As always, keep an eye on injuries and COVID Issues. All stats pulled are TEAM stats from the Last 8 games (L8) and don’t account for individual players. So be aware of new absences and players returning from an absence that could skew the L8 Team stats.
I will regularly post updates throughout the day and annotate with a “*”.
Team Consistency Update
Somebody asked about each teams Variance so I thought I’d post an update.
What this chart is showing is each teams Variance, Standard Deviation (Std Dev), Ave Score for the season, average score over the last 8 games, and a Trending value. The list is ordered from lowest team variance to most team variance. The variance is how wide spread the data is, a team that scores between 100 and 102 points every night will have very low variance, whereas a team that scores anywhere from 75 to 145 on a given night will have very high variance. The Std Dev is the square root of the variance and is a good measure for how consistent a team is… NOT how good or bad a team is, but how consistent they are. Std Dev shows the amount a teams score typically deviates from the average on a given night. The Nuggets score (typically) will deviate about 6.72 points from there average on a given night, where the Wizards score (typically) will deviate 17.87 points from their average on a given night. Obviously the lower the Std Dev the easier it is for my models to project the score and provide higher probabilities. The Trending value is an indication of if a team is scoring more points over the last 8 game than there season average. If they are averaging more points over the last 8 than their season average, the trending value will be positive, if the are averaging less than their season average, the trending value will be negative.
Records
Here is how the models have been performing.
ATS Record
O/U Record
Top Performing Models
Based on Average Win % between ATS and O/U.
- Random Forest – 57%
- kNN – 57%
- Neural Net – 55%
- Ada Boost – 53%
- Basic Model – 51%
- Linear Regression – 51%
- SVM – 49%
- SGD – 46%
Summary of Projections
ATS Projections
O/U Projections
Player and Team News
Teams on a back to back: Knicks (Home), Kings (Sac to LA).
Paul George is out for the Clippers. His impact will not be reflected in the stats.
Nurkic and McCollum still out for Blazers, but they have missed enought time for the stats to account for their absence.
Mike Conley is out for the Jazz, His absence will not be reflected in the stats.
Jaylen Bronw and Marcus Smart are out for the Celtics, Neither of their absences will be reflected in the stats.
Jae Crowder is out for the second straight game for the suns. his absence will not be reflected in the stats.
Sharp Report
Early Money
No Noticeable Sharp action this morning.
Mid Day
ATS – Sharp money has come in on the Hornets (+2.5).
O/U – Sharp money has come in on the Heat/Knicks Under (212.5), Celtics/Suns Under (219), and Clippers/Kings Under (230.5).
Late Afternoon
No late report today.
Model Projections
1. Random Forest (R.F.)
[Nerd Talk] Best performance is capped at about 50 trees, anything more than that and the processing time/power required for a very minor improvement increases exponentially.
Record
Record: 53% ATS, 60% O/U.
ATS
O/U
Model Projections
How to read the projections: The model type is at the very top. Matchups are denoted by the alternating white/green pairings, away teams are on top, home teams on bottom. The model analyzes the matchup and projects the home and away teams score (Proj Score). The difference between the home teams score and the away teams score give us what the model says the line should be (Proj Line). The “Line” column is what the Vegas line is at the time I run the model. The “Line Diff” is the difference in the projected line and the Vegas line. A positive line diff means the projected line is in the away teams favor compared to the Vegas line, negative means the projected line is in the home teams favor. The “Cover Prob” uses a normal distribution and the teams variance to project each teams probability to cover the listed Vegas line. Same thing for totals, “Proj Total” is the sum of the projected scores, “Line Total” is the listed Vegas total for the game, the difference between the two, and the probability to go over or stay under denoted by “O” and “U”.
Betting Edge
If you don’t understand what you are looking at, I recommend reading my post about betting tips. The percentages show the betting Edge, which is the cover prob (from above) minus the implied probability (-110 odds implied prob is 52.4%). If a team has a 92.4% chance to win and a 52.4% implied probability (or -110 odds), the Edge is 40%. The Edge alone doesn’t mean you should blindly bet it. To quantify, >35% is great value, 20-35% is really good, 10-20% is decent, <10 is ok value, blanks are negative value. ML is moneyline.
2. k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN)
The lazy learner (That’s what my grad school prof called it). Nearest Neighbor has performed best with 30 Neighbors.
Record
Record: 56% ATS, 57% O/U.
ATS
O/U
Model Projections
How to read the projections: The model type is at the very top. Matchups are denoted by the alternating white/green pairings, away teams are on top, home teams on bottom. The model analyzes the matchup and projects the home and away teams score (Proj Score). The difference between the home teams score and the away teams score give us what the model says the line should be (Proj Line). The “Line” column is what the Vegas line is at the time I run the model. The “Line Diff” is the difference in the projected line and the Vegas line. A positive line diff means the projected line is in the away teams favor compared to the Vegas line, negative means the projected line is in the home teams favor. The “Cover Prob” uses a normal distribution and the teams variance to project each teams probability to cover the listed Vegas line. Same thing for totals, “Proj Total” is the sum of the projected scores, “Line Total” is the listed Vegas total for the game, the difference between the two, and the probability to go over or stay under denoted by “O” and “U”.
Betting Edge
If you don’t understand what you are looking at, I recommend reading my post about betting tips. The percentages show the betting Edge, which is the cover prob (from above) minus the implied probability (-110 odds implied prob is 52.4%). If a team has a 92.4% chance to win and a 52.4% implied probability (or -110 odds), the Edge is 40%. The Edge alone doesn’t mean you should blindly bet it. To quantify, >35% is great value, 20-35% is really good, 10-20% is decent, <10 is ok value, blanks are negative value. ML is moneyline.
3. Neural Network (NN)
[Nerd Talk] The activation function for this 100 layer NN is a linear function. The solver is an SGD.
Record
Record: 52% ATS, 58% O/U.
ATS
O/U
Model Projections
How to read the projections: The model type is at the very top. Matchups are denoted by the alternating white/green pairings, away teams are on top, home teams on bottom. The model analyzes the matchup and projects the home and away teams score (Proj Score). The difference between the home teams score and the away teams score give us what the model says the line should be (Proj Line). The “Line” column is what the Vegas line is at the time I run the model. The “Line Diff” is the difference in the projected line and the Vegas line. A positive line diff means the projected line is in the away teams favor compared to the Vegas line, negative means the projected line is in the home teams favor. The “Cover Prob” uses a normal distribution and the teams variance to project each teams probability to cover the listed Vegas line. Same thing for totals, “Proj Total” is the sum of the projected scores, “Line Total” is the listed Vegas total for the game, the difference between the two, and the probability to go over or stay under denoted by “O” and “U”.
Betting Edge
If you don’t understand what you are looking at, I recommend reading my post about betting tips. The percentages show the betting Edge, which is the cover prob (from above) minus the implied probability (-110 odds implied prob is 52.4%). If a team has a 92.4% chance to win and a 52.4% implied probability (or -110 odds), the Edge is 40%. The Edge alone doesn’t mean you should blindly bet it. To quantify, >35% is great value, 20-35% is really good, 10-20% is decent, <10 is ok value, blanks are negative value. ML is moneyline.