by A.J. Coltrane
From the Wall Street Journal: The Dallas Mavericks covered against the spread 15 times in a row(!) prior to Game 2 of the NBA Western Conference Finals.
The Mavs were 5 point favorites in Game 2, but lost to the game and ended the streak.
The WSJ piece has an odd title – “The Team Las Vegas Can’t Figure Out”. But then there’s this:
“There’s clearly a major disconnect between perception and reality here,” said Andrew Garrood, executive director of Las Vegas Sports Consultants. “It’s safe to say we won’t see anything like this again for a long time.”
and
Bell said the Mavs have been receiving a boost from the bookmakers this postseason because of their opponents. Their first-round foe, the Portland Trail Blazers, were a media darling and a popular pick to win among analysts and fans. Meanwhile, the Lakers are a marquee team that typically receives a disproportionate number of bets, which swayed the line a bit in Dallas’s favor throughout that series.
I think the excerpts above spell it out pretty well — the title of the piece is something of a misnomer: It isn’t Las Vegas that hasn’t figured out the Mavs, it’s all the squares who continue to bet for the “media darlings.” It’s the same reason that I have to be truly convinced before I’m going to place a bet on any of the following teams: Yankees, Red Sox, Cowboys, Notre Dame, or whoever is the current “flavor of the month” in the media.
The piece would have been better served with a different, more appropriate title: “The Wrong Way To Bet On Sports”
But that would stink of helping to teach people how to gamble on sports, and there’s no way they could publish it like that.
FlatbreadGarden 