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NCAA Basketball Pick – December 18th

A pair of teams looking for their eighth win of the year meet up in Raleigh on Tuesday night, where the Stanford Cardinal will take on the NC State Wolfpack in college basketball betting action at PNC Arena.

The Cardinal are 7-3, and they have some respectable results this year, but all in all, they haven’t played much of a schedule, and this is clearly their toughest game on the slate to date. It’s going to be all about the big men if Stanford is to pull off this upset. F Dwight Powell is the team’s leading scorer, and he is a fantastic shooter as well. Powell is knocking down 41.7 percent of his three-point attempts to go with 56.3 percent shooting from the field. The end result is 14.8 points and 6.9 boards per game. The other big man of note is F Josh Huestis, who is averaging 8.5 points, 8.2 boards, and 2.9 blocks per game. G Chasson Randle has some massive potential, but in the end, he is only averaging 14.4 points per game thanks to the fact that he is shooting just 35.8 percent from the floor and 21.6 percent from long range this year.

The Wolfpack started off the year as a team that was thought to be good enough to be in the Final Four. That might ultimately turn out to be the case, but the team only just got back into the Top 25 after freefalling out of it with two quick losses. The team can fly for sure, averaging 78.4 points per game this year, but the potential just doesn’t feel like it has been reached yet. This is a talented team, as the top six players make up as good of a core as there is in the country. F TJ Warren, F Richard Howell, F CJ Leslie, G Lorenzo Brown, G Rodney Purvis, and F Scott Wood are combining to score 72.4 of the team’s points per game, and save for G Tyler Lewis, the club’s backup point guard, there isn’t another player that has even played in all nine games this year. Brown has to shoot the ball better (42.0 percent), while Wood just needs more chances to be a lethal shooter as we know that he can be. If these two things happen, the bigs are playing well enough to carry this team to the top of the mountain.

Prediction:

Here’s our problem: The Wolfpack had basically the same team last year playing against the Cardinal on the road, and they were beaten by four points. Yes, they’re back at home, but they are just 7-18-2 ATS at home over the course of their last 27 home games. It just doesn’t bode well. This feels like a game that will be won, but perhaps not by as much as the spread suggests. NC State 75 – Stanford 70