NBA DFS Picks and Pivots – Saturday February 24
Welcome to the Saturday 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.
Friday Night’s DFS slate in my mind was relatively simple as I had the majority of my exposure in the late games focused squarely on the Suns/Clippers and Mavericks/Lakers. With the news throughout the day that Danilo Gallinari was downgraded to questionable, I went overweight on Tobias Harris who rewarded me with 60 fantasy points and the third highest score on the night while Julius Randle put up another big game against Dallas this season with 51 points of his home to help me cash across the board. The big difference maker however was Anthony Davis who went OFF for 45 points, 17 rebounds, 5 blocks, 5 steals and 90.25 fantasy points as the clear GPP difference maker on this night – congrats to anyone who locked in The Brow as I am sure you had a great start to your weekend!
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 – Where to start on this slate:
The NBA brings one of its best match-ups to the table tonight with a National TV game featuring the Warriors and Thunder. From a pure basketball perspective this is one of my favorite match-ups in the NBA to watch but I am torn tonight on how to handle it from a DFS perspective.
On the surface it checks all the boxes – highest game total (234), second fastest projected pace and both teams see a 6+ point projected scoring increase so this should be a game we just lock in on considering we know where the production is going to come from.
Frankly that is the beauty and the challenge with the match-up – we know the fantasy production on both sides is limited to a core 3-4 guys on either team and it is not like the DFS sites aren’t aware as they price up the stars in this match-up which makes locking in on even a mini-game stack an extreme Stars/Scrubs build so we would need to have value open up in order to make it work.
These two teams have faced off twice already this season with the most recent game being a 125-105 OKC win in Golden State just before the break. If we look at the player performance of the “Big Stars” over their two games we will see some interesting data points:
- Russell Westbrook – 65 and 54 fantasy points
- Paul George – 64 and 52 fantasy points
- Steven Adams – 33 and 31 fantasy points
- Kevin Durant – 43 and 32 fantasy points
- Stephen Curry – 38 and 36 fantasy points
- Draymond Green – 32 and 31 fantasy points
Outside of Russell Westbrook ($20.8K) and Paul George ($17.2K) the production relative to the price points for the other big stars has really underwhelmed so this is not the obvious all-in stack that it may seem on the surface but I think you will need exposure to this game’s stars in some form or fashion in your roster build as there are really only a small handful of games that have the ability to break this slate open and this is exhibit A.
Westbrook and George would be the first two guys in for me on this slate as over the last four weeks both players are sporting 30% usage rates (George at 30% and Westbrook at 33%) while putting up 1.3 (George) and 1.5 (Westbrook) fantasy points per minute.
On the Warriors side, the decision whether to go Stephen Curry ($18K) or Kevin Durant ($17.8K) is much more difficult and my first instinct is that most will choose to go Curry based off the recency bias of his monster game on Thursday against the Clippers (which makes me want to go Durant).
Over the last two seasons in this match-up it has been Durant who has had the higher usage (35.3% versus 30.2%) and higher FP/M output (1.56 versus 1.36) so the metrics support using Durant over Curry in this case but depending on the site you play on (more on that in a bit) it may make more sense to lock in Curry at PG and keep your forward spot open for some critical value.
NBA DFS – Value Plays:
If you want to stack the big stars in the OKC-Golden State game you are going to need value and the best path to it in my mind is Jimmy Butler. Well, not Jimmy Butler exactly – more the injury status of Jimmy Butler who was carted off with a possible ACL injury on Friday night and we await an MRI on Saturday which frankly puts him at very doubtful to play in this game tonight against the Bulls.
Jimmy Butler collapsed to the floor after getting a rebound and clutched his right knee pic.twitter.com/2xAiJZ0Nfa
— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) February 24, 2018
We have some very recent game environments with Butler out to see how Minnesota responded as Butler missed four games from January 20-25th which pushed Nemanja Bjelica ($6.6K, $3.5K on FanDuel) into the starting line-up. In those four games, Bjelica played an average of 33 minutes per game and averaged 27 fantasy points per game which would absolutely crush value at this price point.
