NBA DFS Picks and Pivots – Tuesday January 30

Welcome to the Tuesday 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!

Monday’s NBA DFS slate became quite the cluster as the day unfolded and we had tons of injury news to react to including Joel Embiid sitting out and essentially all of Phoenix and Memphis being hurt. Ultimately much of that “value” was a dud and because it was the shiny breaking news of the day it resulted in inflated ownership. Giannis Antetokounmpo was the star of the night as the only player who went above 50 fantasy points as his 64.5 fantasy points paced the night’s best plays. Looking back at the results, if you found a way to get Giannis into your line-ups and imply pivoted off the “chalk” value plays of the night you likely outpaced the field with relative ease!

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.

If you are looking to try out a new DFS site, head on over to FantasyDraft and enter my referral code for 10% rake back on your entires!

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 – Where to start on this slate:

Buckle up ladies and gentleman because we have a big time Tuesday slate and a TON of news that is going to completely alter how you attack this slate. If you are new to NBA DFS this season than welcome to trade season where a league that already has too much news that affects our rosters now introduces blockbuster trades which will impact the rotations, usage and outlook for teams all around the league.

The big news on Monday was that Blake Griffin is now a member of the Detroit Pistons while Tobias Harris, Avery Bradley and Boban Marjanovic are headed to the Clippers. As DFS luck would have it – both of these teams are in action today and with the traded players not expected to debut it means we get short-handed squads with tons of open usage – aka a DFS players dream!

Let’s dive right into the Clippers squad and what this means life post Blake as it is very likely we see a Clippers team tonight with only 7-8 active bodies! Lou Williams ($14.9K) is going to be an absolute usage monster with this trade as without Blake on the floor this season he leads the team with a 34% usage rate while putting up 1.2 FP/M but when you factor in the news that Patrick Beverley and Austin Rivers are off the floor, his usage jumps even higher to 37.7% with 1.25 FP/M. In the fifteen games that Griffin missed this season where Lou played, he averaged 37 fantasy points per game including 7 games with 40 or more fantasy points so the upside is VERY real in this spot.

DeAndre Jordan ($12.5K) may not see the same usage numbers (barely 20% in the same scenario above) but his FP/M output bumps to 1.27 as he averaged 38.4 fantasy points per game in 16 games without Blake this year.

What really is interesting about the Clippers is they have played at by far the fastest pace of any team in the NBA since January 1st, so we get a short-handed team with a ton of available usage that likes to push the pace – yeah, this is where you need to start your roster builds on this slate!

Do not overlook what this trade means for the Pistons side as we are taking their starting SG (Bradley) and PF (Harris) off the court tonight against a Cavaliers defense ranked 27th in DvP and Def-Eff this season. With Bradley, Harris and injured PG Reggie Jackson out for Detroit, Andre Drummond ($17.4K) sees a 4% usage boost and is putting up 1.5 FP/M and now gets to take on one of the worst defenses in the NBA where he is going to be asked to do ALL of the heavy lifting! This game literally just happened as Drummond put up 17/11 against the Cavs on Sunday for 41 fantasy points and that was with Harris on the court alongside him.

NBA DFS – New News Versus Old News:

As much as the “new news” around the Clippers and Pistons will impact this slate, it is likely we see inflated ownership as DFS players are very savvy and will know to attack the open usage with guys like Lou Williams and DeAndre Jordan. What is interesting is we literally are 48 hours away from the biggest DFS news of the new year as DeMarcus Cousins went out for the year which opened up an entirely new view of how to attack the Pelicans in DFS.

By now we all know the drill – when Boogie is out – you play Anthony Davis ($20.3K) and Jrue Holiday ($15.2K) and it was not at all surprising to see them massively owned on Sunday, the first time we could utilize them without Cousins. On Sunday’s slate, Jrue Holiday and Anthony Davis were the two highest owned players on FantasyDraft, sporting 46% and 36% ownership rates, but now just a few days later we have new news that may lead people to leave yesterday’s shiny new toy comparatively underowned. For as long as I have been playing DFS, this news chasing recency bias has been one of the most consistent themes across sports so keep an eye on how the industry reacts today because every reason these guys were elite plays Sunday still applies and they may not be the first players everyone is itching to talk about.

