Handicapping

Your basketball news will start to heat up as the playoffs start this weekend and that means you’ll be making your picks for the first round, but how will you deal with the second round of games? Here is some advice to get you started.

Watch The First Round

This seems simple enough if you’re betting online; if you’re going to get a feel for what a team can do, you should watch the first round to see which strategies they’re using, which players are healthy and which are playing through injuries, which substitutions and rotation patterns coaches have decided to use, and other nuances of the game that you can only get by watching. Don’t go into the second round cold and base your picks off box scores and statistics; you can get a much better idea by actually watching games, especially if you haven’t watched all season.

Look At The Matchups Within The Matchup

At this point in the season, matchups become so important and it usually has to do with player matchups; if a team finds that one player has a huge edge over another, they’ll keep going to it until the opposition figures out a way to stop it. You can usually get a headstart on these matchups by looking at the regular-season meetings between the two teams, and head-to-head history is one of the best factors to include in your research as you’re heading online to make the right selections at online betting sites.

The NBA is coming down the stretch towards the playoffs, and now it’s time to look at what you should consider when trying to make your first-round picks for the league’s postseason after a congested campaign that didn’t start until Christmas Day due to the lockout.

Look At The Head-To-Head History

You should always look at the head-to-head history between the two teams before heading to your best online sportsbook to get an idea of how the teams have played each other recently. It can give you some insight into the matchups that you’ll see in the series, and specifically, which matchups will be essential to the outcome of the series.

Who Has The Momentum?

Some teams get hot just to get into the playoffs, and that means they could pull off an upset; if you have been playing elimination games for the last week or so, your mind is always in the zone that it needs to be for an intense playoffs, and that could give a lower seed a jump on a higher seed. It’s like a team that cruised into the postseason and took their foot off the gas; it could take a couple games to get their heads into the game.

Experience Is Key

While the NBA is very young nowadays, you must have a little experience before you can really take the next step in your progress, and that means you usually have to lose a couple times before you can win. If this is a team’s first time in the playoffs in a few years, that is the team that you should be avoiding in your sport betting book.