NBA DFS Picks and Pivots – Monday November 26

Welcome to the Monday 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.

Sunday’s NBA DFS slate was a wild one for me and looking back, it certainly provides some valuable insight. I went with a full on Nets-Sixers game stack for GPP’s including D’Angelo Russell and Jimmy Butler who were the top two scorers on the slate and both came in at 10% or lower ownership which for much of the night had me sitting atop the leader board. In order to stack the studs in that game, it mean paying down at two spots and I felt great about both punts – Allen Crabbe and Royce O’Neale, who was starting for the injured Donovan Mitchell. Well after those two punts combined for only 2.75 points TOTAL – yes, total – it pushed me well below the cash line and despite having both the top raw point plays at minimal ownership, I donated to the cause as a result of the wrong punt plays on this night! Lesson learned.

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 – Injuries to wait on:

Writing this article at 5AM EST each day for NBA DFS is always challenging as we know that NBA news can change significantly over the course of the day and completely change how you look at a slate. Tonight’s slate is loaded with injury news to some of the slats biggest stars which will likely completely change how we approach this seven game NBA DFS slate.

• Donovan Mitchell sat out last night with a rib injury which pushed the not to be mentioned Royce O’Neal into the starting line-up. The Jazz will take on the Pacers who have three big GTD of their own with Victor Oladipo, Myles Turner and Domantas Sabonis all questionable. If Turner and Sabonis both sit – are we ready for Kyle O’ Quinn chalk night
• Chris Paul is questionable to play tonight against the Wizards which would keep Eric Gordon in the starting role after he dropped 38 FPTS against the Cavaliers and we all know CP3 being out would push James Harden to one of the top plays on the slate after he put up 66 FPTS against the Cavaliers over the weekend. With how bad the Wizards are defensively, it is tough to imagine The Beard not getting there again tonight if CP3 does sit and Eric Gordon ($9.2K) remains far too cheap for his role.
• The big news everyone will be waiting on is the status of Anthony Davis who missed Saturday’s game and is questionable to face the Celtics tonight. We saw what life without AD can look like from a fantasy perspective as Julius Randle (61), Nikola Mirotic (41), E’Twaun Moore (39) and Jrue Holiday (38) all had strong fantasy performances against the Wizards.

With so much unknown, does it just make sense to pivot to the known? The Bucks-Hornets play in a game with the fastest projected pace and the highest total on the board as of this writing at 234. We have a 4.5 point spread and two studs in Giannis Antetokounmpo and Kemba Walker who went for 59 and 55 fantasy points against each other the first time they met. I certainly understand “chasing the news” as it is an important part of being successful in NBA DFS but if we find ourselves chasing the news too much, we may just overlook some of the best plays on the board.

Locking in Kemba and Giannis as starting points may seem like a costly endeavor where they will cost you $38.4K for just those two players on FantasyDraft, leaving you “only” $10.2K per player for the remaining 6 spots on your roster but I actually think the pricing for these teams outside of Kemba/Giannis makes it a viable game stack that I believe we can explore.

NBA DFS – Game Stack the Bucks and Hornets?

If you are not reading Joe Metz’s NBA DFS Stacks articles he does for us at Fantasy CPR, you are missing out – he does a fantastic job at looking at ways to approach stacking each night. With that plug out-of-the-way, I think the way he has laid out today’s article is how I could end up seeing this slate playing out with a handful of other spots becoming more popular game stack scenarios.

I could absolutely see the Warriors/Magic being more popular and assuming Anthony Davis and Chris Paul are out, the Pelicans/Celtics and Rockets/Wizards could surely end up more popular cores which may sound crazy that a game with a slate high total at near 240 could be “over-looked.”

Part of the reason these other games may generate more love is that they have multiple stars that can carry you where the Bucks/Hornets in many ways feels like a two-man show but balance that with a massive total that features two of the fastest pace teams in the NBA and you have a strong argument that “fringe” plays in this game are better plays because of the game environment.

The Bucks give us something we love in NBA DFS – a 3-4 man core of guys that play all the minutes and get seemingly all the usage and fantasy production. Outside of Giannis, Khris Middleton and Eric Bledsoe have 20-25% usage rates while both putting up 1.2 FP/M while priced at similar $13-$14K price points. Middleton went for 42 fantasy points the last time these two-faced off and gets to take on a Hornets team that ranks among the league worst in defending SG’s.

