As part of a review of the impact of Vegas spreads on daily fantasy performance, I put together a basic summary of NBA overtime rate based on spread.
Having a game go to overtime can obviously be a big bonus in DFS, especially if you have stacked multiple players on both teams.
However, the numbers indicate that hoping for OT is not a good strategy. The rate of OT in the NBA is low, and a tight spread doesn’t increase the rate much.
As you can see above, the OT rate for games with a spread of 0-4 was 6.09% over 427 games. That’s only a slight increase from the rate when the spread is 5-8 (5.26%).
When the spread is greater than 8 the OT rate does drop to 2.91%. A tight spread makes it slightly more likely to see OT, but no matter what it is very unlikely.
The spread data was gathered from Odds Shark.