NBA DFS Picks and Pivots – Sunday December 23
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.
Wow. What a night. Any time we see winning GPP scores push well over 400 and the cash line in tournaments is over 360 points, you know it was a wild night in NBA DFS. The Wizards and Suns went to triple OT which was a major reason the cash line was pushed so high as players like Bradley Beal and Devin Booker were two of the highest owned plays on the board but it was a monster 84 fantasy point game by a nearly un-owned Paul George that really set you apart on this night and delivered a monster DFS score!
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 – Sunday’s Nine Game Slate:
It is not often we get a Sunday NBA DFS slate this big but with the league taking off on Monday before a big Christmas Day slate, we get the benefit of a huge Sunday of NFL DFS followed by a nine game NBA slate!
As always we kick off today’s slate with another Picks and Pivots FREE ROLL from FantasyDraft which is giving you ten tickets to the Christmas Day slate. Who says Christmas can’t come early!
There are two clear top-tier games that stand out on this slate that will likely draw most of your attention at first glance with the Pelicans/Kings and Warriors/Clippers sporting 239 and 233 game totals and with a number of elite studs that are capable of breaking the slate.
The Pelicans will likely be without Nikola Mirotic once again today which means the usual trio of Anthony Davis, Julius Randle and Jrue Holiday become elite plays in a game environment that is expected to be the fastest pace on the board with both teams seeing two of the largest pace boosts on the slate. The prices on these three Pelicans are high – and will cost you nearly $52K of your $100K salary on FantasyDraft which leaves you only $9.7K per player for the rest of your build.
On the Kings side, Buddy Hield is playing at an elite level in recent games with a 30% usage rate and 1.12 FP/M while PG De’Aaron Fox has been racking up 1.22 FP/M over the same two-week period. You can build a five man stack of this game with these five players and it would leave you $7.3K per player for the last three spots in your roster if you are looking to go this route and plant your flag on this game to shootout.
The Warriors and Clippers game could be the high Vegas total pivot off the Pelicans/Kings that gives you similar upside at price points that are actually a touch cheaper. Consider for a second that you can stack up Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant and Draymond Green for $5K cheaper than the Pelicans three-man stack and you can argue you capture every bit of the upside and leave yourself room to build a more balanced roster elsewhere.
Over the last 10 games, the Clippers are giving up the 4th most PPG to opponents and have the second worst defensive rating in the entire NBA. The fact that the Warriors see the biggest point boost, expected to score 6 points more than their season average, tells a big story here and I think dollar for dollar I prefer the Warriors high-end stars to the Pelicans tonight.
Running it back with the Clippers, feels similar to the Kings in that this is a deeper team, without any real must have star and all the price points sit in a comfortable mid-tier that allows you to stack them easily with the bigger dollar plays on the other side.
With Lou Williams back and healthy it really kills the back-court value in LA as Lou Will leads the team with a 32% usage rate on the season. Stacking up Williams with front court pieces like Tobias Harris, Danilo Gallinari and Montrezl Harrell is the optimal way to attack this team and I will likely limit my exposure to these core pieces.
When these two teams played earlier this year (in a game Curry missed and KD dropped 70+ FPTS), we saw Harrell/Williams go for 40+ each while Tobias (38) was not far behind and those are the kind of supplemental performances that would work perfectly with the high-ceiling stars on the Warriors.
NBA DFS – Pivot Plays and Value:
If you want to move off those two obvious game stack spots, there are a few other places we can look to including Thunder/Timberwolves which has the second fastest projected pace of any game on this slate and an intriguing stars/value combination that can match the stars in the other games mentioned.
Paul George is coming off an 80+ fantasy point effort are less than 5% ownership while his teammate Russell Westbrook could have been had for under 10% ownership last night against the Jazz. This could be a spot where one night after PG13 took over that it becomes the Westbrook show and if Anthony Davis is everyone’s spend up, could it leave guys like Westbrook under-owned again?
The big news on the other side of this game, and I cannot believe I am saying this, is the status of Derrick Rose. With Jeff Teague already ruled out and Rose officially questionable after being forced out of Friday’s game against the Spurs – we could have a glorious night of Tyus Jones chalk!
We have seen this exact scenario play out twice already this season – with polar opposite results. In the first start Jones made this year he played 41 minutes and locked in 33 fantasy points but just two games later with Rose/Teague sidelined, he managed only 13 fantasy points in 27 underwhelming minutes.
Jones is priced just above $8K on FantasyDraft so he needs roughly 25 fantasy points just to hit value, but there is no question he has the upside to pay this price off. If we get news early that Rose is out, Jones becomes the value chalk of the day – a likely must in cash games but an intriguing GPP fade.
If we want a pivot off the Jones value, we may need to wait and see how the Phoenix Suns news breaks today. After a 3 OT slugfest in DC, they travel to Brooklyn to play the Nets and after seeing guys playing 50+ minutes, would it shock anyone to see the Suns rest guys like TJ Warren and/or Devin Booker? It is completely speculation but keep an eye on the news here to see if we get some cheap Suns value plays as they suit up for an early tip (6PM EST) just hours after playing three overtimes!
NBA DFS – Sample Lineup and Slate Overview:
This sample lineup is meant to be illustrative ONLY and should not be used as a Plug and Play lineup.
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G: Stephen Curry
G: Lou Williams
G: Tyus Jones
F/C: Kevin Durant
F/C: Draymond Green
F/C: Tobias Harris
UTIL: Montrezl Harrell
UTIL: Mike Scott
Slate Overview: Looking at this slate, it becomes clear there are two game environments that stand head and shoulders above the rest with the Pelicans/Kings and Warriors/Clippers being the top spots.
As much as I love the spot for the Pelicans, the price points are elevated and as I mentioned, it will cost you $5K more to stack AD/Randle/Holiday than it would to stack Curry/KD/Draymond. As such, I think the Warriors make for the better point per dollar stack as they have every bit the upside of AD and company, and will likely come at lower ownership with a double-digit spread that may scare folks away.
On a nine game slate, we have three games with totals under 210 and there are only three games where both teams see a projected pace boost (the two games mentioned and OKC/Minnesota), so there is a strong argument to be made that you simply limit your player pool to those three game environments and ignore what look to be ugly games everywhere else.
There is no NBA DFS slate on Christmas Eve so we will be back here with our Christmas Day slate Picks and Pivots tomorrow so you can get your lineups locked before Santa comes down the chimney! Enjoy your Sunday and all the Fantasy Football goodness – see you back here tomorrow.
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