On the Hornets side, the pricing is much softer but the floor is also much more perilous than that of the Bucks side. Jeremy Lamb ($11K) is the second most expensive Hornets player on FantasyDraft and has gone for 30+ fantasy points in five of his last six outings and is the only other player outside of Kemba who has put up double-digit FGA on this Hornets team over the last 5 games.

The Hornets front court is rolling Marvin Williams ($7.1K) out for 30+ minutes a night and Cody Zeller ($7.6K) just cranks out cash game value on a nightly basis and neither player costs much and/or is scoring dependent which makes them a nice correlation if you go with Kemba and Lamb on the Charlotte side.Last but not least – Malik Monk ($6.3K) is fresh off a game where he shot the ball 15 times including a whopping 11 three-point attempts.

So just to summarize – assuming the news “holds” and it pushes everyone towards AD and Harden, does the game with the highest Vegas total and fastest pace get a bit over-looked? With the price points for all the secondary pieces here, this becomes an elite game stacking spot where you can go high-low without any real issue.

NBA DFS – Pivot Plays:

With so much focus on the Pelicans side of this New Orleans-Boston game, I am finding myself way more interested in the Celtics side at first glance. No team on the slate will see a larger pace boost than the Celtics who look like they could be a tad short-handed with Jaylen Brown looking unlikely to play.

Brown has only missed one other game this season, 11/1 versus Milwaukee and it was not Marcus Smart or Terry Rozier who got the starting nod, instead it was Semi Ojeleye who drew the start for Boston so let’s not simply assume that Smart/Rozier would step back into the line-up here.

When I ran the numbers this morning with Jaylen Brown off the court, I honestly didn’t think he would change much considering he has only a 21% usage rate and is putting up .7 FP/M this season. It is interesting to me that Kyrie Irving sees a significant bump in usage and production with Brown off the court, jumping 2.5% in usage to a team-high 33% usage rate while putting up 1.5 FP/M in 200 minutes of court time.

Interestingly enough – all of Jayson Tatum, Marcus Morris, Gordon Hayward and Al Horford are FP/M+ players with Brown off the court as every single one of them sees a usage boost and fantasy point boost. It will be interesting to see what Brad Stevens does with his lineup tonight – will he opt to keep Gordon Hayward in a bench role running the second team and lean on a starting unit of Kyrie, Morris, Tatum and Horford?

Against the Mavericks on Saturday, all five starters (including Brown), played 30+ minutes and get the play in a massive pace up environment tonight.

Look at the last two teams to play this New Orleans team – the Knicks and Wizards – who combined had 7 total players go for 40+ fantasy points in those games including 4 from New York (Mudiay, Vonleh, Kanter and Trier) and 3 from Washington (Wall, Beal and Porter). The Celtics could be one of those stacks tonight that goes a bit under-owned and for the simple fact you could have a tight core all playing 30+ minutes in a pace up spot, I would have no issues rolling out multiple Celtics at the core of your build tonight.

If we get news early that AD is out, then I think you can look at this game as a core game stack as we knew the usage and fantasy production will be concentrated on the New Orleans side as well as the Boston side, which makes it perfect for stacking.

NBA DFS – Sample Lineup and Slate Overview:

Please note the sample lineup shown here is meant for illustrative purposes only and is not meant to be a plug and play lineup. 

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Bucks-Hornets Game Stack:

G: Kemba Walker

G: Khris Middleton

G: Jeremy Lamb

F/C: Giannis Antetokounmpo

F/C: Marvin Williams 

F/C: Cody Zeller

UTIL: Malik Monk 

UTIL: Kyrie Irving

Slate Overview – We have so much news that we need to get in order to really make concrete lineup decisions as the AD/CP3 news completely changes this slate in my opinion. If both are out, I think the Rockets/Wizards and Pelicans/Celtics become the popular game stacks which makes the Bucks-Hornets an interesting pivot despite Vegas screaming at you to start here. The pricing is cheap enough where you can build a stack without much issue and still be able to “one-off” a guy like Kyrie who is perhaps my favorite play on the board.

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