NBA DFS Picks and Pivots – Sunday November 18

Welcome to the Sunday 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.

Saturday’s NBA DFS slate was dominated by Kemba Walker who put up 80+ fantasy points on the back of 60 real life points at sub 5% ownership against a Philly team he has now destroyed in three match-ups this young season. With 60+ fantasy nights from stars like Anthony Davis and Paul George as well, the cash line was high and we saw winning GPP scores on FantasyDraft once again push to 350 and higher depending on which contest you entered.

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 – Sun DAYS may be for NFL, but the NBA is our late night hammer!

Listen, I know for many of you Sundays in DFS are reserved for Fantasy Football and do not worry – at Fantasy CPR we have you covered with NFL DFS analysis across every major DFS site including FanDuel, DraftKings, FantasyDraft, DRAFT and Yahoo as well as a ton of season long Fantasy Football content helping you build your best roster. As great as NFL DFS can be, there is nothing better in my opinion than having the NBA tip-off just a few hours later where you can double-dip and basically play DFS ALL DAY LONG!

With a four game main slate kicking off on FantasyDraft at 6PM EST, we have three teams (Lakers, Warriors and Magic) all playing on a back-to-back and as of this writing all the Vegas spreads are 5 points or lower which means in theory we have a ton of close games to choose from.

The game with the highest total on the board is the Lakers-Heat, which boasts a 228 game total and what is expected to be the fastest paced game on the slate with Miami seeing the large pace boost of any team in action. In addition to the pace boost, Miami looks like it will be short-handed (as they seemingly are every game), with the big news being that Goran Dragic is questionable to play.

Miami has not been a team we would normally consider to be fast-paced, but over the last 5 games they have been top 5 in the NBA in pace of play, while the Lakers have been in the top 5 all season long – making this an interesting stacking spot with a high total, high pace and some likely value as injuries open things up.

If we take Wade and Waiters (both OUT) and Dragic/McGruder (questionable) off the court this season – we see that players like Tyler Johnson and Wayne Ellington get the biggest boost with 4% or higher usage rate spikes this season and at price points under $9K, they make for elite value plays on this slate. Hassan Whiteside ($14.8K) and Josh Richardson ($13K) are the two top plays here from Miami with Richardson being my preferred play due to the pace of this game and the discount you get off Whiteside. Any time we have a faster paced game environment, I worry about Whiteside getting run off the floor and with James Johnson due to return, it is possible the Heat could play small in this spot which would limit Whiteside’s upside.

On the Lakers side, they just got waxed by the Orlando Magic last night, down by 20+ points in the fourth quarter which meant that the starters got some “rest” heading into the tail end of this back to back. We get the LeBron James ($19.6K) back in Miami narrative, which actually may not be a narrative considering he has only gone for 60+ in one of his last five meetings with his former team, but any team LeBron gets embarrassed in a previous game you get the potential for angry Bron and an 80 point fantasy ceiling.

My initial take on this game is it becomes the chalk spot to attack – not simply because of the Vegas data, but if we get a short-handed Heat squad, it becomes entirely too easy to lock in LeBron, Whiteside, Richardson and all the value and still have tons of salary left over.

NBA DFS – Pivot Plays:

With the context that I think the Lakers/Heat sucks up the majority of the ownership, it looks like a slate where you can easily pivot off that with a handful of viable spend up stars in other great spots.

The Wizards and Trail Blazers meet up in Washington where we have the second highest Vegas total (222) and the second fastest projected pace, making this the logical pivot off the Heat and Lakers. If you are building around this game it becomes pretty simple – you play John Wall and Damian Lillard who sit at similar $17K price points on FantasyDraft. The only issue I see with using this game as your pivot is that the player pool from this game really kind of starts and ends with this duo and you need at least 50 fantasy points from them both in order to return value. Lillard has only hit 50 fantasy points one time in his last ten games and Wall has not gone for more than 53 fantasy points this season, so it feels like we are paying a salary consistent with their ceiling game which leaves little profit potential.

The Warriors-Spurs game is where I am finding myself landing on initially the more I look at this slate and I expect that with it only having the lowest total on the slate at 216, it will likely not draw the same ownership as the games previously mentioned.

The rationale for making the Lakers/Spurs stars the core is very simple – the four stars in this game essentially soak up all the usage and fantasy production so you can easily identify where the production will come from.

With Steph Curry AND Draymond Green both OUT tonight, that leaves you with Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson who have 40% and 34% usage marks respectively with Curry/Draymond off the floor. Flip it to the other side of this game and LaMarcus Aldridge and DeMar DeRozan spot the two highest usage rates on this team with Pau Gasol off the court at 27% and 32% rates and you are building around a core four that will absorb the majority of the fantasy points.

If you want to stack this game, finding value pieces in the starting rotation like Jonas Jerebko and Andre Igoudala who are both under $8K on FantasyDraft, allows you to rather easily round out a game stack but with so much value in the Miami game, it will be tough to pass on guys like Tyler Johnson for the limited ceiling of Iggy/Jerebko at similar price points. With Draymond Green out, I could see this game going small which may set up for fringe pieces like Marco Belinello ($7.1K) to get added run on the wings if the game script dictates.

Last but not least, we have the Magic/Knicks and I will be honest – I have no clue what to do with this game. These two teams just played a few days ago in a game where Aaron Gordon sat out and the Magic throttled the Knicks by 26 with Nikola Vucevic going for 21 points and 14 boards in only 26 minutes.  We saw the Knicks keep it close against New Orleans in a 129-124 affair last time out but can we really expect the Knicks to shoot 50% from the floor again like they did in that game? This is probably the one game I will just cross off to be honest – the Magic got a huge home win last night against the Lakers so this could be let down city and as much as I love me some Tim Hardaway Jr., this Knicks team right now is far too volatile to plant my flag with on a four game slate with viable pay up plays in every other game and better value, specifically in Miami.

NBA DFS  Sample Lineup and Slate Overview:

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

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G: DeMar DeRozan

G: Klay Thompson

G: Josh Richardson

F/C: Kevin Durant

F/C: LaMarcus Aldridge

F/C: Wayne Ellington

UTIL: Tyler Johnson

UTIL: Marco Belinelli

Slate Overview: At the core of this slate, much like we saw last night, there is going to be some serious value potential depending on what we get from Miami tonight against LA. Assuming guys like Dragic and McGruder do miss, this will open up near must play value across the Miami available players and will give a steady boost to mid-tier plays like Whiteside and Richardson. To me, this is the ‘right chalk” to eat which means we need to find ways to be different in rest of our builds. I could be wrong here, but it feels like a spot where Kevin Durant/Klay Thompson do not get the ownership love that we would expect on a four game slate without Curry/Draymond. We see this all the time in NBA DFS, the “new news” is what dominates lineup builds (ie. Miami tonight) while the old news of Curry/Draymond being out makes us forget just how elite of plays KD/Klay are. Enjoy all the NFL DFS action today and I will make sure to update news on my twitter @2LockSports as we head towards NBA lock tonight.

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