| 02 April 2010
Tonight Phoenix plays in Detroit as 8.5 point favorites. You have the Suns walking in the Palace with a nine game win streak, playing the best ball they have all season, while the pistons are on a nine game losing streak, their last victory over the Washington Gutted Corpses of all teams.
This is precisely the type of game I would never, ever, ever, never bet on!
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I used to bet basketball regularly and I always felt that gamblers who bet in the last two weeks of the season were the True degenerates. I say true with a capital "T" to separate out those gamblers with the rest of us normal degenerate gamblers.
I learned early that teams just don't play the same in the last ten games. Teams like the Pistons may seem like pushovers and some of them may have simply given up by now, but man-oh-man do they love spoiling things at home for good teams like Phoenix. Nothing vindicates a poor season more than upsetting the hottest team in the league. It's just one of those little asterisks a player will be able to file away mentally to make themselves feel better about the futility of their extra effort. (I'm not even going to get into the good teams doggin' it and losing to a team they shouldn't.)
Of course, no one loves a good upset more than the home crowd of a downtrodden team. They've probably dutifully sat in the stands with their season tickets with nothing to shout about all season, until possibly, tonight. I'm not trying to suggest the Suns are "due" to lose and the Pistons are "due" to win. As a mathematician, I know statistics don't work like that. There is no "Law of Averages" that guarantees the gambler anything but a quick trip to the ATM to replenish their pocket change. As a gambler, who has never bet a sure thing, this game simply feels like a set-up to me. The Phoenix are winding down with the fourth game in a five game road trip, five games in seven days. Today is four games in six days. Tomorrow is five games in seven days. And tomorrow they play the Milwaukee Bucks.
For those that have not been paying attention, the Bucks have had pretty much the same season as the Suns, only not quite as good. They started out a respectable 8-3, until they lost their way from the end of November to late January and have since turned things around. In the span of time the Suns have gone 23-5, the Bucks have gone 23-8. It's down right creepy how much the two teams have paralleled each other. The Suns pulled out a 105-101 win in Phoenix and even though I don't know the spread for tomorrow, there's no way I could bet on the Suns.
My prediciton, which is worth its weight mallow cup money, is that the Suns have a tough game tonight. They may win, but I doubt they cover the spread. And tomorrow, the Bucks win. The Suns will be too tired. This has been a tough road trip, in spite of the competition, and even though the Bucks have lost three of five, two of those games came from Miami and Cleveland. They are still playing well beating the teams they shoudl be beating.
Now that I have doled out my dose of reality, or maybe some would call it doom and gloom,
GO SUNS!
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