NBA Crossover Championship Review: Wednesday, March 23rd
The Grinder review series will provide the reader with a breakdown of the exposures of “top of the leaderboard” players, the top single-entry lineup, and a comparison between all single entry lineups and professionals for Wednesday slate GPPs.
This week we looked at the $500k Wednesday Crossover Championship [$100k to 1st!] on DraftKings with a buy-in of $27.
Multi-Entry Grinders of the Game
Balicore played a spread strategy, with a few key value plays, that landed him a number of impressive finishes (7th, 11th, 20th, 50th, 54th). All 5 of those top finishes featured James Harden, which showed that flexing all-stars in a down match can still produce. However, the key to to spreading out ownership percentages while still producing a good number of solid lineup combinations came with a hefty 500 entries.
Scout326 almost followed the same route as bcalicore, except for fading Koufos, while taking a small loss on a large percentage of Omri Casspi (~5x). While we was able to put together a successful 49% cash rate, he did not have higher ownership percentages of top plays in Kosta Koufos, James Harden, or Klay Thompson to put him over top and produce more than one top 50 finish. While his fourth place finish accounted for a majority of his success, his overall lineup construction was an outstanding success and he simply missed out via combinatorics on more top finishes.
Underjones went against the grain in most of his lineup construction, fading most “obvious” plays in Kosta Koufos, Salah Mejri, and Ricky Rubio, while playing lower owned players in Rajon Rondo, Isaiah Thomas, Klay Thompson, Paul Millsap, Al Horford, and Jusuf Nurkic. While this strategy understandably led to a relatively poor cash rate of 20.8%, it gave him the game theory advantage of lower ownership and propelled him into a 5th place finish (even as this slate favored chalk value plays). Again, while having 500 entries, with at least 18 different players at each position, allowed him the possibility of matching up a number of his relatively under-owned players into a top 5 finish: Brandon Knight (4%), Klay Thompson (16%), Al-Farouq Aminu (8%), Jon Leuer (44%), Andre Drummond (17%), Stanley Johnson (20%), Rajon Rondo (33%), Damian Lillard (26%).
Single-Entry Winner of the Game
Beaker913 played a stars and scrubs lineup with an interesting twist. 3 of his 4 scrub players were starters due to injury (Stanley seeing a usage/minutes bump with KCP and Bullock out) with a majority of his star players in negative positional match ups, leading to lower ownership percentages. Koufos, Mejri, and Leuer had already shown solid play when given starters minutes and were highly owned, but the faith in Harden against a slow Utah, Leonard versus Miami, and Rondo without Cousins is what set him apart.
Single-Entry vs. P1/P2/P3
Out of 21,286 entries in the Crossover, 3499 of those entries (16.4%) were entered courtesy of players using a single bullet. The table below compares the exposures of those single entries to the exposures of bcalicore, scout326, underjones, and 25 other top professionals picked off of RotoGrinders’ leaderboard:
