NBA DFS Picks and Pivots – Saturday October 20
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.
With a solid week down in NBA DFS, the common theme nearly every slate, big or small, is that scores are up with winning GPP scores again in the 350 range on FantasyDraft meaning we need 3.5x value in order to really hit it big – just getting 3x value now is basically a minimum cash kind of night so far this season.
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 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 – Top Game of the Night:
With a 10 game NBA DFS slate on top for Saturday Night, my goal is really to help you narrow down your player pool and find the games to target so that you can cast a more concentrated net in your research leading up to lock.
Let’s be clear – there is one game that stands out above the rest tonight – both from a NBA DFS perspective and just an NBA fan perspective as the Houston Rockets take on LeBron and the Los Angeles Lakers.
With a 235.5 vegas total (over 10 points more than any other game) and a 3 point spread, this is the obvious spot for star power with LeBron making his first start in LA for his new team. Let’s start with the Lakers and what we know – LeBron James ($19.1K) not surprisingly lead the team with a 30% usage rate in his first game and delivered with a team high 50.5 fantasy points.
As for the rest of his new team – Brandon Ingram had a 27% usage rate while putting up 1.1 FP/M, Josh Hart led the bench charge with 24% usage and 1.35 FP/M and Rajon Rondo put up 1.2 FP/M primarily through his peripheral stats with 11 assists. What was most interesting to me was that the Lakers played a generally tight rotation with 9 guys (excluding Michael Beasley‘s 2 minutes) but only LeBron and Rondo playing over 30 minutes in their opener.
LeBron is the obvious target in a fast paced match-up in his first home start for his new squad while the rest of his Laker teammates really are more of fringe secondary plays in my mind. Rondo will get CP3 defense and the until we see how this Ingram, Kuzma, KCP and Hart usage and production shakes out over a larger sample size, it feels like you are guessing on which one of these guys becomes the Robin to LeBron’s Batman each night.
The Rockets side of this game is much easier to dissect – James Harden ($20.1K) and Chris Paul ($16.3K) – are the top plays on this squad although I do think it was interesting that neither player had over a 27% usage rate in the opener considering these were two players routinely over 30% last year. Oddly enough – it was Michael Carter-Williams (29.6%) and Carmelo Anthony (22%) – who seemed to suck up much of that usage which I hesitate to say is a problem but certainly something worth watching to see if it continues.
The Rockets have a team high 120 total so building around Harden and CP3 seems like a great Stars/Scrubs star and the value to be had with P.J. Tucker ($8.3K) makes this an easy game stack to start with. Tucker came through with 29 fantasy points in the opener (3.4x value) and should be on the court for heavy minutes again tonight with his defense needed against a certain King James.
If you start a build with LeBron, Harden, CP3 and Tucker – you would have $9K per player remaining to fill our the rest of your roster on FantasyDraft which is certainly a viable price point if you want to prioritize this Lakers-Rockets game stack and could be an approach you take in cash games with the high floors of the stars here and in GPP’s assuming this game plays at the projected fast pace and close spread.
NBA DFS – Pivot Game Stack
Sitting just below the Lakers and Rockets is the Suns and Nuggets, a game with a 224 total but a double-digit spread in favor of the home Nuggets. The biggest news to watch here is the status of Suns rookie Deandre Ayton ($13.8K) who is officially questionable for tonight’s game due to an ankle injury he sustained in practice.
So @DeandreAyton rolled his ankle during practice. He iced it and is listed as questionable. Medical staff will monitor to see how it does. Flying can increase swelling.
— Bob Young (@BobYoungTHI) October 19, 2018
The Suns saw the return of Devin Booker($15.2K) on opening night and boy, it didn’t look like there was any rust from his off-season surgery as he led the team with a massive 35.7% usage rate and 1.57 FP/M in over 33 minutes of court time.
More so than the player performance, there were two big takeaways for me when looking at how the Suns played under their new head coach. First was the rotations – they played essentially a 7 man rotation, with 7 guys playing 24+ minutes and 4 of the 5 starters playing 33 or more minutes in a game they won by 21 points.
Secondly, was the pace – this was a Suns team last year that was second in the NBA in pace with 101 possessions per game and we saw in the preseason that dropped to one of the lowest marks in the at 98. Interestingly enough, game 1, even with 121 points scored the Suns had only 95 possessions which is the lowest mark in the league thus far. Now, could this be the Suns acclimating to life with Booker back or maybe it was the opponent in the Dallas Mavericks? Or could it be the new coaching philosophy? This is something we need to watch as the season unfolds.
The interesting thing about using the Suns in a game stack is that really outside of Booker and Ayton, the complementary pieces like Isaiah Cannan and Trevor Ariza are priced fairly and if we can round out stacks with guys priced around $9-$10K who will play 30+ minutes, then it becomes a more balanced stack than say a Lakers-Rockets game where you are trying to shoehorn in $20K plays like LeBron and Harden.
The Nuggets on the other side of this game are always one of my favorite teams to build around and we saw in their opener that coach Mike Malone played his starting 5 all 30-35 minutes while no single bench player got more than 20 minutes of run. So you can approach this one of two ways with Denver – first, you can argue that you can lock in major minutes from a starting unit that has the second highest implied total on the night behind only the Houston Rockets.
Conversely, this is a starting unit with Nikola Jokic, Jamal Murray, Will Barton, Gary Harris and Paul Millsap with a ton of mouths to feed and no one player that night in and night out dominates the usage. Over the last two seasons, with this starting unit on the court – you basically have 5 guys all around a FP/M with no player over 25% usage – again lots of mouths to feed and only one ball.
As much as I love Jokic, paying over $17K for him considering the lower usage, makes him the one guy I would likely leave out here but with everyone else priced fairly, this could be a stack where you go more balanced with Booker/Ayton and run it back with a combination of Murray/Millsap/Barton/Harris.
NBA DFS – Pivot Plays:
Anytime we have a slate with obvious superstar plays that it feels like people will do anything to play (ie. LeBron and Harden), I like to look at the other stars priced up top as pivot plays. Use last night as an example of this – Anthony Davis was everyone’s favorite play and he came in at nearly 50% ownership in GPP’s while Giannis Antetokounmpo was under 20% owned but with a similar pedigree and ceiling.
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So with everyone working LeBron and Harden in tonight – who are those top end stars we could get for a fraction of the ownership? Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons are priced right around $18K and as a duo are averaging 110 points per game over their first two outings this season. Now their opponent, the Magic, are playing on the tail-end of a back to back and just got their doors blown off by the Hornets last night so there is risk as the double-digit spread would imply. However, we have two stars that are putting up 1.5 FP/M and at similar price points as the other stars on the slate, we could get this pairing at reduced ownership and run it back with Aaron Gordon or even Evan Fournier who leads the starting unit with a 32% usage rate this season.
Jimmy Butler ($14.6K) is two games into a bizarre season but put the circus aside for a second and you will find a guy averaging 52 fantasy points per game which would exceed 3.5x value at this mid-range price point. Wiggins is leading the team with a 30% usage rate and putting up 1.5 FP/M and will get the added benefit of facing a Mavericks team without Harrison Barnes tonight.
The Mavericks will once again be without Dirk Nowitzki and Harrison Barnes again tonight which means we can go right back to the duo of Dennis Smith Jr. and Luka Doncic who sit at similar $12K price points. DSJ led the team with a massive 35% usage rate and Doncic was not far behind at 28% so you could look to build a more balance mid-tier build with Butler/DSJ/Doncic in a game with the third highest total (218) on the slate and only a three-point spread.
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