NBA Betting – San Antonio Spurs at Miami Heat

San Antonio Spurs (-6.5) at Miami Heat

If the season ended today, the defending NBA champs, the San Antonio Spurs (47-26, 18-18 away), would be the No. 6 seed in the Western Conference and travel to Houston to open the playoffs.

The Spurs still have some time to change their fate and gain home-court advantage for at least the first round, though. They currently sit just one game back of the fourth-place Trail Blazers with nine games to go. Tonight, Tim Duncan and company will look to climb a little higher in the standings when they visit Eastern Conference playoff hopefuls the Miami Heat (34-39, 18-18 home) at American Airlines Arena (8:00 p.m. Eastern).

The Spurs have been making a strong playoff push of late, winning six of their last seven, including three straight over Oklahoma City, Dallas, and Memphis (all teams that are likely to be in the postseason).  Small forward and last year’s NBA Finals MVP Kawhi Leonard has been a big part of the recent success. He put put 25 points and ten rebounds in Sunday’s 103-89 win over the Grizzlies.

“He’s playing with more patience,” said veteran Manu Ginobili. “He knows that we’re going to look for him, and the shots are going to come. … We are not dumb, we need him to score like that. He understands that now.”

Miami, meanwhile, is seventh in the East but suddenly finds itself in a dogfight for a playoff spot with the likes of eighth-place Boston and ninth-place Brooklyn both picking up their games late in the season.

The Heat have won just two of their last five, but they managed a 109-102 victory over Detroit in their last outing and have a favorable schedule down the stretch, playing five of their last nine games against non-playoff teams.

If they can earn at least a split between tonight’s game against the defending champs and Thursday’s game against Cleveland, they’ll be poised to claim a playoff spot. Of course, the team knows that facing San Antonio always brings unique challenges.

“You always have to get up to play the Spurs,” Heat forward Udonis Haslem said. “I don’t know what their situation is in the West, but in my mind they’re still the best team in the NBA. We’ve got a huge, huge task ahead of us on Tuesday.”

The Spurs are 6.5-point favorites in the odds despite playing away from home. With the Spurs on a roll and Miami a mediocre 18-18 SU at home (16-18-2 ATS), consider laying the points.

(Photo credit: Zereshk (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons.)