Looking for smart betting action this weekend? Your curated list of sports betting tips, analytics and humor, every Saturday at 10am Eastern.
Harry Kane anytime goal scorer – England opens their Euro 2024 campaign against Serbia, and center forward Harry Kane had 36 goals for Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga this season.
You can get a better estimate of his goal scoring ability by xG, or expected goals, a metric that sums the probability of a goal on each shot attempted. According to the FBRef model, Kane had 0.97 xG per 90 minutes this season in the Bundesliga.
Assuming that goals are random, you can use a Poisson distribution to estimate the probability that he scores a goal. Let’s assume some regression in Kane’s numbers and use 0.75 xG per 90 minutes. The Poisson model gives a 52.8% for Kane to score at least one goal against Serbia.
FanDuel has Kane +105 anytime goal scorer (48.8% break even probability). Usually, Pinnacle has much worse prices as they often have an incredibly small hold percentage. However, Pinnacle has Kane at +106 anytime goal scorer. This suggests value in Kane to score against Serbia (match starts at 3pm Eastern on Sunday).
WNBA player prop – For the past two seasons, Unabated has made women’s basketball player projections. Led by former top daily fantasy player Galin Dragiev, this team combines quantitative methods with a close tracking of WNBA news.
Through June 9 of this season, the release of these projections to top level Concierge members is up over 51 units. Even though Premium Unabated members get the projections an hour later, the projections are still up over 35 units. While the market moves based on the Unabated projections, they do not seem to move enough.
This morning, the Unabated WNBA projections have 13.9 points for Jonquel Jones of the New York Liberty. She faces a Las Vegas Aces defense that tops the league in points allowed in the paint. There is value in Jonquel Jones under 15.5 points, -125 at FanDuel (3pm Eastern tip off on Saturday).
The Unabated NBA team will release the remainder of the WNBA projections at 11am Eastern this morning. Check out more about the Concierge and Premium services.
CJ Stroud, Houston Texans – The rookie from Ohio State had an incredible season, as he led Houston to a playoff win over Cleveland and won NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year. He also set numerous NFL record like most passing yards by a rookie (470 yards against Tampa Bay).
Stroud also set the record for most pass attempts to start a career without an interception (191). He had a 0.8% interception rate for the season compared to the NFL average of 2.3%.
You don’t need advanced analytics to predict regression to the mean for Stroud’s interception rate. NFL defenses are too good for any QB to sustain a 0.8% interception rate, as Tom Brady only had one season with a rate that low.
At The Power Rank, I use the sum of interceptions and passes defended to make a better prediction of future interception rate. This model predicts a 1.8% interception rate for Stroud moving forward, still an incredible rate.
Members of The Power Rank have access to my look at outliers by bad ball rate (login required), an important tool for when the season long interception market comes out.
World Soccer/Football Rankings – At The Power Rank, my rankings for men’s national teams take goal differential in matches and adjusts for strength of schedule. My system includes matches since the beginning of 2020 and weights World Cup matches much more than friendlies.
The updated numbers give the following ranks for the top five contenders to win Euro 2024 by the markets.
- France, 3rd. Kylian Mbappe can be the most dangerous player in the world, and the markets have the French as the second favorite.
- England, 4th. After decades of ranking around 10th in my world numbers, this generation of players has elevated this team. After making the final of Euro 2020, England is the betting favorite for Euro 2024.
- Portugal, 5th. Portugal went ahead of Spain with a 3-0 win over Ireland this week. Ronaldo is looking to prove that playing in Saudia Arabia hasn’t hurt his game.
- Spain, 6th. Alvaro Morata might be a very underrated goal scorer, and Rodri is widely considered the best defensive midfielder in the world.
- Germany, 11th. After a 5-1 thumping of Scotland yesterday, the Germans jumped from 13th to 11th in my rankings. This is still too low for a talented German team which should contend to win Euro 2024 as the host.
Check out all nations in The Power Rank world soccer/football rankings.
Basketball humor – Connecticut coach Dan Hurley turned down the Lakers coaching job, and Brandon Carney put everything in perspective (1:27 run time).
Smarter sports betting in less than 5 minutes
These nuggets were sent to The Power Rank’s email newsletter. This is a free service that strives to be:
- Valuable
- Concise
- Entertaining
Other emails offer analysis of college football and NFL games that founder Ed Feng has bet and a sample of predictions usually saved for paying members of The Power Rank.
To get this free service delivered straight into your inbox, enter your best email address and click on “Sign up now!”
Leave a Reply