NBA DFS Picks and Pivots – Saturday December 29

Welcome to the Saturday 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.

For the second straight night we saw winning GPP lineups at or above 400 points on FantasyDraft with 350 being the min-cash line as a result of massive nights and some more chalk performances. Anthony Davis led the slate with 85 fantasy points and became an easy spend up option once John Wall and Markieff Morris were ruled out which made the Wizards value the chalk route to go Stars/Scrubs. If you look at the winning GPP lineup last night in the $25 Pick and Roll, they had 3 Wizards (Beal, Satoransky, Bryant) with AD and Westbrook – nothing overly sneaky, but hard to argue they were not the right path!

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 – Saturday Night NBA DFS:

Before we jump into tonight’s NBA DFS slate, we have another Picks and Pivots FREE ROLL from our friends at FantasyDraft with $50 worth of NBA DFS tickets to Sunday’s action up for grabs – get in now!

Let’s jump right in because after two nights of seeing the chalk hit in big ways – we owe it to ourselves to start with the obvious roster build and that begins with the two men at the top – Anthony Davis and James Harden – who will take on each other in the highest total game environment of the night.

Both AD and The Beard are priced over $20K on this slate, $3K higher than any other player and normally we would have to choose between the two high floor/high ceiling slate breaking talents but this is looking like a night where you simply jam in both plays in what will likely be a popular pairing.

Part of the reason you can go this route – is the same reason you could fit in AD and Russell Westbrook last night – the Washington Wizards. Assuming the same trio of John Wall, Markieff Morris and Otto Porter miss tonight’s game as they did against the Bulls last night, this becomes a game of how many Wizards can you fit in?

Bradley Beal, Trevor Ariza, Thomas Bryant, Tomas Satoransky and Jeff Green all remain priced fairly and would be locked into 30+ minutes again tonight against the Hornets.

Just for fun – go ahead and click in all five Wizards into your line-up and then lock in Harden/Davis – you still have $11.4K for the last player – so someone in the Enes Kanter/Dewayne Dedmon range for your last man in.

The build makes all the sense in the world, it is easy and chalky but as we have seen the last two nights – sometimes the chalk is the right build for a reason.

NBA DFS – Pivot Plays!

Two days after the Warriors/Blazers faced off in Golden State, they head to Portland for a re-match and give us a potential game stack that we used on Thursday, or as many of you remember it – Lonzo Ball chalk night part I.

In Picks and Pivots that day, we talked about building a game stack – locking in Curry/Durant/Klay/Draymond and running it back with Dame/Nurkic/Aminu and that exact line-up had you rolled it out, would have gotten you 320 fantasy points – good enough most nights, but not recently.

After those performances, FantasyDraft has boosted the prices which makes a similar game stack here impossible – as the price points for Curry, Nurkic and Draymond have all risen significantly.

With so much focus on the Pelicans/Rockets – this Golden State/Portland game becomes an interesting pivot as it has the same projected pace, high/tight Vegas data (225 total and 3 point spread) and tons of star power that is capable of matching Brow/Beard on any given night.

Now what if you want to stick with Brow/Beard but want to pivot off the Wizards value chalk? Why not just stay in the Rockets/Pelicans game and stack with all the value?

With Chris Paul, Nikola Mirotic and Elfrid Payton all out – this game remains chock full of value that just like the Wizards, would give you multiple punt plays with clear paths to 30 minutes of court time.

With guys like Gerald Green, Danuel House and Austin Rivers specifically playing around 30 minutes a night with CP3 out, you can easily use their value to pair some of the more expensive plays in this game (Randle, Capela, Jrue, Gordon etc.) and go full on game stack.

Go ahead and give it a whirl and build a sample line-up:

• James Harden
• Jrue Holiday
• Austin Rivers
• Anthony Davis
• Clint Capela
• Gerald Green
• PJ Tucker
• $6.1K for last spot

Again, just an idea but you have multiple paths to a Harden/Brow build and get to utilize a game stack here as a potential pivot off the Wizards chalk value.

NBA DFS – More Pivots:

Dig a bit deeper on this slate and there are a few other spots I think you can pivot while maintaining a Stars/Scrubs build and that could end up being in Utah where Jae Crowder has already been ruled out and Ricky Rubio is questionable to play.

If Rubio sits, it would like push Dante Exum ($6.9K) into a starting role and after putting up 23+ fantasy points in 3 of his last 4 games, with no more than 21 minutes a night, he would have clear 30+ fantasy point upside in a match-up with the Knicks and could become one of the core plays on the slate.

Derrick Favors ($9.9K) has been inconsistent this year due in large part to the split time with Crowder but this is a player who has put up over 1.3 FP/M with Crowder and Rubio off the court this season.

No team on the slate sees a bigger pace/point projection boost than the Cleveland Cavaliers who take on the Atlanta Hawks and could be another short-handed team that gets over-looked tonight. With the Cavs already without Kevin Love and Tristan Thompson, they were also without Rodney Hood and Ante Zizic last night which pushed guys like Channing Frye and Jaron Blossomgame into the starting unit. The Hawks rank dead last in Def-Eff as a team with 3 positions (PG, SG and PF) ranking 26th or lower which puts the Cavaliers value in an interesting pivot position.

We saw last night that three Cavaliers, Alec Burks, Jordan Clarkson and Larry Nance, all went for 30+ fantasy points in a much tougher match-up with the Heat. Game log watchers may overlook this spot for the Cavs but tonight against the Hawks brutal team defense, they could end up being the difference making value if the Wizards bust on the tail end of a back to back.

NBA DFS – Sample Lineup and Slate Overview:

I have already given you a few different sample ideas throughout today’s article with the similar construct of using AD/Harden with all the value we have. The easy path is to load up on Wizards or you can pivot to a full on game stack with the Pelicans/Houston or even use some of the value in Utah/Cleveland.

There is a path were you simply mix and match and find something that spreads out your exposure as well:

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G: James Harden

G: Tomas Satoransky

G: Dante Exum

F/C: Anthony Davis

F/C: Julius Randle

F/C: PJ Tucker

UTIL: Jrue Holiday

UTIL: Austin Rivers

If you take anything away from Picks and Pivots today then let it be this – building a Harden/Davis lineup is far too easy and the last two nights have proven that fading the chalk can be a losing proposition. The key in my mind is working in the value around them that helps differentiate yourself from the rest. As easy as the Wizards may be to lock and load, there are enough alternatives where I think you can easily pivot to the other teams mentioned and capture similar upside. Good luck tonight – I expect we are going to wake up Sunday and look back on a third straight night with scores approaching 400.

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