Valencia Basket – Gran Canaria: the best example of how to manage the handicap at live betting
The game between Gran Canaria and Valencia Basket was another good opportunity to study the changing handicap at live betting. The winner of the encounter had to advance to the Spanish semifinals, regardless of what happened in the other games of the group. So, the main goal of both squads was to secure the simple win, while the margin of the victory was not important at all.
The game was “balanced” till the halftime, with Valencia Basket having an advantage of 7 points. After the break, Gran Canaria seemed to reduce the deficit at the beginning of the 3rd quarter but in only a couple of minutes, they were down 26 points: 51-77. This was a huge margin, unreal compared with the value of the teams and the whole context. For me, it was very clear that the difference between the teams won’t go deeper in the next minutes of the game, because the peak of the battle was already reached. For Valencia Basket, the win was already assured and probably they would try to slow down the tempo of their offense from that moment.
This was exactly what actually happened: Valencia was not interested in a 30 point win over Gran Canaria, because they were already very pleased with reaching the semifinals of Liga ACB and they wanted to prevent any stupid and useless injury that could affect their roster for the future games. Valencia’s goal was already reached, but for Gran Canaria the situation was humiliating: to be smashed with a huge margin in a derby.
That’s why you could see how Gran Canaria fought hard to come back, while the opponents were not interested in defense anymore. Easy baskets were scored by Gran Canaria and the deficit was cut even to 12 points during the 4th quarter. In the end, Valencia Basket won with 97-81, thanks to a couple of 3 pointers, but Gran Canaria won the last stanza and proved that in this kind of situation when the game is almost done, the underdog has a high probability to reduce the deficit a lot compared with the highest handicap of the game.
Image: Tomislav Jakupec from Pixabay
Gratian Cormos
