NBA DFS Picks and Pivots – Tuesday November 13

Welcome to the Tuesday 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 fantasy basketball 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.

Monday’s NBA DFS slate was incredibly high-scoring as winning GPP scores on FantasyDraft pushed well past 375 as six players went for 50+ fantasy points with three players, KD, AD and KAT, all going for 60+ on a night where the cash line was at 320+ in tournaments.

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 – Planting Our Flag:

On a three game NBA DFS slate like we have tonight, we need to find a way to plant our flag and take stands and simply play a game of chicken with the rest of the field – be willing to go all-in on spots and simply fade others.

Tonight, the team I am inclined to simply go all-in on is the Houston Rockets who are in the middle of a Carmelo Anthony fueled early season drama which in addition to a variety of player illness’s/injuries is leaving us with an incredibly short-handed rotation.

Tonight, the Rockets are expected to be without Carmelo Anthony again, while Gerald Green has already been ruled out and now add P.J. Tucker to the injury report with a stomach bug.

Take a look at the Rockets rotations last game – they played only eight players in that game and that included 40 minutes from Tucker who is a prime candidate to miss tonight’s game. Any time I can find a team that has this much concentrated usage/minutes – I am going to attack it and it all starts with James Harden ($19.2K). In their last game, in a similar game environment against Indiana, The Beard went back into usage monster mode, sporting a 49% usage rate, while putting up 1.74 FP/M on his way to 66 fantasy points. When teams are dealing with chaos like Houston is right now, superstars tend to step up and this is a spot where I think Harden comes out and has another 60-70 point outing, willing his team to a win on his own.

Chris Paul ($15.2K) feels over-priced considering his recent play and the fact that Harden is back on the floor, but if you are going with the mindset that this Rockets team is basically down to a handful of viable options – you have to consider him here based on the expected usage and minutes alone. CP3 put up 43 and 53 in two of his three meetings with Denver last season and is coming off a 47 point performance against Indiana his last game out.

Eric Gordon ($10.4K) was a letdown for me last game due to his cold-shooting, but he was second on the team behind Harden (again) in FGA and played 31 minutes with Melo/Green out against Indiana.

Between Harden, CP3 and Gordon, this trio shot the ball 47 times against Indiana which accounted for 63% of the total shot attempts for the Rockets in that game. When I say you plant your flag and go all-in, this is what I mean – you can essentially stack the entire Rockets offense with these three players.

But hey – why stop there, the Rockets only have 3-4 more bodies that will even play tonight. Clint Capela ($12.3K) is going to be on the court for as many minutes as he can handle with Nikola Jokic on the other side and this is a spot he dropped 60 FPTS against them last season so the upside is clearly there. Gary Clark ($7.5K) becomes the value play here as the 3 and D guy on the wing that could see a starting role if Tucker is forced to miss this game or you can drop down a few hundred more to James Ennis ($6.8K) in a similar role at a punt price.

In the case of Capela, Ennis and Clark, these are low usage guys that are going to make value through peripheral stats which is perfectly fine as a correlation with all the offense you would target with Harden/CP3 and Gordon.

NBA DFS – Nuggets and Rockets Game Stack?

Game stacks are not always the way to go in NBA DFS especially on larger slates but I do believe that on short slates like this, this become a viable “plant your flag and fad the rest” strategy. With as much Rockets exposure as I seemingly intend to have here early on – it only makes sense to run it back with the Nuggets core players.

That all starts with Nikola Jokic ($17.3K) and Jamal Murray ($12K) for me as a boom/bust GPP pairing that can win you a slate or leave you with an over-priced point per dollar investment. The price points on both players has remained reasonable due to a string of un-even games which is what makes them a viable addition to a high cost Rockets stack but you are also looking at two players that have gone for 60-70 fantasy points each over the last week of play.

Last season these two teams, the Rockets and Nuggets, ranked 14th and 15th in the NBA in pace but this year they are all the way down to 26 and 28th respectively which puts this game somewhat surprisingly as the slowest pace game of the night. We all know the upside that The Joker has on any given night but have you realized that Jamal Murray over his last five games is putting up just under 20 shot attempts per game which is 9th in all of basketball? There is some big time volume and usage to be had here with Murray even in a tougher match-up with CP3 defense.

