Steph Curry is the most exciting shooter to ever play the game of basketball, you don’t need me to explain that to you. So when he pulls up from 30 feet with two defenders draped on him everyone watching the game is fairly certain that the ball is going to go through the net. Hence where the “Steph Curry 30-footer Pick of the Day” name came from. I’m not confident enough to call these picks a lock, and I don’t want to deal with the angry emails of how you had to remortgage your house off a bet that I lost you. I don’t need that on my conscience. So these picks, for the most part, will always go in but I’m not going to get 100% right. My one mission is to make you feel like a dumbass if you have a different opinion than me.  

 

The NBA season is here, which means for the next 8 month I will be spending every night in front of my T.V. watching dudes try to put a ball in a hoop. I’m going to be so upset in June when I find out I was oblivious to my girlfriend breaking up with me in January. Anyways, we’re three games in and I feel like this is a good time to start betting. So to pop the proverbial  2018-19 NBA season betting cherry I’m going with a Tuesday night matchup of Pelicans vs. Clippers.

New Orleans comes into this game with an impressive win against the Rockets to open the season, an expected beating of the clueless Kings, and a loss to what seems to be the best team in the East, the Toronto Raptors. With Alvin Gentry coaching for his job and presumably the last season of the Anthony Davis Pelicans era, New Orleans has gone full pace and space. Hell, they out Rocketed the Rockets last week.

On the other hand, you have the Clippers who also beat the Rockets along with a win against a lost Thunder team, and a loss to the undefeated Nuggets. Boban Marjanovic has wrecked havoc on everyone in the league as this ragtag Clippers team continues to prove that they’re competitive.

Now I could rattle off boring statistics like how the Pelicans are averaging 140 points a game, which is 15 points higher than the next closest team (somehow the Kings are scoring 125 a game), and 33 points more than the Clippers. Or that they are the 4th fastest team in the league while being the most efficient. I could do all that, but I’m going to go with the absolute easiest take out there: Anthony Davis is really freaking good.

Through three games Davis is averaging 28 points, 13 rebounds and seven assists a game. Please tell me how the hell you’re supposed to defend that. The Clippers are a top defensive team in the league right now, but much like what is going on in the NFL, defense doesn’t matter. If you can’t outscore someone on the other end, it really doesn’t matter. There’s a reason why last season the best defensive teams overlapped with the best offensive ones. When a team puts up nearly 40 points in a quarter, it forces the opposition to change their entire strategy.

So, the Clippers are tasked with throwing different players at Anthony Davis who is a mismatch the second he steps onto a court. Literally, nothing about his game makes sense. Someone at his size shouldn’t be able to defend, pass and score as well as he does.

Even if they did by some miracle slow Davis down, his supporting cast is actually serviceable. Gentry has created an offense centered around moving without the ball and finding easy looks. Spending so many years with Mike D’antoni and the seven seconds or less team is really showing. If Davis gets doubled they have playmakers in Julius Randle and Elfrid Payton who can get the ball in the hands of their perimeter guys. They’re able to play to truly play a five out offense.

This is no-brainer take NOLA.