FanDuel daily picks: Fantasy basketball lineup — May 17 – 20

The NBA playoffs officially move on to the Conference Finals, with Game 1 in the East on Wednesday and Game 3 out West on Saturday. Get your DFS fantasy basketball team in the game with FanSided’s FanDuel daily picks.

The Western Conference Finals are well under way, with Kawhi Leonard’s injury paving the way for a Warriors 2-0 advantage going into Game 3. And finally, the East is ready to join them as the Celtics dispatched the Wizards in seven games to set up a meeting with the Cavaliers.

The Cavaliers are the defending champions, and clear favorites to come out of the East despite the fact that the Celtics are the top seed and have home court advantage. The Cavs won the season series three games to one and seemingly have an advantage in the middle that the Celtics don’t have the size to counter. We’ve seen the Celtics perimeter players do some big things in these playoffs, though, and they’ve gotten surprisingly strong contributions from their bigs as well, so this could be a competitive series. It begins on Wednesday at 8:30 p.m., which is when lineups will lock for this set of contests.

Out West, the Spurs hope desperately that the four days off after Game 2 will allow Kawhi Leonard’s ankle to heal before they play again. Leonard went down with the Spurs up by 23 in the third quarter of Game 1, only to see the Warriors outscore them by 25 points in the last 20 minutes of game action. The Warriors continued at that pace in Game 2, obliterating the Spurs without their best player. The series returns to San Antonio on Saturday, with Leonard’s potential return as the only legitimate way to make this a series … but since lineups for this contest lock on Wednesday, it would be extremely risky to include Leonard on any of your DFS teams.

My favorite plays of the day can be found on the following slides in FanSided’s FanDuel daily picks. Each day in order to offer a variety of price points at each position, you can find two slides for each position: one for high-salary options and one for high-value options. Each pick is ranked on a scale of 1-5 stars to indicate the confidence in the pick. The final slide of this post has more detail on what each level means, but in short, more stars means more confidence in the selection on a points-per-dollar basis.

Important note: every day the goal of this post is not to give you a copy-and-paste lineup. Instead, each selection is given while highlighting the factors you need to consider when building a customized lineup for yourself. If you want to see an example lineup, you can find it on the final slide of the post, but I suggest you adjust your lineup to fit your personal taste.

To keep up with all of FanSided’s DFS NBA coverage head over to the fantasy basketball hub where each day you can find a post like this tailored for FanDuel as well as one specifically designed for usage on DraftKings.  In this post, all salary and “fantasy points” references are to FanDuel’s scoring system and salaries. If you have any additional questions or thoughts or are looking for updates as we approach tipoff, follow @FanSidedFantasy on Twitter or you can follow my account @ProfessorDrz or find me on my home turf of The Hoops Lab.

Let’s take a look at your best options for both studs and value players at each position.