3 NBA Player Prop Bets to Target on Monday 4/12/21




Nikola Vucevic Over 9.5 Rebounds (-128)

Straight up, our projections are anticipating 11.0 rebounds from Nikola Vucevic over 35.9 minutes against the Memphis Grizzlies tonight, so it's pretty reasonable to like this prop blindly before even digging into it more. Once you do that, there's even more to rally behind.

Vucevic is facing a team allowing 49.0% of rebounds (just above NBA average, naturally), so we don't have to penalize him heavily for the opponent.

Vucevic averages 0.34 rebounds per minute overall (which would get him to 12.2 at his projected minutes rate for tonight).

Dinging him a tad for the matchup against a slightly-better-than-average rebounding team still puts him around 12.0.

Plus, his per-minute rebounding rate doesn't even change from 0.34 if you look only at his games against top-half rebounding squads like the Grizzlies.

Dillon Brooks Under 17.5 Points (-116)

On the flip side of that game between the Grizzlies and Chicago Bulls, we get Dillon Brooks and a points prop that's too high. numberFire's algorithm clocks Brooks for just 15.9 points, more than 1.5 off the mark of the total, over 28.9 projected minutes.

Brooks is a 0.56-point-per-minute scorer, and at that rate, he would need 32.1 minutes to get to 18.0 tonight. The Bulls sit 18th in adjusted defensive rating on the season, so it's not particularly a plus-or-minus matchup by any means.

Brooks' per-minute scoring rate does jump against bottom-half defenses (but barely: to 0.57), and his rate against bottom-10 defenses is just 0.54.

He's not been particularly sensitive to scoring swings based on opponent on a per-minute basis, and the minutes workload isn't projected to be there tonight.

Stephen Curry Over 4.5 Three-Pointers Made (-113)

Although asking for five threes is a tall ask from anyone, even Stephen Curry, there's a clear path for him to do it tonight.

Firstly, numberFire is projecting him for 4.8, so the algorithm is leaning toward the over -- but only just.

The Denver Nuggets are allowing a three-point attempt rate of 41.1%, the 9th-highest in the NBA and around 104.6% of the NBA average.

If we boost Curry's per-minute attempt rate (0.34) accordingly over his projected minutes (35.2) and give him his season-long three-point percentage (41.2%), he's looking at 5.2 made threes on around 12.6 attempts. At his career average (43.3%), he'd be at around 5.5 makes.

Outright, Curry has at least 5 three-point makes in 26 of 45 games (a 57.8% clip) and went 5 for 11 from deep against the Nuggets on the road in mid-January.