NBA DFS Picks and Pivots – Thursday October 11

Welcome to the Thursday 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.

Wednesday’s NBA DFS slate had some familiar names at the top of the leaderboard as John Wall and Andre Drummond had top 3 performances but it was a massive night from a universally ignored Bam Adebayo who had the line of the night – 26 points, 12 rebounds, 5 steals and 3 blocks which was good for a slate leading 61 fantasy points.

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.

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 entries.

As always, we will look to update our final lineup thoughts throughout the day 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 – Pelicans and Raptors:

The Raptors and Pelicans play their final preseason game tonight and what is really interesting about this is that both teams are playing on the tail-end of a back to back.

With Anthony Davis and Jrue Holiday sitting out last night, Elfrid Payton (27), Nikola Mirotic (30) and Julius Randle (30) basically ran the show and I have a hard time believing that New Orleans is going to push that trio on a back to back after the minutes they played last night but as I pointed out yesterday from Andrew Lopez of NOLA.com – coach Alvin Gentry is looking to use tonight’s game as a “dress rehearsal” which by the way is a term I am growing to hate as we try to play detective with these preseason rotations.

"Gentry is gearing up for a “dress rehearsal” type preseason finale for New Orleans at home on Thursday night when the team hosts the Rockets."

So let’s keep it simple – Anthony Davis ($15.5K) and Jrue Holiday (13K) are the Pelicans two clear usage leaders, they were rested last night and tonight the Coach wants a dress rehearsal? These are the two first players into my line-up tonight as you can lock in two players with 30% usage rates last season in the fastest pace offense in the entire NBA.

The Raptors on the other side of this game used the old “dress rehearsal” term last night and played Kawhi Leonard 31 minutes, but limited the other starters like Kyle Lowry and Serge Ibaka to 20 minutes – so the term can be a tad mis-leading as we have found so far in NBA DFS preseason.

My guess on the Raptors is that this is going to be one of those games where all the Veterans are rested and it opens up a ton of value – remember two nights ago when we had a similar two game slate and the Bucks sat out their entire starting line-up and Christian Wood ended the night as the top DFS performer? This could be very much the same situation here tonight.

If Lowry sits, it is interesting that Delon Wright also left the game last night with an injury which means Fred Van Vleet ($8.4K) could end up getting all the run he can handle tonight in a up-tempo spot against the Pelicans. Trying to speculate who is a good play here at 5AM EST as I type this up is a bit silly – my take is – follow Josh Lewenberg, the Raptors beat reporter, watch for news since this is the first game to top-off at 8PM EST – and simply sort through the Raptors that end up playing – as we saw last night with Bam Adebayo, bench players against this New Orleans defense can have some big time upside.

NBA DFS – Jazz and Kings:

The Jazz and Kings will take each other on tonight before they play each other for real in their opening game of the NBA season. Any time you have a situation like this where the same teams will play to start the regular season against the other, I think your gut reaction is that they will not want to “show their cards” and watching this clip from Kings coach Dave Joerger, it was interesting in how he addressed it.

His point that a more seasoned and proven team like the Jazz may hold some things back but it sounds like he intends to push his guys to get better and use every opportunity of court time to do so.

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The Kings played a back-to-back last Thursday/Friday and looking back at those box scores, it is interesting to see how they limited the minutes on the front-end with no starter playing over 20 minutes and then pushed them to 25-27 minutes in the tail-end. With this being the front end of the B2B tonight, it is fair to wonder if Coach Joerger will opt for the same approach but listening to his media clip above, it sounds like he wants to use this as an opportunity to prep his team for their 14 B2B’s during the regular season. The Kings rotation is relatively deep with young players like De’Aaron Fox, Willie Cauley-Stein and rookies Marvin Bagley and Harry Giles off the bench and based off the preseason usage, I think you are looking and hoping for 25 minutes or so from any Kings player you opt to roster.

Even if the Jazz opt to “hold back” a bit, this is still a spot where as long as Donovan Mitchell is on the court, than you simply play him. Mitchell is the clear Jazz usage leader, leading the team in PPG and the only player to average double-digit FGA so far in the preseason.

Slate Overview: The more I look at this slate the more I think salary will not be an issue with what I expect will be some serious value coming out of Toronto which likely means that the “safe” stars like AD/Jrue and possibly Mitchell will all be nearly universally owned. As we saw on Tuesday’s two game slate, do not be afraid to leave salary on the table and just play the bench guys. If for example, the Raptors opt to sit there starters on the tail-end of a back to back – fire up a little Raptors/Pelicans stack and hope the bench Toronto guys give you similar performances to what we saw from BAM last night!

Best of luck in your NBA DFS contests and stay tuned to Fantasy CPR for all the latest DFS news and analysis each and every day!