Tipico Tips: Betting the Thursday NBA slate (Feb. 4)

It always feels odd to see yourself disagreeing with the public recommendation of other analysts, and it’s certainly been a similarly unsettling feeling in any way distrusting Nikola Jokic this season, but that’s exactly what I’m doing Thursday night. Many of the other denizens of Twitter are recommending action on Jokic and on the Nuggets, but I’m going the other way for their game against the Los Angeles Lakers.

A popular prop recommendation on Tipico Sportsbook appears to be Jokic over 23.5 points. This is a mark he’s struggled to reach with regularity against this team. He’s made that mark one of his last 10 regular season outings. In the five playoff games that occurred just this last September, Jokic hit that target exactly one time and needed 39 minutes to do so. Jokic is a supremely talented player who knows how to beat his opponents in many different ways, but the Lakers defense is world class and Anthony Davis, LeBron James and even the over-the-hill Marc Gasol have shown a great ability to contain him over a very significant sample size.

So this leads us to the Lakers -5. I’d have this at a higher line even if everyone was healthy, but the Nuggets will be without the services of one of their best defenders in Gary Harris and their versatile bench stalwart P.J. Dozier. The Lakers on the other hand are as healthy as they’ve been all season, with LeBron even having been listed as “probable” after an epic streak of games saddled with the Q tag.

This nightcap should be some tremendous basketball with some of the greatest players in the world in action. But both the individual lines on Jokic and those on the Nuggets as a team are overly optimistic.

Lakers -5
Jokic Props (Under)

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