FanDuel NBA Picks and Pivots – Saturday November 4
Welcome to the Saturday edition of FanDuel NBA Picks and Pivots, a fantasy basketball column focused on helping you find the best core lineup for this slate of DFS action!
For those of you finding us for the first time, the concept behind FanDuel NBA Picks and Pivots is to first identify key building blocks that can be used for any roster construction and then identify pivot points to help differentiate your lineup in hopes of a big payday!
Friday’s winning tournament scores pushed well past 400 as a monster 92.7 FanDuel point night from LeBron James was at the core of winning GPP line-ups on this slate while high scoring games like NY/Phoenix and Brooklyn/LA gave us some of the biggest individual performances as Kristaps Porzingis (55.4) and Brook Lopez (55) came through with huge outings.
Over the first seventeen NBA regular season slates it has taken 377.2 FanDuel points on average to take down a GPP which means on a $60,000 salary cap, we need 6.28x per player to take down a big time tournament in FanDuel NBA!
Over the first seventeen NBA regular season slates it has taken 377.2 FanDuel points on average to take down a GPP which means on a $60,000 salary cap, we need 6.28x per player to take down a big time tournament in FanDuel NBA!
Picks and Pivots is not a simple “best plays” column but rather it focuses on slate strategy and roster construction to help give you insight into how I will look to play this slate! The goal of this article is to dig through the slate, highlight our top plays and give you a sample line-up as an example of what our core roster build could look like using the analysis we lay out in the coming pages!
As always, we will look to update our picks and final lineup thought prior to lock on our twitter account @FantasyCPR so make sure to give us a follow for all the late breaking lineup news.
Without further ado, let’s get into today’s slate!
FanDuel NBA – Top Point Guard Picks:
Did you catch your breath from Friday night’s slate yet? Wow! We are back today with a small four game Main Slate that feels relatively simple to break down in my initial estimation. We have two games with totals of 200 or lower (Kings/Pistons and Pelicans/Bulls), a potential blowout as Minnesota takes on Dallas with a 14 point spread and then the late night hammer in Denver as the Nuggets and Warriors square off with a massive 230 game total.
Stephen Curry ($9,200): On Thursday night’s two game slate my recommendation was to jam in as many Warriors as we could and I think tonight’s slate frankly breaks down the exact same way! Even though we have a four game slate, I am essentially crossing off the Kings/Pistons game as the 197 total and the fact that BOTH teams see a pace decrease means this boils down to a three game slate for me!
The Warriors have the highest implied team total at 119 (6 points higher than Minnesota) and are going to be in the highest paced game of the night. Put simply – if you don’t have exposure to the Warriors stars, you are going to watch yourself plummet down the standings when the last game of the night tips off!
Curry has the highest usage percentage of any PG on the slate, faces off with a Denver team ranked 20th in DvP to opposing PG’s and will go head to head with Jamal Murray who has one of the worst individual defensive ratings on the slate! Curry has put up 42 or more FanDuel points in every game since the season opener and is the premier play at PG tonight!
J.J. Barea ($4,000): The Mavericks are playing on the tail end of a back to back against Minnesota after taking on the Pelicans last night in their fourth game in six days so I expect this to be a highly one-sided affair for Minnesota but I think we can get some sneaky bench value with Dallas here. Barea is a consistent threat for 20+ minutes a night and has delivered 5x value in 7 of his 10 outings this season and with the Mavericks recent schedule, I am betting on the bench guards getting an uptick in run tonight!
FanDuel NBA – Top Shooting Guards:
Yogi Ferrell ($3,900): Shooting Guard looks to be the perfect spot to save salary tonight and take some punt plays that all play a relatively solid stable of minutes and have flashed 6x value already this season!
Yogi and the aforementioned JJ Barea are essentially cut from the same cloth tonight – they play a consistent 20 minutes a night for the Mavericks but when given the opportunity for more run they have exceeded expectations! Ferrell has hit 6x value three times this season, in all cases they were games where he played 30+ minutes so we are going to be counting on that extended run tonight in a potential blow-out.
Think about it this way – if the Mavericks are not able to keep this game close, the first guys off the floor are going to be players like Dirk Nowitzki and Devin Harris and with Dorian Finney Smith already ruled out, the bench minutes are going to be soaked up by guys like Barea/Yogi. On a four game slate we have to make our stand somewhere and I am going to do so with the Mavericks bench for value tonight!
