NBA Situational Projections: Friday, March 2nd

by Eric Crain (jakz101) Last Updated 2018-03-03 00:00:41 Premium Content Part of the product Core4

When I first got into NBA DFS, the phrase I kept hearing was “minutes = money.” The concept is simple enough: A player averages a certain number of points per minute, and if he gets a certain number of minutes, we can expect him to be one of the best point per dollar scorers on the slate. Unfortunately, as we’ve all learned, not all projections are created equal. Every day, I build my own projection set for NBA. Some days, that’s easy. If a team has a neutral matchup and isn’t missing any bodies, a base set of projections works just fine. Other days though, especially as the NBA season rolls along, it gets a lot more complicated.

Friday, March 2nd

When we’re building our lineups, it’s important to have a short memory. “Recency bias” is a term that’s thrown around in DFS circle. Essentially, it’s a term that explains what happens when our brains favor recent events over the long term. When somebody says they’re not playing Alex Len because he put up a dud against Anthony Davis in his last game, even when the overall numbers suggest he’s a phenomenal play, that’s recency bias. As a DFS player, one of the most important things we can do is get rid of this kind of thinking. One of the ways to do that is simply by looking at (and trusting) the numbers.

After John Wall got hurt, Bradley Beal was all the rage in DFS. Normally priced around $8,000, his FanDuel salary got all the way up to $9,500 as recently as last week. When Wall first went down, people were tripping over themselves to play Beal. Lately though, he’s become a forgotten man.