NBA News, Predictions & Tips

The NBA has grown rapidly in popularity in Australia in recent years. There are a few reasons for this; basketball in general has become more popular courtesy in no small part due to the development of the NBL and the improved performance of the Australian national team on the world stage, while the presence of numerous Aussies in the NBA has also helped to fuel interest down under.

As is so often the case, this rise in popularity has been associated with a rise in betting on the biggest basketball league in the world. And with so many games taking place throughout the course of the season, it’s no wonder. Unlike something like the AFL or NRL, in which a handful of games take place every weekend, there are multiple NBA games every day for most months of the year, with all 30 teams playing a huge 82 games in the regular season.

This means that there are plenty of markets to sink your teeth into, and while small and new betting sites will by and large stick to the most common ones like moneyline and points total, with the bigger bookies you will get hundreds and hundreds of markets on every game, including all sorts of player props. 

With so much NBA to bet on, this league is one of our primary focuses at MyBetting Australia. Below, we take a look at what we offer when it comes to betting on the NBA, how we formulate our bets, and how we can help you out.

In the regular season, there are exactly 1,230 NBA games that take place, and up to 105 more in the playoffs, so as you can imagine we can’t quite provide for every single game throughout the course of the season. But with a multitude of games taking place virtually every day for close to nine months, we still put out plenty of content for you to dive into.

At MyBettingAustralia, we provide multiple NBA predictions pieces throughout the course of the week, as well as NBA multi tips each and every weekend. So if you’re looking for NBA tips for today, then you know exactly where to find them.

We don’t just throw the tips out at you with no analysis, either. Every NBA prediction that we make is accompanied by analysis of the game, of the involved teams’ circumstances, and of why we came to our conclusions. That doesn’t mean that they will be right each and every day, but with the expertise of our NBA experts and the research that they do, we think we provide some of the most accurate NBA tips.

By and large, our NBA predictions centre around markets that you will find with every NBA betting site. Of course, the bigger bookies, as mentioned above, will have a much wider array of different things to bet on, including numerous player stat categories, but for the sake of simplicity our experts focus primarily on things like line bets and outright wins.

There is plenty that goes into creating our NBA betting tips – it’s certainly not a case of just throwing a dart in the general direction of a dartboard and hoping it hits. For starters, the experts that create our NBA tips and predictions have a lifetime worth of accumulated knowledge, having followed the NBA and basketball more broadly since they could walk.

Of course, knowing about the NBA is not enough to make good NBA betting tips. After all, betting is a game of finding value. It’s not just about what you think is going to happen; after all, that is exactly what the odds are based on. It’s about finding an edge over the bookmakers; finding bets that look like they present good value.

This requires plenty of research, because our opposition in all this are bookmakers who have experience, a bunch of experts, algorithms and whatever else at their disposal. Finding an edge over them is not easy and winning is certainly not something you can expect to do, but our experts look to find a statistical edge that makes profiting over the long term that little bit more likely.

There are a massive range of different factors that go into creating our NBA tips and predictions beyond simply looking at a matchup and deciding what we think will happen based on gut feel. Below, we go into a little more detail about the various considerations we have prior to putting out our tips for NBA.

As with any sport that you bet on, there are a number of things to consider when betting on the NBA. These are some of the main factors that influence our NBA predictions.

Recent form

As mentioned earlier, the NBA season is a very, very long one. Invariably, every team goes through periods of ups and downs, and our NBA experts are well across who is playing well and who is playing poorly of late. 

Take the Los Angeles Clippers last season, for example. When James Harden first joined the team, they lost a bunch of games in a row and generally looked terribly. Then everything clicked, and up until just prior to the All-Star break they were one of the best teams in the league and looked like a championship contender. But it didn’t last, and their form soon fell off a cliff and their season ended in ignominious fashion.

Overall record in a season as long as that of the NBA is not always the best indicator of how a team is travelling. Whenever you’re making NBA predictions, it’s pivotal to know how a team has been playing recently, and our NBA tipsters always consider this when making their NBA tips and predictions.

Home/road records

This is something that our tipsters will consider in most sports, but it is particularly important in the NBA. With so much travelling involved in the fixture, a team enjoying the luxuries of their own home and playing on their home court can result in a vastly different performance than when they are on the road. 

Take a look at some of the best teams last season, for example. The Celtics were an incredible 37-4 at home, compared to 27-14 on the road; the Bucks went 31-11 in Milwaukee and 18-22 on the road, while both the Thunder and the Nuggets – the top two teams in the West – were 33-8 at home and 24-17 away.

The home/road record discrepancy is more significant for some teams than others, but generally it plays a major role, so we always factor in how both teams involved in a game tend to perform at home and away.

Player availability

With such a heavy load for NBA players, it’s no surprise that throughout the course of a season, most of them spend at least a little bit of time off the court nursing some sort of an injury. Very few players get through all 82 games unscathed, and with such a high volume of game teams aren’t too concerned with sitting players out even if they just have a little niggle.

The NBA has also had an issue at times with what is termed ‘player management’ – basically, players being rested just for the sake of it. They have now brought in certain rules to prevent it where possible, but there can still be quite a lot of fluctuation in player availability from night to night.

