NBA DFS Picks and Pivots Thursday, January 31

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.

Well Wednesday’s NBA DFS slate worked out nicely as I avoided the dud that was Hawks/Kings, with only one player, Trae Young (37) even able to crack 35 fantasy points. I will say, the ownership in the $25 Pick and Roll for that game was way lower than I would have thought – most opted to build around the Nuggets/Pelicans as Jrue Holiday and Nikola Jokic were two of the highest owned players at 69% and 56% respectively. The big difference maker for me and many others was having Damian Lillard in their builds as e ended the night as the top raw points performer, with 68 fantasy points, seeing a huge usage boost due to the absence of Jusuf Nurkic inside.

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 – Slate Breakdown and a Thursday Free Roll!

Before we jump into today’s NBA DFS action, our friends at FantasyDraft are kind enough to sponsor another $50 Picks and Pivots Free Roll – only 250 spots, so get in before it fills! Also, if you have not seen – they have an awesome Free Super Bowl contest going on – simply pick from a set of prop bets and the winner(s) will win free NBA DFS contests for the rest of the season! Make sure you jump in and get those picks in before Super Bowl Sunday!

We have a six game slate on this Thursday and to be honest, FantasyDraft could have opted to simply skip the first two games and start this slate at 8PM EST and it likely would not have changed my approach one bit. The Mavericks travel from NYC on Wednesday to Detroit in a game with a slate low 208 total, while the Pacers travel from DC to Orlando in a game with the lowest projected pace on the slate.

Now, I know these guys are professional athletes, but you can’t tell me that the travel, especially flying INTO Detroit where it was roughly -11 degrees when they landed wont impact a team like Dallas or the late arrival for a team like Indiana.

The issue even above and beyond the travel and the back to backs, is that you have three obvious great game environments that make settling for these other spots seem entirely unnecessary.

The Warriors/Sixers have a 240 total, a pace up spot for both teams and the Warriors see the highest point boost, nearly 6 points more than their season average. Any time the Warriors are expected to see a pace and point boost, well you better make a point to have some exposure!

The Bucks/Raptors are not far behind with a 230 total and a similar pace boost game environment and with only a 2.5 point spread, this makes for a great “high and tight” game stack.

Lastly, the Clippers and Lakers have the fastest projected game pace while we await an official total/spread due to the uncertainty of the status of Kyle Kuzma and this LeBron James guy. The Lakers do have LeBron listed as OUT but Luke Walton was also quoted as saying that could change before tip-off as both he and Kuzma were full participants in practice.

NBA DFS – Where to start:

On a slate with a clear limited player pool and so many stars to sort through, it becomes hard to start anywhere other than the Warriors/Sixers as you get all the Vegas data and a team full of high-end stars that make building around them feel like safe cash game strategies with the GPP ceiling to help you win big.

Now telling you to play guys from this game is not going to be overly Earth-shattering – the question is, can you actually do it? With so many stars, in a world with a salary cap, can you actually stack this game? Thankfully the presence of DeMarcus Cousins ($12.3K) has helped bring the price tag down on some of the Warriors stars to where you can actually do this relatively easily on FantasyDraft.

The first thing I think you need to do is to figure out which of the stars you want to build around. Joel Embiid ($18K) is the most expensive play from this game and although he did briefly leave the Sixers last game after tweaking is back, he returned to finish out that game and anytime we get Embiid in these National TV Games against elite competition, he becomes a near must play for me as you are looking at a ceiling type game.

Deciding whether to pair him with Ben Simmons ($16.1K) or Jimmy Butler ($14.4K) is likely the next decision you will come to and while the slight salary savings for Butler are helpful when trying to cram in all these stars, I have a hard time paying over $14K for a player who has a minuscule 19% usage rate with Embiid on the court the last month. These two teams have yet to play this year but last year, in the only game that Simmons/Embiid played together, it is worth noting that Simmons dropped 54 fantasy points against the Warriors with a 23/12/8 loaded stat-line. Also of note, Butler has faced the Warriors twice over the last two seasons (both as a member of Minnesota) and he was held to 32 and 28 fantasy points in those games.