In terms of the match-up, the Pelicans see one of the largest pace decreases on the slate but they balance that out with the fact that the Kings have absolutely NOBODY who can slow down The Brow inside as Willie Cauley-Stein is out due to injury which means…oh no, Kosta Koufos and Zach Randolph…oh my…have to attempt to guard him. Seriously – what is the ceiling for AD in this spot with that duo tasked with guarding him? Pau Gasol just put 14/11 in 25 minutes against this same Kings frontcourt and we are going to see 35-40 minutes of Anthony Davis now? Boogie Cousins destroyed this same spot earlier this season with 80 and 58 fantasy points in two games against his former squad and now the Brow gets to exact some revenge against his fallen teammates’ old squad which leads me to wonder is a #RevengeNarrative transferable in DFS?

We already mentioned the Clippers players we want to build around but can we/should we run it back with some of the Portland Trail Blazers? As noted, no team in the NBA has played at a faster pace in January than the Clippers and you know who loves fast paced high scoring games – Damian Lillard ($15.6K). The Clippers and Blazers game has the second highest projected game total (221), a 2.5 point spread and is the fourth fastest projected game on the slate so it checks all the boxes for DFS success. Lillard over the last two weeks has really stepped his game up, sporting a 30% plus usage rate while putting up over 42 fantasy points per game which at this price on FantasyDraft gives him clear ability to return value.

NBA DFS – Stars and Scrubs:

With the Clippers and Pistons looking to be extremely short-handed tonight we should have a plethora of value plays which makes a Stars and Scrubs build looking like the way to go at first glance.

On the Pistons side of the ball, Dwight Buycks ($6.5K) will be one of the few healthy back-court options available tonight and interestingly enough with Harris, Jackson and Bradley off the court this season is one of the team leaders in usage rate at 29.1% while putting up a fantasy point per minute of production. With Bradley out last game, Buycks played 20 minutes off the bench and delivered 20 fantasy points which would return 3x value at his near minimum price on FantasyDraft.

The Clippers front-court will likely be a popular course of value with Griffin and back-up center Willie Reed on their way to Detroit which means we should get a ton of run for guys like Montrezl Harrell ($7.9K) and Sam Dekker ($6.7K). Harrell is an exceptional value on FanDuel at $4.1K and has flashed GPP winning upside putting up 6x value in three of the sixteen games Griffin missed earlier this season.

One injury to watch today is the status of Aaron Gordon who is questionable to play tonight against the Rockets after missing practice Monday with a strained hop flexor. With the Magic already down Nikola Vucevic it would mean that a player like Khem Birch ($7.2K) could be thrust into major minutes in the fastest pace game of the night!

Last but not least – do not overlook the potential value in New York as the Knicks and Nets battle for the third time this season and we already know the Nets will be without Rondae Hollis-Jefferson and Caris LeVert while D’Angelo Russell is expected to play roughly 20 minutes off the bench for Brooklyn.

The Nets had a similar injury scenario last game out against Minnesota (although Russell was out for that game and will be active tonight) so we can get some interesting reads on Kenny Atkinson’s rotations. The Nets were essentially blown off the floor early in that game and my hope is that the Nets finally realize they should not be playing Tyler Zeller any minutes and should be running Jahlil Okafor ($6K) more. Okafor played 23 minutes off the bench, scored 23 points, grabbed 6 boards and put up 30 fantasy points which would absolutely crush value at minimum price on FantasyDraft. With RHJ out again I think the path to minutes is clear tonight for Okafor as the Nets will need big men to balance against the Kanter/KP Knicks front line so I love the idea of rolling him out in GPP’s. The same logic can be applied to Jarrett Allen ($7.3K) who has played 18-23 minutes a game over his last three outings and has put up over 24 fantasy points per game in that stretch and actually drew the start in the second half of the Nets-Wolves game so we need to keep an eye on the Nets line-up news before lock tonight!

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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FanDuel NBA DFS Sample Line-Up:

PG: Damian Lillard ($9,100)

PG: Ricky Rubio ($5,100)

SG: Lou Williams ($8,900)

SG: Alec Burks ($3,600)

SF: Wes Johnson ($4,500)

SF: Dante Cunningham ($4,500)

PF: Anthony Davis ($12,500)

PF: Montrezl Harrell ($4,100)

C: DeAndre Jordan ($7,700)

Slate Overview: This looks like a really fascinating slate to play and with SO much recent injury/trade news we are going to have the ability to go stars and scrubs with all the value that has opened up. The question is going to be which studs do you want to prioritize and as news breaks throughout the day will it cause people to all rush in the same direction?

Next: DraftKings NBA Picks

Best of luck in your NBA DFS contests across FantasyDraft and FanDuel and keep an eye on Fantasy CPR for all the latest DFS news and analysis!