Thursday night was not good if you were a Rockets player, coach, fan, or anything affiliated with the Houston professional basketball team. The Spurs strolled into the Toyota Center in Houston and promptly destroyed the Rockets to the tune of a 114-75 shellacking, doing so without their top star Kawhi Leonard. Houston’s performance in the game and complete lack of competitiveness in the game made them the laughing stock of the internet, but their loss also hit hard for some folks out in Vegas.
Prior to tip-off, the Rockets moved out to 7.5-point favorites as Leonard’s absence from the Spurs lineup pushed the line out to a significant margin. Money line value on the Rockets plummeted as well and you had to lay a large amount to take Houston, but that didn’t stop one confident Rockets backer from placing lots of money on Houston to win.
Bettor @CGTechnology_ placed 3 six-figure money-line bets on Rockets to beat Spurs tonight, totaling $386,000 to win $120,000, per @jsimbal.
— David Payne Purdum (@DavidPurdum) May 11, 2017
This bet was dead in the water by halftime when the Spurs were up 19 and James Harden and Mike D’Antoni were speechless on the bench looking like they’d just seen a ghost. I’m really curious to know at what point this bettor turned the game off in hopes of that turning around the Rockets’ mojo — every sports bettor does this when things go south, thinking that its their fault for watching — and at what point he accepted defeat and tore up his tickets. My guess is that he turned the game off/left the sportsbook in the mid-second quarter, returned in the mid-third in hopes of a furious Rockets comeback to start the second half, and then watched the disaster until about seven minutes left in the game and tore everything up.
If you have $386,000 to put down on a single NBA playoff game, I’m not concerned about you or your money, but let this serve as a lesson to the rest of you: never bet big against Pop and the Spurs.
