On Monday night, the Sixers are back from a successful three-game road swing to take on the Houston Rockets. The Sixers have moved to 19-16 and continue to cling to the last non-play-in playoff spot in the Eastern Conference. The Rockets are 10-27 and dead last in the Western Conference, and that description doesn’t even tell the whole story.

Let’s get into our Sixers vs. Rockets betting pick with player prop predictions, odds, and analysis for this January 3, 2022 matchup.

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Sixers vs. Rockets Betting Pick (January 3, 2022)

Antonio Brown’s unscheduled mid-game departure from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers/New York Jets
game yesterday is going to fill a mile of online column space and hours of broadcast content for the next few days. There are three main reasons for this.

First, Brown played for the defending Super Bowl champions. Second, Brown is still a talented player with a notorious name. Third, and maybe most importantly, the optics were ridiculous and compelling. You just don’t see an NFL player strip to his waist on the sideline and quit on his team in the middle of the game every day.

If you think Brown’s actions were a total anomaly, though, you are short on information. The Sixers will
play the Houston Rockets tonight at the Wells Fargo Center, and less than 48 hours ago, the Rockets had their own in-game mutiny in Houston. Here are a few choice quotes from the Houston Chronicle article summarizing the carnage:

After giving up 47 points in a dismal second quarter against the Denver Nuggets on Saturday, the Rockets had a big enough locker room spat that Kevin Porter Jr., left the Toyota Center in the middle of the game and Christian Wood – at least according to one report – said he didn’t want to play in the second half.

Porter became irate at halftime of the Rockets’ 124-111 loss when assistant coach John Lucas challenged him. The Rockets, who were outscored 47-24 in the second quarter and trailed 77-55 at halftime, spent nearly the entire intermission in the locker room and didn’t return to the court until moments before the second half started.

There are three reasons why this story didn’t make the same headlines as the Brown incident, and as
you can imagine, they are essentially inverses of the reasons why the Brown story blew up.

First, the Rockets are the worst team in the Western Conference at 10-27. Second, Kevin Porter Jr. is not a player who moves the needle from a ratings perspective – he’s averaging a tick under 13 points per game, and is the Rockets’ fourth-leading scorer. Third, a player failing to emerge from the locker room at halftime In an NBA game is a thing that happens for various reasons on a fairly regular basis. Usually, it’s an injury. Sometimes it’s a personal reason. And an NBA player leaving the arena mid-game is not nearly as visible as an NFL player leaving the field mid-game.

So the Rockets are a dumpster fire, and the Sixers are favored by 13.5 points, and by all appearances, the Sixers should beat this Rockets team by 20 points or more. Except, well, this is the Sixers we’re talking about. They lost to a depleted Atlanta Hawks team a week and a half ago. They sneaked past a severely weakened Toronto Raptors team six days ago. The Sixers are not a team that handles expectations well. Sure, they can beat the Nets in Brooklyn and they can beat the Warriors in Philadelphia. On a Monday night against a terrible team stricken with infighting, though? The Sixers just can’t be trusted.

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Sixers vs. Rockets Odds

Here’s the line for the Sixers and Rockets at FanDuel Sportsbook:

  • Point Spread: Sixers -13.5 (-108), Rockets +13.5 (-112)
  • Moneyline: Sixers -1100, Rockets +700
  • Total: 219

Bets We Like With a Sixers Win

Sixers to Win and Under 219 Total Points (+109, FanDuel Sportsbook)

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Parlays are often losing propositions, but in a game like this where the Sixers moneyline is -1100, the only way to get the win to have anything close to even value is to attach it to something like the total. Here, the Rockets are terrible, the Sixers are a team that doesn’t attack bad teams with any kind of venom or vigor — probably, the Sixers will sleepwalk to a win, and not be especially convincing in doing so.

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Bets We Like Independent of Outcome

Sixers Under 115.5 Points (-110, Caesars Sportsbook)

There are two things happening here that point to the Sixers’ under. The first is that this game is that rare instance of a team coming home from a multi-city road trip for one and only one home game and then heading right back out of town. The Sixers will be in Orlando on Wednesday night. The Sixers will barely have time to change their clothes in Philadelphia before they’re away again. In that way, this is something less than a full home game. The second thing pointing to the under is that the Sixers have been quietly posting low scoring totals for about a month now. The Sixers played 14 games in December and scored more than 115 points twice. The Sixers are not guaranteed to explode just because the Rockets are a bad team.

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Rockets +8.5 First Half (-110, DraftKings Sportsbook)

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We won’t know who is playing for either team in enough time to make sense of individual player propositions in this game. The Rockets haven’t announced any suspensions related to Saturday’s chaos. The Sixers haven’t announced whether Joel Embiid will be available, which is sort of remarkable insofar as the team hasn’t played since Thursday night. As such, with this sort of personnel uncertainty, getting 8.5 points in the first half (when the Rockets figure to be trying their hardest) is the safer side.

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Sixers to Win First and Second Quarter (-110 boosted from -130, FOX Bet)

The Sixers can win both of the first quarters narrowly and still not with the first half by nine points. As indicated above and throughout this piece, it’s just unlikely that the Sixers are going to come out and “take care of business” against this bad team. What they’re probably going to do is play just well enough to lead but not well enough to dominate. This wager is premised in large part on the boost, something that FOX Bet does a lot of and which, if you watch for it, can prove lucrative.

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Sixers vs. Rockets Prediction

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The Sixers have no business — no business — laying 13 points to anybody. Home, away, playing a good team, playing a bad team, playing a healthy team, playing a COVID-ravaged team…doesn’t matter. This line is too high.

Pick: Rockets +13 (-108, Barstool Sportsbook)

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