The Basketball Diaries: Thursday, February 11th

Article Image

Welcome to another edition of the Basketball Diaries.

This article is a reflection upon the previous night’s lineup in an effort to improve player selection moving forward.

Before we can learn what to do right in a process, we need to figure out what we’ve done wrong in the past. That is the focus of this piece.

Article Image

Ishmael Smith

Smith was one of the first players I cemented on this roster and never budged. I thought it was a great game for him and that 40 points would be a very likely outcome to his fantasy night. The outcome was obviously a big disappointment from a fantasy perspective, and I’m still trying to figure out why he only took six shots last night. However I’m not disappointed in the thought process in that the matchup was good, he is normally a high volume player and his team ended up scoring 110 points. Normally that should’ve been an easy 35 points for Smith.

Archie Goodwin

Archie Goodwin was a last-minute product of changing things up because of the Philadelphia 76ers breaking news that Nerlens Noel was out of the game. This spot was occupied by Mike Conley but I needed to free up some money so that I get Robert Covington down at small forward, so I rolled with Goodwin thinking that he had an outside chance to perform just as well as Conley. An extremely late rally salvage his day after getting benched early. Some variables, like you getting into a fight on the bench with your teammate in the first quarter, just cannot be plugged into a spreadsheet.

Gerald Henderson

So this team cashed in double ups and some tournament action, but I was just a couple of points out of the money on the higher dollar stuff. Gerald Henderson missed a wide open three-pointer with about 40 seconds left that would have bolted me above other teams and cashed in several tournaments like the $300 Monster. That’s how fickle this game can be sometimes. Henderson ended up on my team because he had a string of solid games in which they were actually using him quite a bit, and this was a good matchup against an up-tempo team.

James Harden

I was actually extremely surprised that James Harden ended up being over 25% in tournaments. I really was thinking people were going to look elsewhere to spend this kind of money. Obviously the outcome was very good, but it’s just difficult to make up a ton of ground in tournaments when a quarter of the field has the same guy.

Stanley Johnson

I hope you believe me when I say that I absolutely did not want to roster Stanley Johnson. The price tag is extremely tempting on FanDuel and when all the injuries started to become announced for Detroit I thought there was no way he wouldn’t see at least 40 minutes in the game. He ended up with around 36 minutes and even that couldn’t pump up his fantasy line any more. At this point he’s just not a good per minute fantasy performer and the monster game last week was just an anomaly.

Robert Covington

Article Image

When they announced that Noel was going to be out for Philadelphia, it was a mad scramble to figure out who was going to benefit. Okafor was the number one option, but I was locked into DeMarcus Cousins and wasn’t going to budge off for him. So Robert Covington was the next guy identified as getting a boost from this injury. I removed the small forward I had in there and put in Covington. That small forward was actually Maurice Harkless at $3700, so then I had to find a way to chip some salary off of the rest of my roster. That’s when I took out Mike Conley and put in Archie Goodwin.

Zach Randolph

When I started off building this roster, the first guy I locked in was DeMarcus Cousins at center. The next guy was Zach Randolph at power forward. Those moves were followed by Ishmael Smith at point guard. Those were the first three guys that I put in and I was never going to come off of them. Randolph just seem to be an easy beneficiary of the Marc Gasol injury.

Markieff Morris

I really liked this matchup for Morris against a team that was going to push the pace of this game up and down the floor. The price tag was still reasonable and it seems as though the Phoenix Suns are trying to showcase him before the trade deadline in order to get him out of town. Coming out of the All-Star break I would expect to see a big increase in salary for Morris, and I may have to wait a game or two to pay a heavier price on them, since I think this decline could happen right away.

DeMarcus Cousins

This seemed to me to be one of the easier picks to put on my roster. If I was only going to roster one superstar last night, it was going to be DeMarcus Cousins against Philadelphia. There was one other guy at this position that I was eyeballing on all sites and that was Andre Drummond. Ultimately I thought DeMarcus just had more upside in this matchup, so I spent the extra money.

About the Author

headChopper
David Kaplen (headChopper)

One of the “OGs” of the daily fantasy industry, David Kaplen (aka headChopper) has been dominating DFS as long as it’s been around, including winning the inaugural FanDuel NBA Live Final. Chop is a 2x NFL Milly Maker Winner ($1,000,000 prize) and has multiple Live Final appearances. You can catch Chop year-round as a show host and Premium content contributor who specializes in NFL, College Football, NBA, and MLB. Follow Chop on Twitter – @headchopper