It’s part and parcel of modern professional sports that any team can beat any other team. Of course, the favorite is more likely to win, but there is always that blip moment that leaves fans scratching their heads post-game. It’s almost impossible to be perfect across a season, so there are always instances when a team has an off night.
Take, for example, the NBA game between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Indiana Pacers in January. The former is perceived as the best team in the NBA. OKC is the current champion, playing at home, has the reigning MVP on its roster, is the favorite for the NBA Championship in June, and boasts the best record in the league. The Pacers, meanwhile, are a team rooted to the bottom of the Eastern Conference with the worst record in the NBA. Final result for the game played on 01/23/26? Pacers beat OKC 117-114.
Every season will throw up shock results
Things like this just happen from time to time in sports. It’ll probably have no bearing on the season, and the game will probably be forgotten about sooner rather than later. But you can gather that many bettors would have been aghast at OKC losing a game, one that would have destroyed multi-leg parlays and singles bets alike, all the more painful when OKC was considered a lock.
Yet, there are many other options for betting on NBA games, as well as other games across professional sports, including player props. While player props bets have long been an option, they have become more popular in recent years. That popularity comes from a variety of reasons, not least the fact that the bets are usually stats-driven.
For example, with DraftKings NBA player props betting, the statistics for the market is listed beside the betting lines. For instance, if you picked an NBA player to score over a certain number of points in an upcoming game, the player’s PPG average would be listed beside the bet.
Bettors will look to AI for stats analysis
It does, of course, go further than that. Bettors have been deep-diving into statistics for props bets, either doing their own research or using tools like AI to find value in the market. Of course, the other benefit, as such, is that the result of the game doesn’t matter, as you are simply betting on the player’s performance. Are there drawbacks? Well, yes. For a start, a player can have a bad night, underperforming their projected stats for a variety of reasons. Of course, you can also bet on the player underperforming if you think that’s the way to go.
Bettors must weigh up market value
But there is also the fact that sportsbooks will not simply pull the market’s odds out of thin air. A variety of factors will determine those odds, including the quality of the opposition. Thus, it’s up to you to weigh up whether your chosen player can achieve a certain number of points or rebounds against different types of opposition.
There are other reasons for player props bets becoming popular, and we would include the overall rise in same-game parlay (SGPs) bets. This is the strategy of combining multiple events in a single game, and they often include stats-heavy player props bets. There’s a social element to it, too, as the stats proposition forms part of the discussion around different athletes.
There is, in the end, no discernible advantage to picking player props bets over moneyline and other wagers, yet it has become more apparent that these types of bets are rising. It might be due to the rise of the celebrity athlete, with bettors looking to back a clutch player or fan favorite to succeed, or it might be due to the availability of statistics, backed up by tools like AI as part of a strategy, but bettors are looking beyond the moneyline and spread more often these days.