Every NBA DFS participant has said it thought it:”If I pile this match and it moves into Overtime, I will make all of the money.” And more frequently than not, the match does not enter Overtime (OT). That led me to ask the following questions:

1. How frequently does NBA OT actually occur?
2. How many more points are scored in OT games?

I gathered data from the previous 3 seasons (2013-14, 2014-15, 2015-16). My findings are below, with the most important findings bolded for people who are lazy and just want to skim through. 1 thing worth mentioning — once I use the term”OT” below, it refers to some game beyond regulation (i.e. OT, 2OT, 3OT, etc.). If you are curious, just 17 percent of OT matches went past a single OT. Let’s dive in!

How often does NBA OT actually occur?

Each season, you will find 1,230 NBA games played. I expected the amount of OT games to vary widely by year, as OT feels just like something that you can not predict. But if you have a look at the graph below, OT has occurred between 6.2% to 6.4percent of NBA games each of the past 3 seasons. To put it differently, when you stack a game and hope for OT, you’re really hoping for an occasion that happens about 6.3% of their time.

I was curious how our present 2016-17 NBA period compared. As of 1/31/2017, there have been 44 OT games out of those 729 games playedwith. If you project that out to the full season, it’s approximately 74 OT games out of this 1,230, which will be 6.0% (right around the 6.3% average over the past 3 seasons). That is a sample of 4,400+ matches we are using here within 3.5 seasons, so it’s a decent sized sample we are working with.

How a lot more points are scored in OT games?

This second question is valuable to me since if we will stack games, I want to measure the benefits of the extra 5 (or more) minutes. So what I did was calculate the average overall score of these OT games, calculate the average overall score of these non-OT matches, and find the difference. By complete score, what I mean is if a match finished with a score of 100-98, the total score is 198.

What we find is in the previous 3 seasons, the average OT game had a entire score of 221.0 points, although the average non-OT match had a entire score of 201.2 points, a difference of 19.8 points. This makes sense — matches with an extra 5 or more minutes tend to have higher total scores awarded that players have more chances to make baskets.

So to summarize, we are apt to see OT occur around 6% of their time, allowing the sport to have about 20 more total points. That’s a massive advantage for DFS players in case you’re lucky enough to have piled an OT game.

Read more here: http://mads.org/en/2019/2018-bojangles-southern-500-betting-odds/