Gary Gustafson 
Welcome back NBA DFS fans to the first big slate of the new season as we have a whopping 13 games to dive into when building our DraftKings and FanDuel NBA lineups!
As one of the lead NBA DFS analysts here at Win Daily Sports, I am incredibly excited for this upcoming year with our expanded suite of tools, projections, cheat sheets, daily content, and expert advice all for a fair price point to give you an edge!
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NBA DFS Picks and Pivots – First Look
If you are new to Picks and Pivots, the focus of this daily NBA DFS article will not simply be to “give you the best picks” – what our goal here each day will be is to break down the slate strategy and help you think through the process in building your lineups with a tournament focus.
Now open up today’s slate, get a up of coffee and take a nice deep breath.
Guys and gals, we have 13 games today which means we have 26 teams and roughly ~150 viable rotations players in the player pool.
I know it is tempting to dive right in but my #1 recommendation for you today is to try and simplify this slate. What that means is to start your process today by crossing off games and players entirely out of your player pool and try to focus your research on a set of core games you want to build around.
Unless you are max-entering GPP’s, and even if you are frankly, trying to capture every possible combination and player output is going to leave you spinning and spreading yourself far too thin – listen there are a TON of good plays today – lots of ’em – but focus your process in from the start and I promise you that by lock you will have clarity on how you want your builds to end.
So, where do we start?
In an effort to simplify the slate, the first thing I do is look at the overall slate and try and find the elite game environments I want to attack. In that process, I am looking for a few things:
- High and tight game totals – looking at high Vegas totals with close spreads. While we cannot predict blowouts, we saw last night in Brooklyn/Golden State how a lopsided score leaves your high-dollar studs capped for upside as they sit on the bench accruing you a whole lotta nothing as the clock winds down to zero.
- Fast pace and no defense – Now, this one is a little tougher to do early in the season as we are relying on last year and an abbreviated pre-season, but finding the games that project to play fast with poor defensive teams is where you want to focus.
If you look at this slate tonight, we have four games with 230+ games totals and sub 5 point spreads so right away we can lock in on Dallas/Phoenix, Spurs/Grizzlies, Hawks/Bulls and Pelicans/Raptors.
If we look at the projected pace of play – two of those games Bulls/Hawks and Spurs/Grizzlies just so happen to sit at the top of that list as well and if you break out the old Venn Diagram, this overlap of two lists could give us the ideal starting point.
Let’s start with the Chicago Bulls and Atlanta Hawks, a game with a 231 total, a 1.5 spread, and a whole lot of injury news that will open up value – some would call this the DFS goldmine. This is the game that immediately caught my eye as it has everything I look for – with high upside stars, under-priced starters, and some serious value due to injury and early season mis-pricing.
The Hawks open the season quite banged up as Clint Capela (doubtful), Rajon Rondo & Kris Dunn (both out) being sidelined means that even more will fall on the shoulders of Trae Young ($9.4K) and John Collins ($7.8K).
The Hawks played at the 7th fastest pace last season and we saw that continue in the preseason as Atlanta ranked 4th in team pace and that sets up perfectly for a high volume DFS asset like Trae Young!
Only three players in the NBA had a higher usage than Trae last season – Giannis, Harden and Luka and only three players shot the ball more per game – Harden, Westbrook and Beal.
Now the other three high usage players I mentioned, Giannis, Harden and Luka are all priced at $10K or higher on DraftKings tonight and here is Trae Young, the 7th highest priced player on the slate – meaning we get every bit the upside at a night PP/$ discount – giddy up!
Now the injury to Clint Capela means that John Collins will slide over to the 5 tonight for Atlanta and makes for the ideal stacking partner with Trae Young. With Capela off the court last season, Collins was a 1.3 FP/M producer and will face a Bulls team that ranked among the bottom 10 teams in opposing rebounding.
Collins interior ability (12 rebounds and 2 blocks per 36 with Capela out last year), correlates perfectly with the scoring dependency of Trae Young and this duo is going to be the core mini stack when attacking the Atlanta side of this game.
Flip over to the Bulls side of this game and we get a similar high usage run back with Zach LaVine ($7.9K). I mentioned the usage leaders from last season already briefly when mentioning Trae Young, but LaVine also sat firmly inside the top 10 in usage among NBA players last season ranking only behind Luka, Giannis, Harden, Trae, Beal, Westbrook, Kawhi, Kyrie and Embiid.
You know the big difference when comparing those players to LaVine here tonight? Not a single one of those guys is going to cost you anywhere close to the sub $8K price on the Bulls top offensive option.
If you thought LaVine was cheap – well, just wait till you see the rest of the Bulls line-up. We have 3 players in the projected starting lineup sub $5K on DraftKings with Lauri Markannen and Wendell Carter Jr in the mid $4K range and rookie Patrick Williams at the stone minimum of $3K. So I can stack up 60% of the starting unit for a team in one of the highest totals and fastest-paced games of the night and it costs me $4K per player? Yeah bro, I am down – D-O-W-N.
Now, why am I so focused on finding cheap stacking pieces in this game? Well because I want to leave myself one big time spend up. While I think Trae Young and Zach LaVine are ceiling type plays, I want to build alongside them and get me one high-end star that can break the slate – and tonight that is clearly Luka Doncic ($10K).
The Mavericks will be without Kristaps Porzingis for the beginning of this year and last season we were able to follow a simple flow chart – No KP = All the Luka.
In a massive 900-minute sample size with KP off the court, Luka was a 39% usage player and 1.7 FP/M player. In 13 games without KP last year, Luka went for 60+ DK points in half of those games and that is the kind of slate breaking upside we simply need to build around. Take advantage of the soft pricing early in the year, all this value makes it easy to simply lock and load at least one stud on DK and tonight that is 100% Luka for me.
NBA DFS Picks and Pivots – The Wrap Up
You may get to this point and go – wow, Brian thanks for writing up Luka and the Bulls/Hawks game. You know it is a 13 game slate you cotton headed ninnymuggins?
Well yes you snarky mother…. sorry, it is Christmas season. I mean, thanks for the constructive criticism.
In all seriousness – this is all by design. I am starting the day with focus on my builds. You want to waste your time digging through the Knicks and Pacers – a game with the lowest total, 20+ points lower than the ones I mentioned and with the slowest projected pace – HAVE AT IT.
My goal is to cross games like that off my list and focus simply on the spots with high pace and high usage stars. Nail those games when they go off and my friends – you will be swimming in dollars.
Enjoy this slate – let’s get in Discord today and chat it up while we dig through our cheat sheets and projections here at Win Daily to set up the start of this NBA season with some big wins!
Make sure you follow me on Twitter at @2LockSports and be sure to sign up for an ALL ACCESS GOLD ACCOUNT account here at Win Daily Sports. Gain access to our Projection Models and jump into our Discord where we will have our experts talking plays across every sport and slate!
