NBA DFS Picks and Pivots – Wednesday March 28
Welcome to the Wednesday 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.
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 – Finding a Core:
Good Morning Picks and Pivots fans – apologies for not getting an article out yesterday as I was focused on getting our MLB Opening Day content out early as like many of you, I am ready to get started on the MLB season and Picks and Pivots will be ready to roll each day from now until the World Series.
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I had many people ask me yesterday for advice as it appears some are still playing NBA DFS this late in the season and I would suspect with no baseball until Thursday that folks will look to scratch their DFS itch on Wednesday with some NBA. I pride myself on being transparent in this industry and I can tell you, I have essentially no interest in playing NBA DFS at this point in the season other than throwing out some GPP darts for the entertainment value only. Listen, there is still money to be made and I get that but when you look at how the playoff standings are more or less locked and you look at the sheer number of players resting or being ultra conservative with injuries (ie. those of you who rostered Kevin Love and LaMarcus Aldridge last night), personally I think the risk outweighs the reward this late in the NBA season.
All that being said, you are going to say – great Brian, I am glad you have moved on to MLB DFS but I need one more night of NBA DFS to bridge the gap and for the last time in the NBA regular season it felt like I owed it to my readers to give you one last Picks and Pivots before we fully move on to baseball!
So let’s jump in! The big news is that Damian Lillard will be out tonight due to the birth of is child and that makes C.J. McCollum and Shabazz Napier players 1 and 2 in my player pool right off the bat. With Dame off the court this season, McCollum sees a 6% usage boost and leads the team with a 34% usage rate which puts him in consideration as a cash game lock with a GPP ceiling.
My only concern with McCollum is that Portland more or less has the 3 seed on lock so if this game against Memphis gets out of hand, he is going to be watching from the bench! Napier is the best value on this slate and would get the run in any scenario and his performance in the starting line-up this season has been phenomenal as he is averaging 37 fantasy points per game in 7 starts this season. On FantasyDraft where he is priced at $7K, the upside is simply enormous and I would lock him into every line-up I have tonight!
The Clippers are the one team that stands out to me tonight both because of their place in the standings and the match-up against the Suns. LA is just 1.5 games behind Minnesota with just 8 games to go so we know the starters are going to log their normal minutes and considering they get one of the largest pace boosts on the slate in the fastest projected pace game, you can just simply load up on the Clippers in this spot and feel good about your core.
These two teams played at the end of February and it was not shocking to me to look back at the game log and see monster outings from a numbers of the Clippers. Tobias Harris (58 fantasy points), Lou Williams (42) and DeAndre Jordan (38) all had huge games and if I were building a roster tonight I would have no issue locking all three of these players into my build tonight. From a pure core perspective, you can lock in the five players noted here on FantasyDraft and still have nearly $12K per player for your last three spots.
The team the Clippers are chasing, the Minnesota Timberwolves, get to play the Atlanta Hawks at home and as I am typing this it dawns on me that the three teams I am looking to build around are playing the Hawks, Grizzlies and Suns – if this doesn’t scream blowout risk then I don’t know what will. For every reason you want to play the Clippers in a must win game, you can make the same argument for the Wolves here as this is a team that is playing a tight six man rotation (with Jamal Crawford off the bench) and I would not hesitate to mix and match every single one of these guys tonight.
Now if this is going to be my last Picks and Picks of the NBA season, I just have to do it. TIM. HARDAWAY. JR. Yes kids, one last time and although this is partially for laughs there is also some merit to this in GPP’s. Trey Burke is going to be SUPER popular after his monster game and rightfully so after dropping 42 points on THIRTY ONE shot attempts so rather than chase the chalk, I love the idea of the leverage play here with THJ or even someone like Michael Beasley who dropped 55 FP against this Sixers team when they met a few days ago.
I truly want to THANK YOU all for reading each day during the NBA season as this has been a blast for me and I hope informative (and profitable) for you. I hope you will all continue to read Picks and Pivots during the MLB season and when THJ wins you a GPP tonight (because frankly he owes us), I hope you all let me know on Twitter!
Best of luck in your