NBA betting free picks: Washington @ Cleveland

Added on Jan 06, 2010 by Jack Thurman in

The Washington Wizards gave us a nice NBA betting winner last night as they won outright against Philadelphia as +4′ dogs. They’ll step up in class on Wednesday night as they travel to the Quicken Loans Arena to take on LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers. This is the Cavs last game at home before their longest and arguably toughest road trip of the year, a five game west coast jaunt.

Washington Wizards at Cleveland Cavaliers
January 6, 4:05 PM Pacific

Cleveland has been in excellent form of late, winning seven straight and 12 of 14. They’ve also been very good at home with a 13-3 SU mark, and the loss to Charlotte on Sunday ended an 11 game home winning streak. Where they’ve struggled this season is against the pointspread and particularly at home. The Cavs are just 5-11 ATS at home and 13-18 ATS overall as a favorite. They also have a 5-10 ATS record playing teams with losing records. It’s not surprising for a team with championship aspirations to struggle against the NBA’s bottom feeders–they’re faced with an opponent that provides no special motivation and simultaneously expected to cover a big pointspread. That’s a tough task for even the best teams. The schedule doesn’t help Cleveland either. While they are 5-3 ATS off of an upset loss as a favorite, the looming road trip with stops in Denver, Portland, Utah, Golden State and Los Angeles to play the Clippers is a much bigger focus at this point. Even Cavs’ coach Mike Brown admitted this was a concern, and stressed that the Wizards are a very dangerous opponent in this situation:

“They’re very capable of coming in here tomorrow and giving us a good run. They get up to play us … if they beat us they can use it as a game to say we’ve arrived, we’ve got over the hump, now let’s start rolling.”

There’s speculation that the Wizards’ Gilbert Arenas may be suspended by the NBA due to the ‘firearms in the locker room’ issue but with the points involved we still like Washington in this spot regardless. It’s doubtful that the NBA would suspend him before letting him give his side of the story and he hasn’t been contacted by the league office as of yet, so most likely he’ll be in the lineup here. We don’t see Washington pulling the outright upset, but we don’t see them getting blown out either and at this price a competitive effort will cash our ticket.

Bet Washington +13′ over Cleveland