Thursday, Jan. 16 is bringing a five-game main slate for all the big daily fantasy sites. Before you lock in your NBA DFS lineups and NBA DFS picks on DraftKings, FanDuel, Yahoo and FantasyDraft, make sure to check out check out Awesemo’s NBA DFS rankings and projections. Let’s dig into some NBA DFS Picks, including Julius Randle, Elfrid Payton and more.
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Don’t forget to check out the NBA Strategy Show featuring Dave “Loughy” Loughran and Adam “ShipMyMoney” Scherer as they break down the NBA DFS slate and give out their thoughts on injury news and other NBA DFS analysis.
Also, be sure to read Chris Spags’ Switch and Hedge for more NBA DFS picks and analysis.
NBA DFS Picks: Prime Time Players
Julius Randle: New York Knicks vs. Phoenix Suns
DraftKings $8,000, FanDuel $7,900, Yahoo $33 Ownership Rating (preliminary run): DraftKings 20.2%, FanDuel 27.1% Yahoo Fantasy 23.6%
In a bit of a twist, the Suns have been in the middle of the pack from both a defensive efficiency and pace standpoint over their last 10 games. On the season, they have been in the bottom third for both, so perhaps they are slowly climbing out of the dregs with a healthy Deandre Ayton. Tonight, Phoenix will be without Kelly Oubre and his hefty minutes load will be shifted to several other players.
We know that Julius Randle thrives in up-tempo environments and there is a decent chance that Marcus Morris is out again tonight, which opens up additional shot attempts. With Morris next to him over 848.1 minutes this season, Randle is averaging 1.01 fantasy points per minute with a 25.6% usage rate. Without Morris, that jumps to 1.21 fantasy points per minutes with a 30.6% usage rate.
While tonight’s price tag is not a steal, it is fair for a projected top-10 raw points performance. We can utilize Randle as one of our core building blocks for our main lineups.
NBA DFS Picks: Good Value
Elfrid Payton: New York Knicks vs. Phoenix Suns
DraftKings $5,500, FanDuel $5,700, Yahoo $20 Ownership Rating (preliminary run): DraftKings 22.1%, FanDuel 18.9% Yahoo Fantasy 22.8%
This is a 15-20% discount for Elfrid Payton depending on your DFS site of choice. In three of the last five games, the Knicks have been blown out. Two of those games had Payton being skipped over for his fourth quarter minutes and a third had him play just over four minutes in the final frame. In competitive games, we see Payton with minutes in the mid-30s under the new coaching regime. As a bonus, Dennis Smith Jr. remains out and Frank Ntilikina (adductor) is questionable.
Over his last 18 games, Payton is averaging a fantasy points per minute with 29-plus in half of those appearances. On a fun note, in his last three games against the Suns, he has averaged 45 fantasy points against his former squad. The better two were while he was with the Pelicans last year. This year he had 29.3 fantasy points in 31.7 minutes in Phoenix two weeks ago. Focus on the minutes and pace rather than the opposing jerseys. This is a nice salary saving play tonight.
NBA DFS Picks: Risky Value
Phoenix Suns
Kelly Oubre Jr (concussion) is out for at least tonight. That leaves 34.0 minutes, 18.3 points and 6.4 rebounds to be distributed to his replacements. Aron Baynes, Mikal Bridges, Dario Saric and Cameron Johnson are the likely beneficiaries. The real question is which player will see the biggest opportunity boost and will they be able to capitalize on it?
Cameron Johnson is the cheapest across the board, so that will mitigate some of his downside on this five game slate.
Dario Saric may be in the starting lineup, but he has been in six of the last nine games. In this stretch, he is averaging 15.8 minutes per game and just 0.5 fantasy points per minute. We know he has 40 fantasy point upside, but there is tremendous risk of yet another dud performance here. In three of his six starts during this time frame, Saric has had single fantasy point outings and he has topped a dozen fantasy points only once.
Aron Baynes could move back into the starting lineup as Oubre’s replacement and he played 29.2 minutes in a start against these same Knicks two weeks ago with 20 points and 12 rebounds. He would seem to be the most projectable of the beneficiaries.
Mikal Bridges is unlikely to step into the starting lineup, but he can contribute a little bit of everything and does have solid upside with his hustle/helper stats aka steals, blocks, rebound and assists in what should be a bit of a sloppy game.
FantasyCruncher Tip of the Day
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With the incredibly user-friendly FantasyCruncher, we can take our lineup construction to the next level.
Today, let’s look at how we can use the groups feature to facilitate a game stack.
We can create a group with all of the players we want from the Knicks and Suns game and set the must play recommendation to five.
Keep in mind that all of your other rules and player exposures will be enforced. I like to give these type of groups an obvious name so I can quickly find them and then enable/disable as I see fit.
After running a few Crunches, I am seeing the mixes leaning towards one or the other team (aka 4-1 player disbursement).
To counter this, I have gone into the advanced tab and set it to a minimum of two players from each of the teams.
Because of this, it will be better for me to run my game stack crunches separately and then disable these rules to run the remainder of my lineups.
Final Thoughts
There are a boatload of moving parts tonight so be sure to tune into the Deeper Dive/Live Before Lock two-hour block on YouTube, Twitch and Periscope beginning at 5:30 p.m. EST for all of the up-to-date information.
As always, you can reach out to me in Awesemo.com Premium Slack or on Twitter @EMacDFS if you have any NBA DFS questions about DraftKings, FanDuel, Yahoo or FantasyDraft.
Good Luck NBA DFS Gamers! ~ EMac
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