NBA DFS – Runnin’ it back with the Dubs:

With Boogie Cousins now playing over 100 minutes of court time with the Warriors, the impact on the rest of the starting unit is becoming clearer and that impact has also led to price drops on the Dubs stars which is why stacking this game actually becomes viable.

In 109 minutes of court time, Boogie is second on the team in usage with 29.5% and leads the team with 1.48 FP/M. In his five games back, Boogie has gone for 30+ fantasy points in four of his five outings despite not playing more than 25 minutes, which was his high water mark against Indy last time out. Boogie is coming off back to back games of 35-36 fantasy points and with Embiid on the other side of this game, it would not shock me to see the court time continue to tick up for the Warriors big man.

In the five games since being back, perhaps the most interesting note is that Klay Thompson ($11.4K) has seen the biggest usage bump (3.3%) of the starters, in fact he leads the team in usage and is the only other player besides Jonas Jerebko that has seen a usage spike with Boogie on the floor. Now although the usage has been there, the fantasy production has not followed, as Klay has only gone for over 30 fantasy points one time in that stretch which makes him a lower floor play but one with obvious GPP upside.

Stephen Curry ($15.9K) and Kevin Durant ($16.8K) have seen the biggest hits, as Curry has seen a massive 12% usage and .3 FP/M drop while KD is less stark with only a 3% usage drop and .2 FP/M decrease.

This is where playing the Warriors gets interesting. Listen, at this point if you play NBA DFS with any regularity you know you can easily find tools to show you usage/FPM, toggling players in and out. The “hit” that Curry and Durant have taken will continue to be a major DFS story as the sample size grows and more and more people will certainly think twice about rostering them as a result.

Think about it this way, you can roster Curry/KD tonight in the highest total game with  pace/point boost for Golden State for the exact same price as stacking Blake Griffin and Luka Doncic in a game with a total that is over 30 points lower with a pace decrease.

I certainly understand the logic and the stats that support not playing Curry and KD, but this becomes a spot similar to how I felt with Damian Lillard last night, sometimes the price just falls to a spot where you have to act and I think that is where we are at with Curry/KD.

If forced to choose, I would likely lean more towards Curry for the simple fact that Boogie patrolling the interior with Draymond Green is going to severely limit Durants rebounding numbers.

So it all comes back to the million dollar question – can you stack this game – and the answer is – yes, and frankly it’s not that hard:

• Joel Embiid
• Ben Simmons
• Steph Curry
• Klay Thompson
• Draymond Green
• DeMarcus Cousins

Go ahead and click in that six – you will see you have $7.1K per player for the last two spots in your build. This is absolutely a route that I think you can take tonight in both cash games and GPP’s, simply going after the best game on the board.

NBA DFS – Sample Lineup and Slate Overview:

Please note – 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: Klay Thompson

G: Ben Simmons

F/C: Joel Embiid

F/C: Draymond Green

F/C: DeMarcus Cousins

UTIL: Rodions Kurucs

UTIL: Edmond Sumner

Slate Overview: Telling you to stack the Warriors/Sixers is the easy part, and hopefully showing you the build helps you see it a little bit clearer. The one thing about this slate so far is there is very little “obvious value” in that most of the players who are hurt seem likely to play which means we don’t necessarily have slam dunk punt plays available. However, in the context of this build, there is enough “solid” value in guys like Sumner/Kurucs as examples who have starting roles and clear paths to 25 minutes and if you can eek out say 20 fantasy points from each of those plays, I think you would be thrilled to let your game stack do the heavy lifting.

Make sure you get in that Free Roll today and spread the word on it so it fills! Thanks as always for reading – let’s have a great night!

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