To me this is the game with the most talented core of players on both sides, so I could see this game staying close throughout and with it being in Denver, I view this as somewhat of a statement game for the Nuggets who are sitting in third in the Western Conference in the early going. Denver is in the midst of a nice little home-stand here, having played at home last Friday and will not have to leave for a road trip until this coming Saturday so they should be well-rested here and with their next game being against the Hawks – this feels like the spot they really push their starters. Go back and read the quotes from Mike Malone after their loss to the Bucks – there is frustration here with how his starters played so this could be one of those games where the starters respond after a few days of “tough love” or they come out flat and he runs the bench players to send a message. As I have said – the Nuggets, even Jokic and Murray – are GPP plays only.

It will be interesting to see if Juancho Hernangomez ($7K) gets the start again for the Nuggets tonight after his spot-start against Milwaukee. It sounded like initially this was a match-up based start but per the quote from beat writer Harrison Wind, it sounds like this could be a move that sticks for the Nuggets.

NBA DFS – How to handle the other two games:

I mentioned a few times about taking a stand and this Golden State-Atlanta game is where I intend to do just that. It rarely pays off the “predict” blow-outs but even with Steph Curry out, I just do not see how this Atlanta team can keep it close enough in Golden State to make the investment in guys like Kevin Durant, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson pay off. The fact that they are also on the tail-end of a back to back after a OT game in LA last night makes it even harder to pay up for this trio over the Houston-Denver stars.

Atlanta has been blown out by the Kings and Cavaliers this season but also managed to go down to the wire with LeBron and the Lakers in LA – so the range of outcomes is wide here, honestly I am just not going to go there. If Trae Young burns me, so be it – I would rather invest in Harden over Durant, CP3 over Draymond and Murray over Klay on this slate and that is where I will plant my flag. Maybe as the day goes on, this will be the take the rest of the industry has as well which could make Golden State a GPP pivot but at first glance, this is just not where I am looking to spend.

If you want to play the blow-out narrative here – then maybe you leverage a bit and look towards the Hawks/Warriors bench guys who would get the late game run if/when this game gets out of hand. Kevin Huerter ($6.1K) is the guy that caught my eye here as he kind of gives you the best of both worlds from a punt perspective – serving as one of the first men off the Hawks bench which means he gets “normal minutes” but we also saw in their blowout loss two games ago to Detroit, he played nearly 30 minutes as the starters got little run in the second half.

The Hornets-Cavaliers game is the only one with any sort of Vegas information as we already have the key information here with a ton of injuries on the Cavs side with Cedi Osman, George Hill, Sam Dekker all ruled out with JR Smith and Kyle Korver questionable to play with Michael Kidd-Gilchrist out for Charlotte.

This is likely the game I look towards for my “value fillers” – the guys I work in around Houston/Denver to make it all work. On the Hornets side, with MKG out, I expect Miles Bridges ($7.2K) to continue to get added run in the 20-25 minute range after back to back games where he got 22+ fantasy points – making him a solid cash game fill-in piece. On the Cavaliers side you could roll out mid-tier guys like Larry Nance Jr. and Collin Sexton ($10K each) who are locked into 30+ minutes and their price has yet to reflect their expanded roles.

There is nothing about this game that makes anyone here a must play in my opinion – really outside of Kemba Walker who are you worried about fading here? With this being the lone early game, tipping off 2 hours before the next game, I really hope people over-play this game since it could be the only one we have with confirmed line-ups before lock.

NBA DFS – Sample Lineup and Slate Overview:

Please note – this sample line-up is meant to be illustrative only and is not meant to be used as an optimized plug and play line-up. 

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G: James Harden

G: Chris Paul

G: Jamal Murray

F/C: Nikola Jokic

F/C: Clint Capela

F/C: Gary Clark

UTIL: Eric Gordon

UTIL: Kevin Huerter

Slate Overview: Three game slate – take a stand and move on. The more I look at this slate the more that overall mantra holds true – pick a game and go-all in on it. The Warriors-Hawks could go off, or it could be over by halftime. The Hornets-Cavaliers game feels like one we would ignore outside of Kemba and maybe Sexton if there slate was an 8-9 game night. All that leads me back to a short-handed Rockets team against the Nuggets in the only game, in my opinion, that has legit star power on BOTH sides. Assuming this game stays close, there is an obvious core of players that will be involved and that is all you can ask for. Take your stand and move on folks – it is a three game slate.

Stay tuned to Fantasy CPR for all the latest NBA DFS and Fantasy Basketball news and analysis across FantasyDraft, FanDuel and DraftKings.