Sports Edge! Recent Games
The first and perhaps most important concern when handicapping a game is "What has each team done lately?".
One of the problems when viewing recent game history of teams is considering the impact of schedule difficulty.
Many amatuers and pros alike can get overly influenced by recent domination of a particular team
without considering the level of opponent. Often times a favorite with recent
victories behind them will play down to the level of their opponent. Similarly,
big dogs with poor records might step up against a top team. With Sports Edge! Recent Game Logs,
the ability to filter opponents by class (ranking) allows for reduction of the
schedule difficulty influence and provides direct insight into how teams
perform against similar classes of opponents.
For the NBA game below we are using Win/Loss record as a filter, only showing games where the
opponent had rankings within 11 ranks of the current opponent. You can see
that the Miami Heat enjoy beating up this class of opponent on the road, often
winning by double digits. Minnesota meanwhile tends to lose at or above
this line. On the strength of Miami's blowout wins, it'd be hard not to pick
them here and they in fact went on to win by 13 easily covering the -6.5 line.