
Why the NBA Is Different
What the NBA offers that other leagues can’t is intragame consistency.
You have a good chance of deciphering a range of outcomes if a player is in the lineup and doesn’t get hurt. As long as you accurately predict how many minutes he’s likely to play, it’s possible to land in range of his actual production.
Which makes betting NBA props an attractive prospect for bettors looking to grind up consistent profits.
“There’s a higher degree of certainty,” Unabated Managing Director Justin Phan said. “It’s a less event-based sport. You’re not betting on touchdowns or big catches or home runs or hits. With MLB you have four or five at-bats in a game. With the NFL you have a few opportunities. In the NBA you have 90-100 possessions a game, so there’s a lot more certainty in terms of projecting things in general.”
Know the Terrain
The trade-off is that the higher degree of certainty you can get in NBA betting demands more familiarity with the league, its teams and its players.
A prop like pitcher strikeouts, while not entirely off-the-shelf, doesn’t ask you to know the ins and outs of every pitcher-vs.-batter matchup, lineup platoon changes, or specific pinch-hitting scenarios. That’s all generally baked into the projection. And baseball projections, in general, hew closer to being independent individual performances.
In the NBA, though, knowing how teams operate can help you navigate deeply interconnected outcomes.
The heart of any NBA projection is in a player’s projected minutes, and one player being out means those minutes have to be distributed to the rest of the team.
That’s why the dynamic conditional projections are such a critical part of Unabated NBA. There are different projection sets available for different scenarios, depending on whether key players sit or start. The team monitors every squad’s injury/availability situation, and adjusts projections to account for those.
“I think more than anything the NBA requires subject knowledge on the range of outcomes for each player in each situation,” Phan said. “If you’re on a Warriors rotation guy it requires knowing that, in general, the Warriors rotation from night-to-night is very swingy.
“Even with injuries, they’re playing 12 deep. We try to capture that in the projections but it’s very news-and-information based. At the end of the day, we’re trying to convey as much as we can within our projection.”
Information Is King
The spice in the NBA prop betting stew is player news.
It’s not that news is unimportant in other sports. It’s just that in the NBA player news impacts the entire team’s outlook sometimes with an unexpected suddenness – and often on different time horizons – than in other sports.
“In baseball, you wait for confirmed lineups. Once in a while, there’s a scratch. You have plenty of time with the NFL,” Stephen Byron Keech said. Keech is one of the three members of the Unbated NBA team making daily player prop projections.
“A thing that is far different than other sports is back-to-backs. The guys that tend to be resting on back-to-backs are impactful players that have major trickle-down effects to the rest of the lineup.”
Unexpected shifts in player status create opportunities for bettors to capitalize when markets are slow to react or make the wrong corrections. But it also means you have to be quick on your feet.
Grab Those Injury Reports
Just being aware of which teams are coming into or on the second half of back-to-back games is important, but so is knowing how to parse the injury reports that are due at 5 p.m. the day before a game, or by 1 p.m. on the second day of a back-to-back.
“Injury reporting, a lot of people complain about it, but it’s gotten better,” Unabated NBA’s John Raudebaugh said. “With minutes, we think about what the range of outcomes are for a player. With injuries, there is a range of outcomes for a player that we might widen. We factor all that in when we’re doing the initial minutes projection.
“If we don’t get an injury report by the time projections are released you’ll see on the conditional projections. At 50 percent to play, we’ll start with him in the base set, and then we’ll have a set with him out as well. By the time the projections are released hopefully we at least know who all is questionable, available or out.”
Injury reports can mark a player – in descending order of likelihood to play – available, probable, questionable, doubtful or out. They’re available through the official NBA site.
On the Prop Odds screen, player status is noted next to their name, after their position. They’re marked IN if they’re available, Q for questionable or P for probable.
Interconnected Outcomes Shape NBA Prop Betting Strategy
There’s one kind of variance that comes as a result of injury and availability news. But there’s another type of variance that exists within certain stat categories, and within how you structure your bets.
Projections are inherently more volatile, for example, when you’re trying to hit minuscule targets. The kind you can see in stats like turnovers or blocks.
“The thing with 3-pointers and steals or blocks is that unless you’re Victor Wembanyama and you’re averaging four or five blocks a game, there’s going to be higher variance,” Raudebaugh said. “Most guys are going to be between zero and two. Even assists sometimes, any assist line of 0.5 and a guy can just fall into it.”
These props can come with huge edges on lines that are a generous price (or require significant outlay). That increases your night-to-night variance. If you’re going to swim in these waters, just know you’re signing up for high-variance bets.
Be Very Aware of Covariance
Player projections are interdependent, but the plays you make can be, too, within those projections.
There’s covariance available in NBA props, depending on how you bet them. If you’re betting Jayson Tatum’s points, points plus assists, and points plus rebounds, you’re living and dying with Tatum having a good or bad night shooting.
“There are definitely times where I have some Quentin Grimes points Unders and also his PRA Unders. But if there’s something like that where a lot (of the value) is on the same stat, I generally will try to pick a favorite,” Keech said. “It depends a lot on the player. Grimes is a guy who’s generally not giving you much in rebounds or assists. He’s generally more of a scorer. I think it all depends on the particular player and the situation that they’re in that day.”
Or a situation might come up where two players on the same team could end up working against each other’s performance in a certain stat category.
“Player position and archetypes is probably the covariance you want to avoid,” Raudebaugh said. ”I wouldn’t want two rebound Overs on two bigs who would compete for the same stat.”
