Welcome to the Sunday edition of NBA DFS 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 NBA DFS Picks and Pivots is to give you a first look at the day’s NBA DFS slate, including our top picks, plays and pivots, using FantasyDraft pricing as a reference, to help you build your best line-up and win big!
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!
Saturday Night’s Picks and Pivots core was built around a Sixers/Nuggets game stack while utilizing the Portland Lillard-less trio and it came through with a score of over 318 on FantasyDraft! Nikola Jokic (53) and Jamal Murray (50) led the way for the balanced roster approach while Shabazz Napier (45) continues to excel with Lillard off the court. Overall, DeMarcus Cousins was the leading scorer on the slate with 63 while Stephen Curry returned with nearly no ownership due to a minutes limit and proceeded to drop 52 fantasy points in only 26 minutes of court time!
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 go position by position to help you identify the best slate strategy across your NBA DFS line-ups.
As always, we will look to update our final lineup thoughts 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!
NBA DFS – First Look at Sunday’s Slate:
Each day I will use this first section of Picks and Pivots to highlight some of the key news and notes we already have as I am finding this brief overview really helps set the tone for my roster build.
Paul George and Andre Roberson: Per Royce Young of ESPN.com, the game notes for Sunday’s OKC-Dallas game list BOTH Paul George and Andre Roberson as OUT. We have seen this year game notes are less than accurate so I would not cross these players off your list but be aware of what this could do to the slate and your roster builds (more on that in a moment).
Game notes for tomorrow’s game against Dallas lists both Paul George (knee soreness) and Andre Roberson (patellar tendonitis) as out. Subject to change, as always.
— Royce Young (@royceyoung) December 30, 2017
Kentavious Caldwell-Pope: Will be required to miss Sunday’s game as it is out of the state of California which means Josh Hart will likely re-renter the starting line-up where he is averaging 25 fantasy points per game this season!
The Clippers will continue to be without Patrick Beverley and Danillo Gallinari and we can add Austin Rivers to the injured list as he is questionable to play tonight due to an Achilles injury, although the MRI did come back negative!
After sitting out on Saturday night in Denver, Joel Embiid is due back for the Sixers tonight in Phoenix in a dream match-up for the big man in a massive pace up spot in a high scoring game!
Looking over this five game New Years Eve slate, the first thing I did was cross off the Kings/Grizzlies game and make this a four game slate. That game has by far the lowest game total at 194, a whopping TWENTY points lower than the next game on the slate and for two teams that already play at slow paces – they happen to see the two largest pace decreases on the night! No thank you – simplify your process tonight and cross this game off. We have a four game slate now – so let’s identify where we want to build around!
NBA DFS – It all starts in OKC:
Let’s be clear here – the status of Paul George is where this slate begins for me as his absence makes Russell Westbrook ($23.9K) a core play in every single format. If you take PG13 off the court this season for the Thunder, no player gets a bigger usage bump than Mr. Westbrook who sees a massive 10.2% usage boost, leading the team with a 47% usage rate and 1.6 FP/M. Need proof of what Westbrook can do without George on the floor? Look back at last game against Milwaukee when he racked up 40 points, 14 rebounds, 9 assists and 73 fantasy points as the primary threat for OKC and tell me you have any interest in fading that!
Where Westbrook is the obvious plug and play, the rest of the Thunder become very interesting if both George and Andre Roberson miss this game. If you take both wing players off the court for the Thunder this season, Westbrook now sees a 12% usage increase while Carmelo Anthony ($12.5K) sees a 6% usage boost but a minimal FP/M increase. Anthony was extremely popular last slate with George out and he put up a stinker with only 19 points so the recency bias will likely keep his ownership down tonight giving you the opportunity to jump back on a good play when most have soured on him.
The toughest piece to predict for the Thunder is how the secondary wing pieces will fall in line but they could become key value cogs in our line-up tonight if we can read this situation correctly. If we look at last game without Paul George on the floor, we saw the secondary players minutes break out as follows:
- Andre Roberson: 35 (if out – that is a lot of minutes for these guys to soak up)
- Alex Abrines: Got the start but only played 10 minutes
- Josh Huestis: 28
- Raymond Felton: 27
- Jerami Grant: 20
- Patrick Patterson: 13
Digging into the game flow, it’s really interesting to see that although Abrines got the start, he was taken out in the first quarter and NEVER returned and there was no injury to speak of. One of the things I love to do in this situations is to try to figure out how a team closed out a game to give me a hopeful sneak peek into what they may do today – and interestingly enough, it was Raymond Felton ($6.1K) who played the entire fourth quarter and was on the court with Melo, Westbrook, Adams and Roberson in the closing minutes of a close game. From a value perspective, Felton (as scary as it sounds) may be one of the best point per dollar plays on the board!
Felton actually is a FP/M producer with George off the court this season and right below him on that list is Jerami Grant ($6.9K) who is putting up .9 FP/M this season with PG13 off the court. Although Huestis drew significant run in this game, this is an extremely low usage player (12.8%) that I would avoid and would instead limit my Thunder value exposure to Grant and Felton in this spot!
NBA DFS – Fast Pace in Phoenix:
The game of the night from a DFS perspective in my mind is Phoenix and Philadelphia and frankly I think you will need to have exposure to this game if you want any chance of cashing. This game has the second highest total on the board and is projected to stay close (2 point spread) with not only the fastest projected pace but BOTH teams see a significant point AND pace boost which is the perfect recipe for a game stack!
