Gary Gustafson 
Welcome back NBA DFS fans! After months of being on pause, the league is back and so is DraftKings with big prizes pools to take down so let’s get started with our top NBA DFS picks for today’s slate!
Monday’s NBA DFS slate was, well quite ugly for those who followed in my advice of stacking the Pelicans and Grizzlies as the two teams shot below 30% from the floor in a clunker that from the outset was played at a sloppy and slower pace then we saw these teams play before the break. Winning scores in GPP’s pushed near 380 once again as the early games had some serious stand out performances with TJ Warren (70) and Michael Porter Jr. (60) setting the stage for a high scoring night in NBA DFS.
For those of you new to Picks and Pivots, the goal of this NBA DFS article each and every day is to provide you a “First Look” overview of the slate where we use DraftKings pricing as a baseline to help us get started. Rather than simply write out the “top plays,” this article will focus on slate strategy and roster construction with a GPP mindset to help you get started on your initial builds. Without further ado, let’s dive into today’s slate!
NBA DFS Picks and Pivots: Slate Breakdown
Today’s six-game NBA DFS slate kicks off at 1:30 PM EST with perhaps the ugliest game (or at least we hope) of this re-start with a Brooklyn/Milwaukee game in which the Nets are resting every NBA player they have. I know what you are thinking, they only had like 2 or 3 in this re-start anyways so how could they do that? Well you see, the Nets have played a few games of basketball and now its time for their 20-year-old core players like Jarrett Allen and Caris LeVert to get some much-needed rest.
All I can say is THANK YOU DRAFTKINGS.
Seriously, thank you.
DK went ahead and spiked all the potentially Nets chalky value into insane pricing which makes the decision to ignore this game far easier. Chris Chiozza ($9.3K) is $100 cheaper than Russell Westbrook. Think about that for a second.
If all these guys were sub $4K it would have turned into gross Nets chalk day and I am so very happy we can avoid that!
So where do we go next? There are two games on this slate that stand out to me as Houston/Portland (243 total) and Dallas/Sacramento (236 total) gives us some high totals and a whole lot of star power to build around.
With Giannis in a likely early blow-out, I think much of the top tier decision will come down to whether you opt for Luka Doncic, Kristaps Porzingis, James Harden, Russell Westbrook and/or Damian Lillard? To me, the star power rests squarely in these two games and getting the right mixture of stars here I think will be the key to unlocking this slate.
Harden at $11.3K is the most expensive play on this slate and there is no doubt he has the ceiling to be the late night hammer that changes this slate but his struggles against Portland have been noticeable this year – going for just 36 and 37 DK points in the last two meetings against Portland as he shot 26% over those two games.
What is interesting about those two match-ups compared to the November game in which he went for 56 DK points, is those later games had Trevor Ariza on the court for Portland who as we know is sitting out this re-start. So was this Ariza’s impact? Were they just two poor shooting games for the Beard?
Any time you see games where Harden struggled, it is best to see how Russell Westbrook ($9.4K) did in those games and it is not shocking to see the correlation in a Westbrook spike in performance with The Beard off his game. Westbrook has torched Portland this season in every single match-up – going for 65.5, 68.8 and 69.8 DK points in the three previous meetings. In the two game re-start, Westbrook has actually been the usage leader on this team at 35.8% compared to Westbrook at 28.8% and with the $2K salary savings off Harden, this could be an interesting spot to pivot if the regular season is any indication.
You know who didn’t struggle that last match-up? Damian Lillard ($9.9K) who dropped a 70 DK points triple-double the last time these two teams met and has played a whopping 44 and 45 minutes in the two re-start games for Portland.
In the two games since the re-start, the Mavs have been a two man show – with Luka Doncic and Kristaps Porzingis both sporting usage rates above 30% and 1.6 FP/M a piece.
This is another spot where salary could determine how we approach this, with KP nearly $2K lower than Luka on a slate without much obvious punt value.
Think of it this way – you make the strategic decision to move away from Harden/Luka and move to Westbrook/KP which saves you $4K on DraftKings and gives you the direct leverage assuming you grabbed the team’ stars that will have the big night.
Moving off the price points of Luka/Harden gives you the option also of going 3 deep at star as you can drop below $10K and get all three of Westbrook/Dame/KP and you still have $4.3K per player for the rest of your build.
What I love about this build is the price point you are left with in the mid $4K range gives you a huge player pool just from the top two games to mix and match with.
From Dallas/Sacramento – the Kings entire starting unit besides De’Aaron Fox is $5.2K or lower and the Mavericks will get some potential value in Delon Wright ($4.1K) today with Seth Curry looking unlikely to play.
Portland meanwhile has mid-range starters like Carmelo Anthony ($5.7K) and Zach Collins ($4.3K) and this may be the team playing the most condensed rotation in the league right now since the re-start.
In the last two games, this team is running basically a 6-7 man rotation with heavy reliance on the starting unit and that is what you are banking on again here by grabbing multiple fringe plays from this game. In the last game against the Celtics, Portland played a 7 man rotation in the second half of that game with Whiteside the direct sub for Nurkic and it was Gary Trent ($4.3K) who got all the 4th quarter run with the starters.
The Rockets on the other side of this game are essentially a carbon copy – running their starters into the ground with Eric Gordon sidelined. Every single starter played 30+ minutes against the Bucks and all 5 played 40+ against the Jazz on their opening night. In both instances no bench player saw more than 22 minutes.
So what does it all mean? I love the idea of stacking the secondary plays in this game because of the minutes certainty. To me, you can get 2-3 pieces from both teams very easily in a mini game stack here around a Westbrook/Dame superstar combo.
NBA DFS Picks and Pivots: The Wrap Up
Once again for GPP’s I am all about drawing my line in the sand and taking a stand and tonight I am going to limit my player pool to Houston/Portland and Dallas/Sacramento. These games to me not only give you the stars to build around but the mid-range value here has the most consistent and direct paths to minutes and value.
Let’s jump into Discord and talk some hoops my friends. Time to make money!
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