I mentioned before one of the reasons to go Curry over Durant on FanDuel is that you can free up your second SF spot (assuming you are using Paul George in the other) to lock in the elite value of Bjelica which opens up massive roster possibilities tonight.
Although he may not draw the start, Jamal Crawford ($3.8K on FanDuel) looked to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of Butler’s absence on Friday night and we saw him put up big time numbers in that January stretch where Butler missed time as he put up 26 and 32 fantasy points in 25 minutes per game off the bench for Minnesota. To me, the Butler news is the key to unlocking the Golden State-OKC stack so keep an eye on the news here and react accordingly.
Do not think that the only value to be had here is on the Minnesota side as their match-up with the Chicago Bulls opens up an opportunity to go back to a spot we harped on Thursday Night as the “new-look” bulls unveiled a new starting line-up and rotation that sent Justin Holiday and Robin Lopez to the bench (and DNP-CD’s) in the first game back from the break.
David Nwaba ($8.9K) was one of the most popular value plays on the Thursday slate and all he did was deliver with 21 points, 9 rebounds and 40 fantasy points and although he got a slight price boost – frankly it is not even close to enough to keep me from going back here again tonight!
Cristiano Felicio ($7K) was the chalk play on Thursday and bombed in a big time way picking up quick fouls against Joel Embiid which sent him to the bench and allowed Bobby Portis to go off. Felicio is risky but all the reasons we played him Thursday still apply – he is going to start, play significant minutes (assuming he cannot foul) and he is still dirt cheap. This feels like a spot where everyone jumps off and we can go right back to him against a Minnesota team ranked 25th in Def-Eff against opposing Centers.
NBA DFS – Pivot Plays:
One of the things that jumped out to me when I first dug into this slate was that Devin Booker ($13.2K, $7.7K) feels too cheap for a guy shooting the ball 20 times a game since he returned from injury. This match-up against Portland is one that Booker has crushed so far this season putting up 46 and 67 fantasy points in the last two games these teams have faced off and on FantasyDraft he is one of my favorite GPP plays as his upside relative to his price point is just insane. For those who read me daily – you will know this pains me to write – but how in the world is Booker $200 cheaper on FantasyDraft than Tim Hardaway Jr.???????? Booker is way to cheap here and I am going to lock him in tonight as a player that could easily break this slate and his price point does not prohibit me from building around the OKC-Golden State studs.
Keep an eye on the status of Tyson Chandler who missed the Suns game last night with a neck injury which pushed Alex Len into the starting line-up again and he has now put up 46 and 37 fantasy points in his last two starts. Considering that Len is priced at only $4.5K on FanDuel, you are looking at 8-9x return at this price point and on a night where we need salary savings, locking in Len at Center is a great start to any roster build.
Josh Hart has another double-double with 11 points and 10 boards.
— Mike Trudell (@LakersReporter) February 24, 2018
The Lakers welcomed back Lonzo Ball last night who was limited to only 17 minutes of court time and we already know that he will sit out tonight on the tail end of a back to back. The one player I wanted to watch last night to see how Ball’s return impacted him was Josh Hart ($8.5K) who remained in the starting line-up and logged another double-double in over 33 minutes of court time. Over his last seven games, Hart has out up 30 or more fantasy points five times and has double-doubles in four of those games and considering he only “needs” 25 fantasy points to pay off this price tag, he feels like one of the best point per dollar plays on this entire slate.
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: Russell Westbrook ($11,200)
PG: Stephen Curry ($9,500)
SG: Jamal Crawford ($3,800)
SG: Devin Booker ($7,700)
SF: Paul George ($8,800)
SF: Nemanja Bjelica ($3,500)
PF: Lauri Markkanen ($6,100)
PF: Al Farouq Aminu ($4,900)
C: Alex Len ($4,500)
Slate Overview: To me this slate is simple – it boils down to getting 2-3 studs from OKC-Golden State, Devin Booker and using the value in Minnesota/Chicago to make it all work. On slates like this where we have the value, I simply have no issue eating the chalk and going Stars/Scrubs but if you are going to go that route – I would recommend playing a good amount of cash games to supplement your GPP exposure as this route could end up being the chalk build and although it is my preferred route, it may be tough to differentiate in a significant way in tournaments as a result.
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!