NBA Betting – Cleveland Cavaliers at Dallas Mavericks
By Zack Garrison in News
Updated: January 17, 2018 at 9:40 am ESTPublished:
Cleveland Cavaliers (-4.5, 200 o/u) at Dallas Mavericks
The streaking Cleveland Cavaliers (40-25, 16-16 away) travel to the Lone Star State tonight to meet the tepid Dallas Mavericks (41-24, 21-10 home) at American Airlines Center (8:30 p.m. Eastern).
The Cavs come into the game with three wins in the last four; on Sunday, they held the Suns under 80 points in an 89-79 win over Phoenix. Despite having all of LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, and Kevin Love in the lineup, it was Timofey Mozgov who led the Cavs with 19 points on the night.
“We came in and got great work in,” said Lebron James. “We have no room to waste an opportunity [sitting just half a game up on Chicago in the Central Deivision] and today we didn’t do that. We got better, so this is great for us.”
The Mavs also won their last outing, downing the Los Angeles Lakers, 100-93 on the weekend.  However, Dallas has lost two of three and four of its last six. Guard Monta Ellis had been struggling from the field, but caught fire against the Lakers, scoring 31 points.
“Sometimes I can be my own enemy when I go to the basket and don’t get the foul. Then I get frustrated and lose my game a little bit,” said Ellis after the win against the Lakers. “Tonight the biggest thing for me was just to get back to being aggressive — and if they call it, they call it. If they don’t, I continue to attack.”
The Mavericks are currently sixth in the Western Conference, half a game back of the Clippers and 1.5 up on the Spurs. With the eighth-place Thunder and ninth-place Pelicans both charging hard, the Mavs will need to extricate themselves from their current slump in order to stay in a playoff spot in the suddenly tight Western Conference.
In the trends, Dallas has won eight of the last ten games against Cleveland and has posted a 7-3 ATS record in those meetings. The Cavs are listed as 3.5-point favorites at the moment and the total is at 200.5 points.
(Photo credit: Keith Allison (flickr) [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode]. Photo has been cropped.)
Sports Writer
Zack is a tour guide whose favorite sports are football, baseball, and golf. He enjoys giving obnoxious commentary during games and hopes to some day write a book about sports. His favorite underdog victory was the Diamondbacks beating the Yankees in game 7 of the World Series.
