NBA Playoff Betting – (7) Mavericks at (2) Rockets

Dallas Mavericks at Houston Rockets (-5, 211 o/u)

After getting the second seed in the Western Conference, the Houston Rockets look to start their playoffs series against the Dallas Mavericks with a win.  Game one will be this Saturday at the Toyota Center in Houston (9:30 p.m. Eastern).

The Rockets closed the season with three straight wins and narrowly held off the Grizzlies and Spurs for first place in the stacked Southwest Division.

Despite missing key pieces all season, Houston boasted the sixth-best offense in the NBA. James Harden’s MVP type season kept the Rockets scoring at a pace all year; the former Sun Devil averaged 27.4 points per game to go along with 7.0 assists.

Now that center Dwight Howard has returned from injury, the rest of the NBA is on notice that Houston is a legitimate title contender.

“There’s no more predictable team than the Rockets,” Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said about his team’s opponent. “You know exactly what they’re gonna do. But James Harden is so good. … If you know what the percentages are, in the playoffs, you have time to counter them. Whether you’re good enough to do it is another question.”

Dallas, on the other hand, limps into the playoffs after going 5-5 in its last ten. The team that had serious problems all season in terms of chemistry and, to make matters worse, have listed shooting guard Chandler Parsons as day-to-day with a knee injury.

“Am I concerned? Yeah, I’m concerned,” Mavs coach Rick Carlisle explained. “We’ll see where we are. We’re not going to take any risks with it. [Parsons] desperately wants to play, and he’s played hurt a lot this year. When he came back from his foot thing, he was out there a lot earlier than a lot of guys would have been. We’ve just got to make sure we’re smart about the whole thing.”

Houston won the season series 3-1 and are 4-1 ATS in their last five meetings against Dallas.

With the Rockets firing on all cylinders and the Mavs struggling to find consistency, take Houston and lay the points.

(Photo credit: thepanamerican (Flickr: Rockets v Thunder 22 by Norma Gonzalez) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons. Photo has been cropped.)