NBA Best Parlays of Week 4

We didn’t have a great week again last time, dropping to 1-2 on the season in parlays while maintaining a 5-4 overall mark on our picks. This week we’re going to mix things up a bit and offer up two NBA betting parlays for the price of one! The first will be a pair of markets we couldn’t be more confident in, our ‘Sure-Thing Double Parlay.’ The second, the ‘Payday Accumulator Parlay’ will be a little bit more experimental and offer much greater odds, giving you a chance to win big-time paydays.

If anyone can relate to Ron Burgundy when he said that he was, “in a glass case of emotions,” it’s these Houston Rockets. After dealing with James Harden and his clear apathy for his teammates over the past few weeks, the team is finally over the hump and looking towards a new future that will hopefully be featuring willing leaders John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins in starring roles after the departure of the Beard.

Of course, Christian Wood and newcomer Victor Oladipo will also be important parts of the offense as well, though it seems unlikely that Oladipo will be ready to suit up for his new team just a day after being traded. Nonetheless, Harden literally said that this team was not good enough, so it’s not a surprise that former All-BA players like Cousins and Wall are angry. Expect them to voice that anger on the court on Thursday night in a resounding triumph.

The Rockets are the underdogs against the San Antonio Spurs on Thursday night not only because of hurricane Harden, but also because Houston has just a 3-6 record, second-worst in the Western Conference. We are expecting Wall, Cousins, Wood and company to show a lot more heart than most would expect, and while we do believe they should win this game outright, to be safe we’re going to go with the Rockets +5.5 point spread at beautiful -105 odds on sports betting site 22Bet for the first half of our Sure-Thing Double Parlay.

For the back end of our parlay, we’re going to head over to Portland where the Trailblazers will be hosting the Indiana Pacers, another team involved in that blockbuster Harden trade. While the Rockets should be expected to come out firing because those players have something to prove after being called out by the Beard, the Pacers are in a bit of a different position.

Indiana lost one of its longest tenured and best players in Oladipo, and with him out of the lineup and replacement Caris LeVert unlikely to be able to play on Thursday night, the Pacers will be a little bit short handed in the backcourt—and that’s not where you want to be missing reinforcements against the Blazers.

The guard duo of Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum (who’s having a career year averaging 28.1 points per game, second in the NBA) is unlikely to show mercy on the transforming Pacers and should be in line for an easy win. Portland has been quite good against Indiana of late as well, covering the spread the last five times they hosted the Pacers while also going 13-3 ATS in the last 16 meetings between these two squads.

We’re taking Portland’s -2.5 spread at -105 odds as the second leg of our Sure-Thing parlay this week.

For our inaugural Payday Accumulator Parlay we’re going to go to one of our favorite betting strategies. This strategy theorizes that instead of teams slacking on offense and shooting poorly when they’re tired, they would instead allow themselves to be lazy moreso on the defensive end, which is much less interesting to most players.

This strategy—which has been used at a 59 success rate by the good people at Sports Geek in the past— tells us that if one or both teams are playing in the final leg of a three-games-in-four-days stretch, they will slack off on the defensive end and allow for over bettors to cash out. Considering how often teams will be playing this season, there will be ample opportunities to test this strategy out for ourselves.

For now, we’ve found three games on this Thursday slate that fit into that category for which we’ll take the over prop: Heat @ 76ers, Pacers @ Blazers, and Hornets @ Raptors. The contest between the Pacers and Blazers is a particularly solid bet here considering the fact that both teams will be on the final leg of a three-in-four.

That leaves us one short of an accumulator, however. So, to bring our wager up to four and stay in the spirit of things, we’ve tacked on another over in Warriors @ Nuggets, which is pitting two of the NBA’s worst defenses and most potent offenses against one another in a Rocky Mountain showdown. Do +1196 odds tickle your fancy, accumulator bettors?