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All times Eastern, and all odds via Caesars Sportsbook
🔥 The Hot Ticket
Lakers at Warriors, 9 p.m. | TV: ESPN
- Main trends: In four games against Golden State, Schroder averages 21.75 points and assists.
- The pick: Dennis Schroder over 11.5 points and assists (-129)
When it comes to betting on player props, I like to look for instances where the sportsbooks deviate from the averages and projections for a player and don’t pay enough attention to the specific matchup. They are not always easy to find, but I believe I found one tonight.
Dennis Schroder was primarily a starter until D’Angelo Russell showed up, then Schroder moved to the bench to lead the second unit. However, there are certain matchups where the team leans more on him than others, despite his non-starting role. Golden State is one of those teams where Schröder’s role is getting bigger because, based on what I see, Darvin Ham wants him to defend this team at the fringe much more than D’Angelo Russell does.
This also leads to Schroder taking on a more prominent role on the offensive side. Schroder averaged 21.75 points and assists per game against the Warriors in four games this season. In Game 1, Schroder finished with 19 points and three assists. Although I don’t expect him to play such a scoring role tonight, he should continue to score enough minutes.
So far in the postseason, Schroder has played five games in which he was grounded for at least 20 minutes. In those five games, he averaged 12.6 points and assists per game. The only time he finished below total in those games was Game 6 against Memphis when he only scored two points but had five assists.
Here’s what SportsLine says about the game: The projection model doesn’t like traditional plays, but our SportsLine handicappers have found a slew of props they’re happy to deploy tonight.
💰 The choices
Getty Images
🏀 Another pick of Lakers vs. Warriors
The Pick: Jordan Poole over 1.5 3pt FG (-163) — There’s been a lot of discussion about Jordan Poole’s deep three-point effort at the end of Game 1. I don’t care. Good shot or bad shot, all that matters to me in the context of this bet is that Poole took the shot. Do you know why he shot? Because there isn’t a shot Poole doesn’t believe he will make.
This attitude is prevalent among the Warriors shooters, and it’s an attitude that Steve Kerr, Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson Poole encourage. So he may have missed the shot in Game 1, but that won’t stop Poole from shooting more tonight. He’ll keep chuckling, and damn, two of them will probably go in there.
⚾MLB
Blue Jays at Red Sox, 18:10 | TV: MLB.TV
The Pick: Masataka Yoshida over 1.5 bases in total (+123) — Yoshida has been as good as the Red Sox could have hoped for since signing him and taking him across the Pacific. He hits .303/.391/.515 in his first 115 at bats with five home runs and 21 runs batted in. He also has more time thrown out (13) than he struck out (11). Note that he has been better against judges and has shown more power against them. Of his 11 extra-base hits, nine were against right-handers, and he has an XBH% of 11.1% against right-handers, which is pretty good.
In the past week, Yoshida has swung only 30% of the pitches he’s seen, but he’s made contact 92.6% of the time when he swings. His barrel rate is 13.6% and his hard-hit rate is 72.7% in that range. All this suggests that he is locked into the board and is not wasting his time on something that he will not crush.
🔒 SportsLine pick of the day: Not only does the projection model have an A-score on the aggregate in tonight’s game between the Dallas Stars and Seattle Kraken, but three SportsLine handicappers are also in the same game.