This Week: Hansel Wei on Betting the NBA . Read the whole article in Hansel's Zone at GoSportsBet.

In basketball, there is simply less luck involved. When making sports wagers (a task with inherent risk involved) we as professional handicappers and you as someone choosing who to bet on want there to be as little “luck” involved as possible, because the more room for “luck,” the greater chance that something can go wrong in our calculations! Think of all the ways luck plays into football. There is the coin toss to start the game, and particularly importantly, to start overtime. The ball itself is shaped in a way that increases the chances of “bad bounces” and can be hard to catch or control. The difference in conditions for games can quite literally be like night and day, rain or shine (or snow?), or summer and winter. So your team looked pretty good one week, on a nice indoor field. How can you have any confidence they’ll play the same way when it’s -10 out, it’s snowing, and it’s getting dark? Exactly. Also, there are more than 50 players on a team and at least 30 of those will see meaningful playing time. In basketball, around 7 of the 12 players on the bench will have an impact on the game. Why play with 30 variables when you could play with 7? Want more examples? Okay. In basketball the two teams will combine to score on about 100 plays. In football, the average is about 8. This means that an unpredictable fluke play has far more impact in football than it does in basketball.
I’ve given plenty of examples, and I’m sure you can think of more. Finally, because basketball has a longer season and because (in theory) it is a noncontact sport, injuries play far less of a role than they do in football. Allen Iverson might get banged up, but he’s not in a position where it’s Warren Sapp’s stated goal to cream him on every possession. Since there are only 16 games in the regular season, injuries can really affect how a team performs for the whole year. Basketball is much easier to handicap than football because of the absence of key numbers, and the reduced “luck” factor makes for far fewer unpredictable twists. If you’re worried about not being able to handicap all the basketball games the way you would with football, remember that you don’t have to play all of them, and one solution is to just follow a handful of teams throughout the first few weeks until you gain confidence. For the reasons outlined above, all the pros bet football and basketball. There’s no reason you can’t too.

READ THE REST NOW