NBA DFS Picks and Pivots – A Very Picks and Pivots Christmas
Welcome to the Christmas Day 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 rare large slate treat and it delivered with winning GPP scores near 340 fantasy points. The pivot to Kevin Durant and Stephen Curry worked out nicely as they put up 125 fantasy points between them at 10-15% ownership compared to the 50% plus marks on the duo of Anthony Davis and Julius Randle that was unable to crack 100 fantasy points on the night.
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 – Christmas Day DFS!
A very Merry Christmas to all the Picks and Pivots readers out there – thanks for spending part of your holiday with us, even if it is likely hiding in the bathroom so you can read this article and set a lineup before your family realizes you are gone.
Our friends at FantasyDraft have given us an early Christmas gift with another Picks and Pivots Free Roll with ten tickets up for grabs and a $25 Pick and Roll Ticket to 1st place so get in now and reserve your spot!
As nice as it is to get a five game NBA DFS slate to play on Christmas, it also presents some unique challenges on a site with no late swap as the games are spread out from a 12PM EST start all the way to a 10:30PM EST and considering that NBA is the most volatile of pre-lock sports, there is some risk in this format today, even more so than usual.
Choosing Your Studs:
The biggest question you have to make on this slate is which high-end plays are you going to plant your flag with and build around. With so many studs available, my guess is that most will look to go Stars/Scrubs in their build which makes living in the mid-tier an interesting contrarian build but not one I am finding myself leaning towards early on.
The other thing to consider, with so many studs, and some obvious ones that will be popular, could we simply zig where others zag and lock in high-priced guys like Giannis Antetokounmpo, Joel Embiid, Kyrie Irving or Damian Lillard at a fraction of the ownership of the others?
Take Giannis as an example – at $19.4K, he is $100 less than James Harden, without Chris Paul on the floor – if you are finding your way to this price point won’t everyone simply find the extra hundo to afford the Beard?
Giannis has faced the Knicks twice this season and gone for 60 and 75 fantasy points, with the later coming at Madison Square Garden where he will be the first star on display on this Christmas Day slate. In two games already this season, these games have totaled 237 and 248 in regulation so there is merit to stacking up the Bucks star at what I would guess will be a fraction of the ownership of Harden in this price range.
If you look at the pricing in this Bucks/Knicks game what really stands out to me is that outside Giannis, the pricing is incredibly fair with no other player over $13K on FantasyDraft so there is a very real path if you want to take it to stacking up Giannis with the mid-range in this game and going with a stack of the only game you will likely have starting lineups for before lock.
Eric Bledsoe ($12.8K) has gone for 48 fantasy points in both previous meetings with the Knicks this season which would exceed 3.7x value at his current price point. On the Knicks side of this game, in their most recent match-up – Emmanuel Mudiay (45), Kevin Knox (42) and Tim Hardaway Jr. (38) all had strong outings in a game that went to OT.
Think of it this way, if you stack this game you can leave the early screenshot life and you get to roster Tim Hardaway Jr. on Christmas – what could be better?
NBA DFS – The Beard and Beastbrook:
One of the drawbacks of building around Giannis in the early game is that you really only have one superstar in that game stack and although the mid-range build is an appealing contrarian idea, this feels like a slate where you will need at least two stars in your lineups.
Welcome to our next game where James Harden takes on Russell Westbrook. We all know the deal by now – Harden with Chris Paul off the court is a DFS cheat code, with a 40% plus usage rate and putting up 2 FP/M so not much needs to be said.
Harden has only faced the Thunder once over the last two years with CP3 out and he did frankly what we all expect him to do – he dropped 68.5 fantasy points on Christmas Day 2017 with 29 points, 14 assists and 8 rebounds.
In that same game last Christmas, Westbrook dropped 60 fantasy points of his own and this pairing, which will cost you nearly 38% of your salary cap on FantasyDraft should end up as a popular pairing but with similar performances from a year ago, you are starting off your build with nearly 130 fantasy points so the fade argument is a tough one to make.
The nice part of this game is that the stack can be done fairly easily with a Stars/Scrubs build as a result of the CP3 injury. The Rockets secondary plays like Eric Gordon, PJ Tucker, Daniel House and Gerald Green are affordable across the industry and they all logged between 28-35 minutes in the last game the Rockets played with this short-handed rotation.
