The New Orleans Pelicans and Golden State Warriors open their Western Conference Semifinals series on Saturday night. The opening tip from Oracle Arena in Oakland, California is slated for 10:35 PM ET. The game will be televised by TNT.

The current NBA odds at Bookmaker has Golden State as a 9.0-point favorite. Bookmaker is also indicating that 69% of point spread bets have been made on the underdog Pelicans thus far.

These teams faced each other 4 times during the regular season. Golden State won 3 of those contests and each team covered twice. Furthermore, 3 of those 4 games went over the total and there was a combined 234.8 points scored per contest.

Red-Hot Pelicans

The New Orleans Pelicans entered the NBA Playoffs as the Western Conference #6 seed. They proceeded to sweep #3 seed Portland in 4 games. It wasn’t so much a shock New Orleans won the series, but it was in the decisiveness of how they did so. Going back to the end of regular season action, the Pelicans have now gone 9-0 SU&ATS in their last 9 games. They won those 9 contests by a convincing 14.0 points per game while shooting a sizzling 51.9%. New Orleans is also an extremely profitable 12-3 ATS in its last 15 away games and won straight up on 12 of those occasions.

New Orleans is coming off a series clinching 131-123 win over Portland and that Pelicans scoring outburst is significant. They’ve been a terrific 13-1 straight up during away games this season following a contest in which they scored 120 points or more.

Defending Champs Easily Advance

There was a bit of concern from Warriors faithful heading into their opening round playoff series against San Antonio. After all, their defending world champions finished the regular season by going an uninspiring 6-9 in its last 15 games. Additionally, star point guard Stephen Curry would be sidelined for the entirety of the San Antonio series while recovering from a knee injury. However, they weren’t facing the same Spurs team that we’ve become accustomed to over the past 2 decades, and easily disposed of them in 5 games. The Warriors played terrific defense for the majority those 5 games, holding San Antonio to 96.8 points scored per contest, and limiting them to a cumulative 41.3% shooting.

NBA Totals Betting Angle

Presently, the NBA betting odds at 5Dimes has a total of 225.0 for tonight’s Pelicans and Warriors game. New Orleans has held this season’s opponents to a cumulative 45.4% shooting from the field. Meanwhile Golden State enters this series with a season long 44.5% defensive field goal percentage. At the time of this writing, New Orleans has a rebound margin of -0.6 per game and Golden State is at -0.8. The combination of this data sets up an extremely profitable betting angle which is applicable to tonight’s total and is illustrated below.

Any NBA game with a total of 220.0 or greater, involving teams that have a 43.5% to 45.5% defensive field goal percentage and both are playing after game 41 of their season, and each possesses a +3 to -3 rebound differential per game, resulted in those contests going 54-14 (83.8%) over the total since 1996. Those 68 contests had an average total of 224.3 and there were a combined 233.0 points scored per game. Additionally, 66.7% of those games went over the total by 7.0 points or more. These results certainly can’t be ignored when making today’s NBA picks.

Pick: Over 225.0