Here at Stokastic we spin the hits. We know you’ve heard this one a lot recently, but it never stops getting old: Another big DFS win from one of our pros thanks to Stokastic Sims. Once again it was our CEO Tom Kennedy — aka tomjk321 — who has raked in MMA DFS and NFL DFS first-place finishes over the last month or so. Now he joins the top of the DraftKings NBA DFS board by topping DraftKings’ $200K Fadeaway on Saturday and taking home $50,000 in the process. Once again, let’s dive into Tom’s winning lineup and the Stokastic NBA DFS Sims he used to get to the top of the DraftKings leaderboard.
Tom’s Winning DraftKings NBA DFS Lineup & Strategy | NBA DFS Sims
The first thing you’ll notice about Tom’s winning lineup is the even split between uber-chalk and contrarian options. Tre Mann and Buddy Hield were both projected for over 50% ownership playing for their new teams, as was Houston rookie Amen Thompson in a great matchup with the Hawks. Despite that, all three appeared to be good chalk leading up, as Hield and Mann were expected to get a huge uptick in minutes and Thompson was playing a fast-paced, defensively poor Hawks squad. And that’s exactly how things played out.
Thompson was the only one who wasn’t a total boom — not just of those three but in Tom’s whole lineup — but 32.75 fantasy points at $6,000 was stomachable. Meanwhile, Mann and Hield were big splashes at their modest tags, especially Mann at the stone min.
As for the contrarian pieces, Tom took some swings here and found absolute lightning on three guys with single-digit ownership. The big hit was Nikola Vucevic at $7,800 — who was Tom’s highest-priced player, another factor in his win. Vucevic killed it with a huge double-double against his former team, resulting in 63.25 fantasy points. In the same game, Franz Wagner had a huge scoring night to fall just shy of a 50-burger at $7,200.
Then there was Draymond Green. This seemed like a potential “lighter fluid” spot for him since he was playing the team and player (Suns and Jusuf Nurkic) that essentially got him suspended earlier this year — hence why so many may have stayed away. Alas, Green got to 35.75 fantasy points at $6,000 for yet another contrarian boom.
Back to the salaries — there were no studs in Tom’s winning lineup and just one proverbial “scrub” in Mann (who splashed). As a result, Tom was able to get an extremely balanced build of four $7,000 players, two $6,000 and one $5,000, plus Mann. And everyone got him at least 31 fantasy points, and thus Tom’s lead over second place in the DraftKings $200K Fadeaway was as wide as the difference between second and ninth.
Forgoing the studs like Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant was essential to winning this slate. Running Stokastic’s Post-Contest Simulator, we can see that the top ROIs for this slate were basically all guys in the $7,000 range, and Tom had all of them (Vucevic, Murray, Wagner and Jalen Green); Green came in just behind Vucevic for the second-best ROI. The only stud-adjacent players in the mix were Scottie Barnes and Jarrett Allen, but forgoing them to get the full range of $7,000 guys was the far better option.
Tom was able to get to this stud-less lineup thanks to Stokastic’s NBA DFS Sims, as they allowed him to find roster builds like this that could score extremely highly without the need of a 50-DraftKings-point-per-game guy. Sure, some of his lineups may have had studs, but the Sims allow you to see the full range of possibilities and build your lineups accordingly.
If you want to turn your NBA DFS season around, there is still plenty of time! Sign up now for Stokastic’s NBA DFS package to gain access to the contest sims, lineup generator, projections and much, much more — and get yourself up on that podium alongside other Stokastic users and pros!
