NBA DFS Picks and Pivots – Thursday December 20
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 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.
As expected, Wednesday’s NBA DFS slate was crazy high scoring with winning GPP scores pushing over 375 on FantasyDraft on a night where we had multiple studs that felt like must plays and a ton of value that made fitting in multiple studs an easy path. Russell Westbrook led the slate with 71 fantasy points but teammate Paul George was not far behind with 69 fantasy points of his own as the OKC-Sacramento game served as the late night hammer that likely determined your cash position on a large 12 game slate.
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 – Two Game NBA DFS Slate:
With only a two game NBA DFS slate on tap tonight, you would think our friends at FantasyDraft would take the night off with their Picks and Pivots Free Roll – but you would be wrong as they come through once again with another free roll, giving away 10 tickets to Friday’s slate of contests. Find me another DFS site that puts out free rolls on two game slates – this is why their customer service is industry leading in my opinion – take advantage of this tonight guys!
The big question tonight you have to ask yourself is – do you lock in James Harden ($20.8K) as the most expensive play on the slate by over $5K or do you decide to go more balanced and fade The Beard?
Harden is coming off a four game stretch where he has put up 58, 68, 72 and 85 fantasy points and the reality is, if he has another game with this much raw point potential and you don’t have him (at high ownership mind you), you are cooked – there is simply not a viable path to making up that ground in my opinion.
The overall look of this slate, is well, blah. Every single team is expected to score fewer points than their season average so you do not even have elite game environments to latch on to and hope the second tier of stars can have a ceiling game.
Now you do have to factor in that Harden and the Rockets are playing on a back to back, traveling from Houston to Miami and are playing for the third night in four days and this game happens to have only a 208 total.
That may be enough to push the secondary pieces like Chris Paul, Clint Capela and Eric Gordon out of our minds, but Harden is a guy I think you simply cannot fade on this slate. If you played this slate out 100 times, how many is Harden the likely top raw point play? To me, the most likely scenario is that he ends the night as the top point scorer and although I do expect folks will fade him just to try to have a contrarian build, I still think the ownership will be 60% or higher and to me that is the kind of chalk you need to eat.
NBA DFS – Lock in Harden…and now what?
With Harden locked into my lineups, the question becomes where do you want to plant your flag? This becomes the differentiation step today – locking in Harden along with 60% plus of the field is the easy part, it is what you do around him that will determine how your night goes.
In my opinion, the next place to go, and go all-in, is with the Dallas Mavericks against the LA Clippers. Over the last ten games the Clippers rank third to last in the NBA in defensive rating while over the last five games, they rank dead last in the entire NBA. During that stretch, the Clippers have given up 121.6 points per game which is over 7 points higher than their season average so I think this becomes the match-up you plant your flag with and get in as many Dallas players as you can.
It all starts with DeAndre Jordan ($13.7K) in a REVENGE spot against his former Clippers team that he dropped 16/23 against for 54 points in their first meeting this season. With Dennis Smith Jr. likely out again, the offense is going to run through Luka Doncic ($15.4K) who has a 30% usage rate wile putting up while putting up 1.33 FP/M in the last 8 game stretch with DSJ off the court.
The beauty of the Mavericks is that they run a tight four man core including Harrison Barnes and Wesley Matthews with the starting four playing 30+ minutes a night and both Barnes (45) and Matthews (30) has strong outings against this Clippers team when they met the first time this season.
Outside of this four man stack, you are rolling the dice basically with a group of bench guys all playing 15-20 minutes and frankly, you are just hoping that they “get you there” which is never a route I want to take so I would rather focus in on the core four and find other ways to fill in my roster.
NBA DFS – Filling out your roster:
To me the hardest part of this slate is figure out the fill-in plays – more so because the player pool in my mind is so limited to Harden and the Mavericks.
Yes, I know the Miami Heat are on the slate and Goran Dragic is out so in theory we should have value here, but it is not overly appealing. This Miami team has not score more than 105 points in their last 4 games and even in a massive pace up spot against the Pelicans last time out, they managed a mere 102 points and only two players (Whiteside, Richardson) managed to eclipse the 30 fantasy point mark. Look at the Heat rotations in that game – they ran a 10 man rotation and that is without Dragic on the floor! On this slate, I think you simply take the stand of avoiding the over-priced Heat and finding your secondary pieces elsewhere.
After a night in which the Rockets knocked down 26 3’s in a record-setting performance against the Wizards, we could look to use their secondary plays here to fill in around Harden and company. There is certainly risk with the B2B and 3 games in four nights but that applies more to the pricey plays like Capela and CP3 with far less risk on the guys like Eric Gordon ($9K) and PJ Tucker ($7.7K).
Tucker and Gordon give you a rare value on a slate like this – guys priced below $10K who are pretty much 30+ minute locks. If you want lock in similar type plays to run back your Mavericks stack, you could look to the Clippers backcourt with guys like Shai Gilgeous -Alexander ($10k), Avery Bradley ($7.7K) and Patrick Beverley ($8.1K).
With any of these guys, you are playing the game of locking in the 25-30 minutes and hoping they simply get you 3x. On smaller slates like this, minutes security is a key component of roster construction – I would much rather take these guys and their guaranteed 30 minutes then hope tonight is the night Boban gets 20 minutes and crushes.
NBA DFS Sample Lineup and Slate Overview:
Please note – this sample lineup is meant to be illustrative ONLY and is not meant to beused as a plug and play lineup.
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G – James Harden
G – Luka Doncic
G – Wesley Matthews
F/C – DeAndre Jordan
F/C – Harrison Barnes
F/C – PJ Tucker
UTIL – Eric Gordon
UTIL – Danilo Gallinari
Slate Overview: On a two game slate, rather than try to be different and come up with some crazy off the wall take, why not just build a lineup around the best raw point play (Harden), the best team stack (Mavs) and fill in around it with guys who you know will at a minimum, get you 30 minutes of court time? Now with the Rockets on a back to back, maybe we get lucky and get some value (go ahead and rest CP3, we don’t mind) but right now this becomes a slate where my goal is to limit my risk and simply play the best plays while letting others get cute.
dark. Next. DraftKings NBA Top Plays and Fades - December 20
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