These two teams also played a few weeks back with a similar cast of characters so we have some context in which we can use to help build our line-ups tonight. On the Phoenix side the premier play is Devin Booker ($17K) who has returned from injury and put up over 40 fantasy points in the last two games against two of the slowest paced teams in the NBA – the Kings and Grizzlies. Tonight, the match-up is set up for him to explode as the Suns not only see a massive pace boost but they will also take on a Sixers team ranked 26th in DvP and 28th in Def-Eff at defending the SG position. When these two teams met back on December 4th, Booker erupted for 64.5 fantasy points on the back of 46 points and 8 rebounds and in this game environment he absolutely has that same ceiling again!
The one Suns player that may get overlooked tonight is Tyler Ulis ($7.3K) who not only lives in a PG time share but now also takes a big usage hit with Booker and T.J. Warren on the floor with him. The situation is not exactly the same as it was the last time these two met (Mike James is gone and Isaiah Canaan is playing significant minutes off the bench) but it is important to note that Ulis racked up 12 points, 12 assists and 32 fantasy points the last time he took on the Sixers. The Sixers struggle to defend opposing PG’s (ranked 22nd in DvP) as we saw with Jamal Murray who dropped a 50 spot on them last night so Ulis makes for a nice low owned way to get exposure to this game in a favorable match-up.
The Sixers have to play on the tail end of a back to back, traveling from the altitude in Denver to Phoenix and their third road game in four nights so there is some potential here for tired legs. My recommendation to fade Ben Simmons yesterday (20 fantasy points) worked out in spades and I have ZERO interest in him here as the rookie wall appears to be very real and his inability to shoot or challenge defenders from the outside has made him entirely too one-dimensional.
If there is one player I am locking in on, it is the one guy who rested last night and will be the “freshest” of all the Sixers players – Joel Embiid ($18.5K). In the first meeting between these teams, Embiid racked up 22 points, 12 boards and 50 fantasy points and with so much value to be found (potentially) in OKC, I think using the salary savings to pay up for The Process is a great roster strategy tonight!
NBA DFS – Pivot Plays
At first glance, I am finding my core builds focused around the Sixers/Suns and Russell Westbrook with the expectation that Paul George will be out but going into the day I always want to have a short list of pivot plays so that I am prepared to make adjustments as the news breaks.
The Clippers/Hornets game doesn’t jump off the page with its solid 214.5 game total and middle of the road pace, but this is a game where both teams are expected to score more than their season average AND we have a 2 point spread so a game stack here could pay off with some players that will likely be low(er) owned.
Blake Griffin ($14k on FantasyDraft and $8.5K) is simply priced too low on both sites considering we saw him come back and play 32 minutes while racking up 41 fantasy points in his first game back since injury. I absolutely did NOT expect him to get that much run, but if the Clippers feel that he can handle a full load then I simply see no reason not to prioritize him tonight against the Hornets. These two teams played last month and Griffin racked up 19 points, 8 boards and 36 fantasy points which seems like his floor in this spot when you consider that Austin Rivers is questionable to play which means Griffin and his team high usage rate would be asked to shoulder even more of the load tonight!
The Hornets side of this game could be used (if PG is IN and I want to move off Westbrook) as a potential pivot although admittedly they are not a core play for me initially. When these two teams played in November, Dwight Howard (43), Nicolas Batum (34) and Kemba Walker (37) all had strong fantasy outings and could make for an interesting correlation with Griffin on the other side of this game!
It may seem crazy that I have failed to mention the highest projected scoring game on the slate between the Rockets and Lakers but that is a bit by design. First off, we saw that with Chris Paul back, it crushed the usage/upside for James Harden and with a 15 point spread, I am a little hesitant to pay the premium prices for the Rockets stars here tonight.
There is one player that has my attention tonight and that is recent acquisition Gerald Green ($6.1K) who is minimum priced across the industry and may be a player that DFS players may have not realized is now on the Rockets. Green has played two games for Houston so far, logging 11 and 27 minutes and has always been an elite scoring threat in his NBA career. What is interesting with Green is we saw the Rockets leaned on him heavily last game, playing significant minutes including checking in with 4 minutes remaining in the third quarter and never coming off the court the rest of the game. Obviously this was blow-out driven but tonight we have a home game for Houston with a 15 point spread so it would seem logical that this could be a repeat game environment. Green went 6 for 10 from the floor, including 4 for 6 from three-point range and racked up 26.5 fantasy points which would deliver 4.3x value at this price point!
NBA DFS – Slate Overview and Sample Line-Up
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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FantasyDraft Sample Line-Up:
G: Russell Westbrook ($23,900)
G: Devin Booker ($17,000)
G: Raymond Felton ($6,100)
F/C: Joel Embiid ($18,500)
F/C: Blake Griffin ($14,000)
F/C: Jerami Grant ($6,900)
Util: Tyler Ulis ($7,300)
Util: Gerald Green ($6,100)
Slate Overview: Enjoy tonight’s abbreviated New Years Eve slate and keep particular focus on the news for Paul George as any confirmation that he is out would make Westbrook priority number 1 in all lineups. Ensure you have exposure to the fast paced Suns/Sixers game and do not overlook the sneaky game stack between the Clippers/Hornets!
Enjoy your New Years Eve – BE SAFE and Picks and Pivots will see you back here in 2018. Thank you all for reading along and making 2017 a historic year for Fantasy CPR!
Next: FanDuel NFL Picks - Week 17
Best of luck in your NBA DFS contest and stay tuned to Fantasy CPR for all the latest DFS news and analysis!