Get familiar with how stats interact. Points and 3-pointers made are obviously highly correlated. Points and turnovers are anti-correlated.. A player can get a rebound and points in the same play, but can’t get an assist and points at the same time. Consider the logic of the plays you make and how they interact instead of treating each edge as a completely independent event.
Understanding How Stats Are Built
One way to better understand correlation and covariance within categories is to get a good handle on how the counting stat categories develop.
If you want to develop a solid feel for the relationship between the on-floor product and prop betting, Keech says to look at some of the more subtle metrics that reveal the underlying factors that go into points, rebounds and assists.
“In assists and rebounds you can access under-the-hood data and familiarize yourself with it. You can see the total number of passes made, total number of passes received, potential assists, rebound distance, rebound chances,” Keech said. “You can find more context where it paints the picture of why things have happened that is separate from the projections themselves. Doing that would be a good way to figure out how the stats are accrued and what makes it easiest to earn them.”
Using Unabated NBA
Unabated NBA starts with breaking news.
The members-only #nba-news-alerts channel in our Discord is the hub for player news alerts that are sent to the entire community.
Phan, Keech and Raudebaugh constantly pore over news outlets, beat writers, team insiders and ball-knowers up and down Twitter/X to monitor for developing situations that will affect a team’s outlook at the betting window.
Members can also get the latest news updates on the dedicated NBA News page, or call the information up directly on the Odds Screen. You can see if there’s new news items available for a team when you see the newspaper icon next to a team name on the screen.
Be Prepared
The information game is an essential piece for most any NBA bettor, but when news breaks, there’s a limited window to react to it. That window will define your NBA prop betting strategy. Do you try to beat it, or get ahead of it?
“The biggest thing that’s changed in NBA betting over the last five years is the window has gotten smaller and smaller,” Phan said. “I used to be able to hit three, four or five books and get down a good amount in 60 seconds when we did get news. Now it’s 15-30 seconds. Sometimes books are pulling stuff within 10 seconds. They’re on news services. They’re getting notifications. They have teams that know where to look.”
That gets to the heart of Unabated NBA’s dynamic conditional projections.
These sets give you scenarios for what a team’s projections will look like with, or without, certain key players in the lineup.
With Kyrie Irving in the lineup, he’s ticketed to play 35.5 minutes and score 24 points. Meanwhile Daniel Gafford is at 23.5 minutes and 11.43 points Dereck Lively gets 23.5 minutes and 9.22 points.
But if Irving is out, Gafford remains at 23.5 minutes but projects for 12.4 points, while Lively’s projection goes up to 10.1.
Move Fast or Plan Ahead
Windows are short. It may be too late if you wait until players are confirmed in or out before you simulate a scenario.
That’s why using the scenario projection sets earlier in the daily news cycle is so important.
“The first use of the conditional projections is gathering information on where the market leans right now and whether there would be an edge if that player ends up being ruled out,” Phan said “That’s a very important data point. Because if a news item breaks a certain way, and the market’s already counting on it, there’s no point betting into it anymore. There’s no edge.”
The setting on the far right turns off all of that team’s projections in the Odds Screen. When you toggle to “in” or “out,” you load up scenarios for a team using each status for that player.
Use Scenarios to Feel Out the Books
In the Irving example, you can see that BetRivers’ lines on Gafford are closer to what they’d look like in our projections if Irving is out. The book is shading that way.
But if your NBA prop betting strategy is to put together a plan ahead of time, you might know you only want to take on Mavericks props if Irving does play, because you can get your bets in with an edge before books react to the news.
“You can also use it as a way to try to get your money in good,” Keech said. “We talked about this a little bit (on the Set the Screen livestreams). There was an example with the Suns where Bradley Beal was questionable. We were leaning toward him being in and we looked at it like Tyus Jones assists Unders become basically coin flips (if Beal is out), but if he does play – which we imagine is the more likely scenario – you end up with a pretty easy bet.”
Context Clues Matter
Set the Screen is the NBA team’s livestream that generally runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 4 p.m. ET. (You can check the week’s schedule on the projections dropdown menu.)
That’s where you’ll find Phan, Raudebaugh and Keech dissecting the day’s slate in real time, giving out their thought process behind the projections.
The Discord’s #nba-proj-release channel also has daily writeups posted to give some context around what’s happening with each team on the schedule. The team will also note which teams are in the first or second game of a back-to-back, which will have a huge impact on some veterans or players coming off of injuries.
There’s also an #nba-alpha channel for members to ask the team questions about the process, news, general NBA prop betting strategy, or anything else.
Consider the Slate
Some nights may not see many conditional scenarios at all. Some could see eight to 10. It’s the latter that have the potential to be the most profitable nights for bettors.
“I don’t want to look at situations with no news,” Keech said. “That does not matter to me at all. Everything with the NBA is reading and reacting. Our best quality is reacting to news quickly and then being ahead of the game in terms of projecting what those changes mean. The stuff that is able to have the high percentage edges are the things that pop up and folks haven’t had a chance to adjust yet. ”
That means taking the time to monitor what’s happening as games get closer to tip-off. Only looking at lines once a night means your NBA prop betting strategy will miss out on key opportunities as news breaks and books adjust.
There are some opportunities that exist early in the day that don’t exist later in the evening. And there are definitely opportunities later in the evening you’d never see if you’re only betting when the projections release.
“That window when all the lineups are being announced or news is being announced?” Phan said. “Lock in during that 5:30-9 p.m. ET window. It’s prime money-making time.”
