NBA DFS Core Plays LIVE: Friday, December 30th
Andy Means (meansy53) will be bringing Premium subscribers his top NBA DFS plays to build around for the upcoming slate. A former Duke basketball walk-on, Meansy will also give you his thoughts on the slate as a whole from a macro perspective. On weekends, the GPP maestro you all know and love, STLCards, takes the reins. And on this rare occasion, we have Noto at the helm.
GENERAL SLATE THOUGHTS
10:00 AM ET – Ladies and gentlemen, we have finally arrived at the weekend. We have nine games on the schedule this evening and the injury report seems to be growing by the minute. The core plays performed admirably last night, but that was the case for a lot of players on the slate. Before we dive into tonight’s slate, let’s look at a quick recap of the core tags from last night:
FanDuel: LaMelo Ball (), Julius Randle ()
DraftKings: Immanuel Quickley (), Scottie Barnes (), Julius Randle ()
Unfortunately, I didn’t surround the core plays with the right pieces. I locked Jaylin Williams and Donovan Mitchell in for the first set of games. While they didn’t play poorly, they sort of handcuffed my choices moving forward. I ultimately decided to play Pascal Siakam over Luka Doncic because I didn’t quite have the salary cap for Doncic. The mistake that I would go back and correct was locking Mitchell when we still didn’t know the status of Jalen Brunson.
If you are ever stuck in a rut and can’t seem to shake a losing streak in DFS, I highly recommend going back and looking through your decisions for each slate. It’s important to focus less on the results and more on the process of each decision point and where you could have altered your strategy and your thought process. The more you do this, the quicker you will be at identifying mistakes in the middle of your lineup building process.
Now, let’s turn our attention to Friday’s slate. Here is the list of players that have already been ruled out for tonight:
Cole Anthony
Mo Bamba
Wendell Carter
R.J. Hampton
Gary Harris
Jalen Suggs
Moe Wagner
Cam Johnson
Cam Payne
Landry Shamet
Precious Achiuwa
Fred VanVleet
Clint Capela
Cade Cunningham
Hamidou Diallo
Killian Hayes
Khris Middleton
Jordan McLaughlin
Taurean Prince
Brandon Ingram
Dewayne Dedmon
JaMychal Green
Andrew Wiggins
Keon Johnson
Wow, based on the names above, we should have no problem making lineups that we feel good about on this slate. I’m sure we will add more names to the list, as the following players are listed as questionable:
Bradley Beal
Taj Gibson
De’Andre Hunter
LeBron James
Derrick Jones
Coby White
Patrick Williams
Marvin Bagley
Jrue Holiday
Kyle Anderson
Herb Jones
Larry Nance
Bruce Brown
Aaron Gordon
Jamal Murray
Caleb Martin
Trey Lyles