FD NBA Slam Champ: Monday, January 5th
Well, that was interesting.
While building lineups yesterday, you could kind of tell it was going to be a crazy night in the association. There were pretty straightforward plays (Kevin Love and Andrew Wiggins, to name a couple) and then some values out there that were difficult to resist (Dion Waiters, Rudy Gobert and Donald Sloan among others), but most of those tantalizing $/point options instead ended up breaking the hearts of many DFS enthusiasts, including myself. It happens. Such is the life of a Grinder.
If you rostered Waiters, Gobert and/or Sloan – don’t forget about Swaggy P, either – at least you can take solace in knowing you weren’t alone. In fact, Waiters was 46.2 percent owned in the FanDuel NBA Slam, with Gobert just behind at 44.3 percent. Sloan was a popular play too, meaning you weren’t exactly dead in the water, even after a big fat zero from the former Cavs guard, a foul-plagued 18.8 from The Stifle Tower, or a tilting 11.9 from Sloan. Now, if you had all three in your lineup, that’s a different story…
Before we get to the winning Slam entry (worth a cool $20K), here’s a look at the the top performers from Monday:
In spite of all the duds we talked about earlier, there were still a ton of points out there for the taking if you chose your spots right, as you can see above.
With that frame of thought in mind, let’s break down RG member toetaggintambo’s winning lineup from last night’s Slam, a team that bested the rest of the field by over 12 FD points:
toetaggintambo went expensive and contrarian at point guard, opting for the high-upside pairing of Michael Carter-Williams and Damian Lillard. MCW went off against a Cavs team that trotted out Matthew Dellavedova and Joe Harris as its starting backcourt, and Lillard put Portland on his back en route to a monster fantasy outing in a W over the Lakers, who as we know have been god awful at defending point guards throughout the season. Over 108 combined FD points from your two floor generals? Yeah, not too shabby.
In order to pay up elsewhere, toetaggintambo decided to use the shooting guard spots as his salary savers. Wayne Ellington was an attractive play, considering he was starting in place of Kobe Bryant and was at a bargain bin price of $3,700, but it’s the inclusion of Arron Afflalo that really stands out. He was 3.6 percent owned and exploded for 34 points (40.4 FD points) against Minnesota. A great differential play there.
While many decided to go with Wiggins at one of the SF spots, toetaggintambo went the other way and grabbed Shabazz Muhammad, who put up more than serviceable numbers in an up-tempo battle with Denver. Nicolas Batum was quiet, but that didn’t matter all that much in the end.
Given Cleveland’s injury situation right now, it’s hard to argue with the selections of Kevin Love (54.2 percent owned) and Tristan Thompson (28.3 percent) at PF, and both bigs easily paid off their price-tags versus the 76ers. Then there’s Gorgui Dieng, who, at an affordable price of $6,600, carved up Denver’s weak interior on his way to 44.4 FD points.
Congrats to toetaggintambo for putting together a killer lineup, a lineup that included three of the top four FD point scorers of the entire night. He took some chances, like fading the Warriors/Thunder game completely and taking a shot with Afflalo, but it paid off handsomely.
Were you guys able to avoid the landmines like last night’s Slam champ?