NBA DFS Core Plays LIVE: Thursday, January 5th
Andy Means (meansy53), a former Duke basketball walk-on, will be bringing Premium subscribers his top NBA DFS plays to build around on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Everyone’s favorite, Notorious, will be guiding you on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And on weekends, the GPP maestro you all know and love, STLCards, takes the reins.
GENERAL SLATE THOUGHTS
10:15 AM ET: Happy Thursday everyone! I have a little more pep in my step than usual. The PGA Tour is back (and doesn’t lock until 2:30 PM ET today if anyone is interested in joining contests) and my beloved Jaguars have a very good chance of winning the AFC South and hosting a home playoff game. It’s been so long since they have been competitive that I haven’t allowed myself to fully embrace the best parts of being a fan of a team. However, I am ready to be hurt again. I would say that I’ll finally be able to actively watch a game without any skin in the game, but you know I’ll be playing DFS for the two-game Saturday slate.
While I’m excited about golf and football, we are here to talk basketball. I got a little too cute with my lineup on DraftKings last night. There were so many good expensive plays to choose from, but I really loved the spot for Jaren Jackson at sub-5% ownership in tournaments. He played well on a per-minute basis, but the Grizzlies were up by 30 points for most of the second half and the starters didn’t see a full allotment of minutes. If I was going to play someone from that frontcourt, I should have trusted the recent form of Steven Adams, which is what a large portion of the field ended up doing.
My other mistake was playing Immanuel Quickley over Jalen Brunson. As I was mulling over my options in LineupHQ, I kept seeing the terrific RG value that Brunson had and I kept seeing Meansy’s Core Play tag, yet I stubbornly decided to play Quickley instead. He played well, but Brunson clearly the better option. I had a serious case of fancy play syndrome last night and it happens to the best of us. Luckily, I tilt-entered the late slate and was able to put a good lineup together. Strangely enough, I’ve had much more success on short slates and showdown slates than I have on full slates over the last six months and that’s true for NBA, NFL, and PGA.
We now turn our attention to Thursday’s four-game slate. There are only two teams playing in the second half of a back-to-back and they happen to be facing each other (the Grizzlies and Magic). We don’t have that many injuries to monitor, so we can spend most of the day breaking down matchups and price points.
As always, let’s take a look at the important injuries for the slate:
Ruled out:
Moe Wagner
Bol Bol
Dorian Finney-Smith
Josh Green
Jae’Sean Tate
Collin Sexton
Nicolas Batum
Questionable/Doubtful:
Brandon Clarke
Jalen Suggs
Eric Gordon
Paul George
Let’s start with that for now and will do a deeper dive into the slate once I get my initial rankings up. If you have any questions about the slate or about life in general, fire away in the comments. I like having some fun with this article.