As you would expect, this can significantly influence a team’s performance, particularly given there are only five players on the court in basketball so the absence of one star can drastically change the quality of a team. For our daily NBA tips, we will always keep an eye on any potential absences for both teams.

Schedule situation

This is a funny one which is fairly unique to basketball – or really, to any sport with such a high number of games throughout the year. Unlike in a league like AFL or NRL, where every game is important, it’s not quite such a big deal to drop a game here and there in the NBA.

That’s not to say teams do it on purpose, but there can be matchups which are always going to be a tough ask for a team based largely on their schedule – something the industry terms ‘schedule losses’. 

Back to backs are a big topic of conversation in the league, these occurring when a team plays two games in two nights. These are particularly difficult if the two games are in different cities, resulting in a squad playing one game, jumping on a plane late at night, arriving in a new city early in the morning and then having to play again that night. Clearly this takes a toll and makes it hard to perform at a high level, so rather than purely looking at the matchup, our NBA tips always factor in the schedule situation for both teams. 

Game relevance

Game relevance is something that comes into play in most sporting leagues in the world, particularly later in the season. The NBA generally does a reasonable job of avoiding this courtesy of the fact that, with the advent of the Play-In Tournament, there are now ten teams that either make the playoffs or get the chance to play off for a spot in them in each Conference – that’s out of 15 teams. Assuming another team or two below those top ten are in the hunt till relatively late in the season, and most teams have something to play for deep into the season.

But invariably there are still some teams which are never going to make the playoffs, or which are locked into a particular position with a few games left in the season. In these cases, often those teams won’t be at their absolute best. So when you’re reading our NBA predictions for today, you can be sure that our experts have factored in what the motivation level for each team is likely to be.

If you are looking for NBA tips for today, NBA tips for tomorrow or NBA tips for the weekend, then you’ll be able to find them at MyBettingAustralia. Our team of experts is hard at work throughout the week, scouring the odds and multitude of matchups that take place every day to try to find the best value for our NBA tips. This is a process which involves plenty of research, and the result is NBA tips for you to take a look at multiple days of the week.

On our NBA predictions pages, you will find specific bets with the odds listed, as well as different bookmakers at which you can get some of the best NBA odds. That means that it’s easy for you to simply directly copy our NBA betting tips – if you trust us of course!

But that doesn’t mean you have to do it that way. Maybe you’re a seasoned bettor simply looking for a little bit of inspiration, or you want to have a look at whether the NBA tips of other punters align with yours. With our detailed analysis and insights that come along with all of our NBA predictions, you can take a look at whether our views fit in with yours, which may serve to further validate your own perspectives – or to make you look at things another way.

Ultimately the bets that you place are up to you, but with our well-researched NBA tips and analysis that comes with it, we think that we can provide something of value to every punter, be they a seasoned veteran or a complete amateur.

How much weight do we put on history? This is a question that you need to consider whether you’re betting, tipping, creating your fantasy team or basically doing anything to do with sport that requires making a prediction.

Realistically, this is a layered question that depends on exactly what element of history you’re considering, and what it is that you are betting on. For our NBA tips and predictions, our experts certainly place some emphasis on history and certain trends that have emerged, but generally this is confined to relatively recent history.

We are not too concerned, for example, on how two teams have matched up over the past two decades. Teams play each other so often in the NBA and rosters change so dramatically that what happened a few years ago probably has minimal bearing on today’s NBA tips.

But shorter term trends, such as the aforementioned home advantages of some teams, are certainly worth considering, and occasionally there will be longer term trends that we will consider too. Take, for example, the dominance of LeBron James over the Toronto Raptors. This is something that harks way back to when he and his Cavs were competing regularly against the Raptors in the Eastern Conference playoffs, and even nearing his 40s he has continued to seemingly hold that team in some sort of trance. At this stage there is clearly a psychological nature to this trend both for LeBron and the Raptors, so recognising that he is probably likely to put in a big performance is something that we will factor in to our NBA tips.

Some other historical trends can be relevant too. For example, the Nuggets have long held a really distinct home court advantage, in the eyes of many due to the altitude in Denver to which they are accustomed, and their opponents are not. Whether that is truly the reason is hard to know unless you have played basketball in Denver, but whatever the reason, there is no denying that you can bank on the Nuggets being very tough to beat at home most seasons.   

While NBA tips for today and tomorrow are the modus operandi for most NBA bettors, including our own, there are other markets available to you that you can follow throughout the entirety of a season.

Most sporting leagues will have some futures markets available for punters, with the bigger betting apps and sites generally having a fair few more than the smaller ones, and the NBA must have one of the most extensive range of futures markets to bet on.

For starters, you have all the team-based markets on which you can make NBA predictions. The most obvious among these is the Championship winner, but you can also bet on teams to make the playoffs, to make the Conference Finals, and to make the NBA Finals.

Plus, there are a huge number of different individual player awards in the NBA, and with the big NBA betting sites you will find markets for virtually all of them. The most well known among these is the MVP as well as the NBA Finals MVP, but there are plenty of others; Rookie of the Year, Most Improved Player, Sixth Man of the Year, while you can also bet on the Coach of the Year.

All of these different markets give you something different to bet on when it comes to the NBA, an allow you to place a bet which you can follow for months and months.

Below, we answer some of the most frequently asked questions that readers have about the NBA.