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Posted at 10:00 AM EST. Odds are subject to change.

Houston -8½ -105 over Denver

8:30 PM EST. Denver's weekend deserves its own box score. The Nuggets beat Indiana 114-102 in Mexico City on Saturday afternoon, got to the airport that night, boarded at 9:00 PM, and then sat in their seats until 3:25 in the morning while a replacement part failed to fix a door that would not close. They were back in a hotel by 5:00 AM, finally took off Sunday at 4:54 PM, and landed in Houston around 6:30 PM Sunday evening, less than 24 hours before tip, having not practiced since before the Mexico City game, with Monday's shootaround cancelled outright. And then the injury report landed and all five starters questionable, Nikola Jokic with a sprained right elbow, Jamal Murray with a shin contusion, Aaron Gordon and Cameron Johnson under lower body management, Christian Braun with a calf problem and an illness, plus sixth man DeMar DeRozan and his back spasms for good measure. Teams do not produce a report like that by accident. That is an organisation telling the league its players are held together by spite and airplane sleep.

Houston is built to punish exactly this. The Rockets own one of the two best offences in the league in the early going and a top ten defence, they are 4-1 at the Toyota Center, and they have covered this very number in four of their last five home games. Alperen Sengun is running the show at 21.5 points, 8.8 rebounds and 7.8 assists a night, Kevin Durant is adding 20.8, Jabari Smith Jr. 17.3, and the length of Amen Thompson and company is a miserable thing to face on dead legs, because tired teams settle, reach and foul, and Houston lives at the rim and the line. The Rockets also come in angry, having dropped two straight to Minnesota and Phoenix after a 7-1 start, and there is no softer landing spot for a bounce back than a home game against an opponent that spent its weekend in an airport.

The honest caveats, because this number depends on them: questionable is not out, and if Jokic and Murray both drag themselves onto the floor, Denver is a team that has won three straight on the road and four of five overall, and Houston is missing both backup centres, Steven Adams and Clint Capela, leaving Sengun alone against the best big in the world with no foul trouble margin at all. Houston also shot 38.7 percent in Phoenix on Saturday, so the home side is not exactly humming. But a bet on Houston here is not really a bet that all six Nuggets sit. It is a bet that a team which slept in an airport, skipped two days of preparation and is nursing six separate ailments cannot bring its A game on the road against a rested, deep, motivated favourite, and that even a diminished Denver effort leaves the margin in double digits by the fourth quarter.

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