Speaking of stars that due to their price point, nobody will play – let me introduce you to Paul George ($17.8K) who is $100 more than LeBron James and $400 more than Kevin Durant. Similar to the argument I made with Giannis, if you are in this price range, are you really going to go with PG13 over the others?
The price point alone makes him an intriguing GPP pivot and when combined with the fact that most will prioritize Westbrook from the Thunder in their builds, we could get a player who is averaging 70 fantasy points over his last three games at minimal ownership.
NBA DFS – The “Late Night Hammer”
OK – technically the Portland/Utah game is the late night hammer but this Warriors/Lakers game which begins at 8PM EST serves its purpose in my mind. Listen, I live on the East Coast and have two small kids – I will likely be woken up by 5AM EST (if I am lucky) to the screams of SANTA CAME so if I even make it to halftime of this game, I will be shocked – but this feels like a game you simply will have to have exposure from.
Over the last 10 games, the Warriors and Lakers are playing at the 4th and 5th fastest paces in the NBA and what really stands out to me in this game is the pricing. I made this argument on Sunday’s slate where everyone spent up for the Pelicans stars instead of the Warriors who were priced at a discount and we saw the ownership play out where most jammed in the New Orleans guys instead of taking the salary savings with the Dubs who have every bit the same upside.
With Harden/Westbrook presenting a similar dilemma here on this slate – you can make the same argument – would I rather lock in the OKC/Houston stars or pair stars in this game for a $2-3K savings?
LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Stephen Curry are all priced in this $16-$17K range on FantasyDraft which if you decide to stack all three will cost you $51.6K. A similar cost stack in the OKC/Houston game would give you Harden, Westbrook and someone like Clint Capela.
From a pure point per dollar perspective this Warriors/Lakers game just gives you the best bang for your buck in my opinion when looking to get star exposure. All three of the names I mentioned could end the night as the top raw point play on the slate and I don’t think any of us would be surprised quite frankly.
This will be the first match-up between these teams in the regular season and with both teams at full strength there is a reason this game has the highest total on the board at 231. Not only do we get the highest game total, we also have the fastest projected pace where Golden State actually gets the largest pace boost on the entire slate – this is where I think you plant your flag and stack away.
Outside of the big three – the rest of the plays here are all priced fairly reasonably with Draymond Green and Klay Thompson at $12.5-$12.7K and the Lakers secondary pieces like Kyle Kuzma (12.3K) and Brandon Ingram ($10.7K) giving you nice point per dollar upside for a core that will all be locked into 30+ minutes.
With FantasyDraft not having late swap, the one decision we may have to make without all the news is what to do with Ivaca Zubac ($8.9K) who has put up 33 and 38 fantasy points in back to back starts. If we get the news early, Zubac likely becomes the chalk value but if we do not have news on JaVale McGee and Tyson Chandler than Zubac becomes a roll of the dice that even without news could still push to be one of the most popular plays on the board.
NBA DFS – Sample Lineup and Slate Overview:
This sample lineup is meant to be illustrative ONLY, especially written a full 24 hours before the slate begins, and should not be used as a Plug and Play lineup.
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G: Stephen Curry
G: Daniel House Jr.
F/C: LeBron James
F/C: Kevin Durant
F/C: Draymond Green
UTIL: Kyle Kuzma
UTIL: Brandon Ingram
Slate Overview: To me this slate comes down to which game you are going to plant your flag with – Rockets/Thunder or Warriors/Lakers, as the star power in both feels un-fadeable. The pricing on FantasyDraft leads me to lean more towards the Lakers/Warriors where you can grab three studs and three high-end secondary pieces as I showed here. On slates like this, I love the idea of simply game stacking and letting the chips fall where they may so building two game stacks and just sitting back and enjoying your Christmas may end up being the easiest and best route.
Have a very Merry Christmas all – thanks for being here with Picks and Pivots each day and from all of us at Fantasy CPR, we appreciate you reading along with us!
NBA DFS GPP Breakdown - FanDuel Christmas Day. dark. Next
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