The Utah Jazz have the NBA’s best record this season, but there’s an even better way to measure their unexpectedly magnificent start: They also have the NBA’s best record against the betting line.
The Jazz are beating everybody. They’re even beating Las Vegas.
Their 71% rate of covering the point spread is not only the highest in the league this season but would be by far the highest of any season in recent NBA history, according to Team Rankings, which tracks gambling data going back to 2004.
“This doesn’t normally happen,” said Johnny Avello, the DraftKings director of race and sports operations. “Maybe us oddsmakers haven’t caught up to them yet.”
It’s especially peculiar that the Jazz are such a good betting team because they’re such a good team, period.
Every betting line reflects a number of factors that have been calculated by quants to lure bettors and make casinos huge gobs of money: the power rating of each team, the strength of their home-court advantage, the variables of injuries, the effects of scheduling and the uncertainty of Covid-19 in this strange pandemic season.
But oddsmakers also must account for the most unpredictable part of each casino’s business: human beings. In a perfectly efficient market, a point spread would be simple math. But the books want equal action on both sides of the wager—and that’s where the public comes in. It doesn’t only matter how good the Jazz are. It also matters how good the millions with access to legalized sports betting think the Jazz are.
The only way a team can fool Vegas so frequently is to be misvalued by the public. It’s not enough to be great. For a team to beat the line on a consistent basis, they have to be great without most people realizing they’re great. As it turns out, that is the Jazz. Sports books have been forced to update their lines accordingly.
“But it doesn’t seem to have mattered, does it?” Avello said. “We continue to make adjustments on them—and they’re still covering. I guess there will be more adjustments to make.”
They might keep beating down the rest of the league. But they’re going to have to be even more dominant to keep beating the spread. Those adjustments explain why teams can’t defy the odds forever and the Jazz may not be such an outlier by the end of the season. As the oddsmakers crank their power rating higher—the Jazz are now basically even with the full-strength Los Angeles Lakers and Brooklyn Nets—they say to expect an inevitable regression. Anyone betting on them will essentially be paying a Jazz tax.
“If you see what they’ve done and start jumping in now,” said Jeff Sherman, the Westgate SuperBook’s vice president of risk management, “I don’t think that’s going to be a profitable solution.”
There was very little reason to see this glorious Jazz season coming. They were bounced in the first round of last year’s bubble playoffs, and there were eight teams with higher preseason win totals for this year. Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert are rarely mentioned in the same breath as other All-Stars. Mike Conley is widely known as
the nicest guy in the league. So they are not the most intimidating title contenders.
But the oddsmakers are struggling with the Jazz for the same reasons the Jazz are befuddling the NBA teams attempting to solve them.
Their defense is suffocating, but there is nothing surprising about that. In fact, over the past five seasons, Utah has the NBA’s most efficient defense. What’s different about this team is their uncharastically explosive offense. They are testing the limits of basketball even without a singular talent like Stephen Curry or James Harden.
The Jazz are taking 48.6% of their shots this season as 3-pointers and making 39.6% of them for a combination of volume and efficiency that the NBA has never seen before. They are taking way more threes than
the revolutionary Warriors teams in 2015 and 2016 and making way more of them than
the experimental Rockets teams from 2017 until 2020.
The results have been astonishing. At one point this season, the Jazz won 20 of 21 games. Every statistical metric now suggests they are the NBA’s team to beat, even if the eye test favors teams with LeBron James and Anthony Davis or Kevin Durant and James Harden. That’s partly because all those 3-pointers from their stars and role players like Joe Ingles, Jordan Clarkson and Bojan Bogdanovic allow them to score in torrents. “They can change the complexion of a game so quickly,” Sherman said.
What they’re doing is quietly bonkers. It’s also driving Vegas crazy.
How they play makes the oddsmakers’ jobs hard enough. Who’s watching them play doesn’t help. The Jazz already had the edge of having an office at high altitude, but there is something else unfamiliar about their arena this season: fans. With nearly 4,000 people allowed in their building, they now have another kind of home-court advantage.
It could be even more significant in the playoffs. If the Jazz solidify themselves as the No. 1 seed in the West, they could avoid one of the Lakers and Clippers, who might find themselves battling each other as the No. 2 and 3 seeds. That helps the Jazz’s championship probability. So does a potential Western Conference Finals opponent in Los Angeles, where fans are still waiting to get back into games.
This season for the Jazz really started right around this time last season, when coach Quin Snyder’s team settled on
a proven formula for winning in today’s NBA: shoot more threes. The Jazz were launching nearly 40 per game in March for the league’s highest 3-point reliance that month as they checked into their hotel in Oklahoma City one year ago next week.
And then Gobert felt sick. His
positive coronavirus test on the
first official day of the pandemic was enough to
suspend the NBA season,
shut down sports and forever change American life. Suddenly not even the Jazz cared about the 3-point rate of the Jazz.
It was easy to miss the Jazz taking even more threes in the NBA bubble, especially after they lost in Game 7 of their first-round series, when one of their many 3-pointers rimmed out at the buzzer. What they did next was curious for a team without much playoff success: They came back with almost exactly the same roster. But they were about to become a new team because of their new style.
It’s been torture for other teams. It might get worse soon. When the league released the schedule for the second half of the season, there was some troubling news for the NBA—and the NBA’s handicappers.
The team with the easiest remaining schedule? None other than the Utah Jazz.
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