Buddy Hield ($4,000) and Bogdan Bogdanovic ($4,100): As much as I want to write off the Kings/Pistons tonight entirely – the potential value at SG might be too tough to pass up here tonight at a shallow position where we need to roster two SG’s!
The Kings SG’s have essentially alternated who has had the better game over the last 5 contests as Hield has hit 30+ FD points in two games (while failing to exceed 14 in the other three) and Bogdan has hit 6x value in two contests while reaching only 15 FD points in the other three.
What this all means is you are rolling the dice here and trying to pick “the right one” tonight when building your roster. I am not going to pretend like I can predict which mediocre SG will have the better DFS night for you but it is worth noting that over the last week Hield has a 26.6% usage rate which is 8% higher than Bogdan’s so I will side with the higher usage player when making my coin flip but will likely have exposure to both tonight!
FanDuel NBA – Top Small Forward Picks:
Kevin Durant ($10,000): Let’s see, the Warriors have the highest team total, the Nuggets are ranked 26th in DvP to opposing SF’s and Wilson Chandler has one of the worst defensive ratings at the position this season. On a short slate, Durant joins Steph Curry as the core building blocks of my team and I simply see no reason to get cute tonight!
The second Small Forward choice is actually quite interesting and there are two options at the same price point which make pivoting back and forth for multiple rosters an easy route tonight!
David Nwaba ($4,600): Nwaba has entered the starting line-up for the Bulls and has responded with 27.7 and 32.5 FanDuel points, exceeding 6x value in both starts! The Pelicans are ranked 28th in DvP to opposing SF’s this season so the match-up is exceptional and the price point is primed for value – just keep in mind that game log watchers will likely flock to Nwaba and this Nwaba-KD pairing could become quite popular!
Wilson Chandler ($4,500): We have spent a lot of time focused on the Warriors side of this game so far but we cannot overlook the fact that the Nuggets have the third highest team total and see the largest pace boost of any team on the slate.
Chandler so far this season this season has been underwhelming to say the least with less than 20 FD points in five of his nine games but we saw the upside he has in pace up spots like the one he crushed for 33 FD points against Brooklyn a few days ago. Last season, in his lone outing against Golden State he put up 32 FD points and at this price point he makes for an elite GPP play and pivot off the more popular Nwaba!
FanDuel NBA – Top Power Forward and Center Plays:
So far outside of Curry and KD we have littered our roster with bargain plays and there is some serious rationale behind it – I want to allocate my salary to the frontcourt today and specifically on the Warriors/Nuggets match-up with Draymond Green ($7,600), Paul Millsap ($7,200) and Nikola Jokic ($9,500).
Jokic is one of my favorite DFS players and we are starting to see his price creep back up to $10k after putting up 50+ in back to back games and 44+ in five straight so take the discount today on a player we will see likely priced above $10k the next time we try to roster him!
Draymond and Millsap are both fantastic individual defenders so it is odd to see Golden State and Denver ranked 21 and 22 in DvP to opposing PF’s but these two bring stability and a solid core at a reasonable price point tonight. Millsap and Draymond seem like virtual locks to get you 30-40 FanDuel points in each game and have the upside for 50+ on any given night so prioritizing them as top plays at only $7k each feels like the best roster approach tonight!
DeMarcus Cousins and Anthony Davis: Listen both guys are in great match-ups tonight against a Bulls team that frankly has no way of slowing them down and I am not normally one to disagree with Vegas, but how is this game only a 6 point spread? I have serious concerns that this game will stay close enough where these two can pay off their $12k salaries and will happily take the discount to the Curry/KD pairing tonight!
FanDuel NBA – Sample GPP Line-Up and Slate Overview
Please Note: This is NOT an optimized line-up, it is simply illustrative to show the type of roster build we can have using the logic previously laid out in Picks and Pivots. My actual line-up may differ from the line-up shown here.
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PG: Stephen Curry ($9,200)
PG: JJ Barea ($4,000)
SG: Yogi Ferrell ($3,900)
SG: Buddy Hield ($4,000)
SF: Kevin Durant ($10,000)
SF: David Nwaba ($4,600)
PF: Draymond Green ($7,600)
PF: Paul Millsap ($7,200)
C: Nikola Jokic ($9,500)
Slate Overview: On short slates like this I simply try to keep it simple and tonight is no different – I am prioritizing the Warriors/Nuggets game and stars as the core of my build and will look to mix and match value plays to make the roster build work! Keep an eye on news as we could get value opening up which would make going Stars/Scrubs even easier tonight!