NBA DFS Picks and Pivots – Sunday February 11
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 NBA DFS slate set up as a wait and see slate as we simply were held hostage by the status of Joel Embiid and it was only 15-20 minutes before lock that we got the news he would play. Ultimately Embiid ended up being THE play on the night as he led all fantasy scorers with 61 fantasy points and only Giannis Antetokounmpo was able to come close with 50 fantasy points as these were the only two player on the night to eclipse the 50 fantasy point mark!
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 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 – Quick Slate Overview
Sorry for the late article today – due to a little too much fun last night, my ability to formulate words and sentences took a bit more coffee/Gatorade/greasy food to get me to this point but we will rally and get you so some quick thoughts on this four game Main Slate.
Similar to yesterday’s slate, I think we are going to have to take a wait and see approach on building our rosters until we know the status of Russell Westbrook and Carmelo Anthony who are both questionable to play and considering they did not even practice on Saturday it would seem likely they sit out again tonight.
Paul George ($17K) would be the auto-lock play of the day assuming that Westbrook and Carmelo sit out as we saw last game he took a whopping 25 shot attempts as the lone man in the Thunder offense. George had an absurd 42.5% usage rate in that game and I see no reason to think this game would play out any differently – you simply make him your first man in every line-up if Westbrook and Melo are ruled out as expected. Raymond Felton ($6.7k) will likely be asked to play 30+ minutes again tonight as he did versus the Lakers where he put up 21 fantasy points which would be more than enough to return value here.
On the Memphis side of this game do not overlook the return of Tyreke Evans ($14.9K) who has not played since January 29th due to pending trade rumors but with Evans still a member of the Grizzlies and the deadline now in our rearview mirror, we can feel confident locking him back into our lineups tonight. The fact that Andrew Harrison is questionable and Wayne Selden is already ruled out means that Evans will likely be required to play major minutes in his return and considering this was not an injury issue with Tyreke, I see no reason to expect his minutes to be limited. In their earlier season meeting, Tyreke put up 53 fantasy points so there is significant upside here for Evans who could be over-looked as recency bias leads people in other directions.
What really makes this slate odd is that we have two games with huge blow-out concerns as Houston (15) and Minnesota (13) are favored in big time ways and 3 of the 4 games in action are projected to be significant pace down spots – in fact only the Dallas Mavericks have a positive pace boost – meaning 7 of the 8 teams in action see pace decreases.
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The Jazz-Blazers game is the “late night hammer” with the lowest total on the board so it may get over-looked here but if you want to play the game theory and assume Houston and Minnesota are in blowouts, it makes sense to target a game like this which should be close and we get a full run of minutes from the starters.
Ricky Rubio is questionable to play which means we could get point Donovan Mitchell ($12.5K) who sees a 7% usage bump with Rubio and recently traded Rodney Hood off the floor, leading the team with a 36% usage rate. I love the idea of stacking Mitchell and Damian Lillard ($17.6K) as both players played extremely well in the first meeting between these two, in fact Dame was able to drop 61 fantasy points in that meeting!
Rudy Gobert ($13.4K) had 37 fantasy points in that game earlier this season but it was actually Jusuf Nurkic ($11.2K) who had the better fantasy day as he dropped 45 fantasy points while logging 34 minutes of court time. Playing Nurk is always risky but when Portland plays a team with a big man like Gobert who will be on the court for 30+ minutes, I think they will simply have to match the court time with Nurkic which gives him massive upside and great GPP appeal as a low owned play!
Slate Overview: With the Mavericks playing the Rockets without Dirk, Wes Matthews and JJ Barea, I could see that game getting out of and quickly and so paying up for the Houston stars seems like waste of salary if we are only going to get 2-3 quarters of minutes from them. Minnesota is usually a team we can count on for minutes but they carry the same blowout risk against a Kings team they beat by 25 earlier this season so my initial builds are keeping me on the games I expect to be closer. We will need to watch the OKC injury news and the Rubio news as it would open up significant value across this slate. Again sorry for the late post/quick thoughts – we will be back tomorrow with our usual Picks and Pivots format!
Best of luck in your NBA DFS contests across FantasyDraft and FanDuel and stay tuned to Fantasy CPR for all the latest DFS news and analysis!