The Basketball Diaries: Thursday, February 4th
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.
Here is a lineup I brought to the table on FanDuel:
J.J. Barea
In hindsight going cheaper at point guard last night was a bad move. You know that on any given night guys like Russell Westbrook and Steph Curry can have monster games. But 60+ point fantasy games are against the norm and when they both do it on the same night you’re pretty much toast if you didn’t take them in tournaments. When the news came in that Deron Williams and Devin Harris were out again, JJ Barea became a massive target for me around the industry as he has shown good upside and came at a very low price tag.
Kyrie Irving
Typically I would’ve been ecstatic with almost 36 points from Kyrie Irving. Unfortunately it came on a night when the 2 stud point guards went crazy. The reasoning on this pick was knowing that Irving was going to spend a lot of time on the court with Jeremy Lin as his defender. The big upside is not there right now for Irving, but as long as the price tag remains sub $7000 I think he makes for a solid play.
Jeremy Lin
Jeremy Lin was the first guy that landed on each of my rosters when starting to build. He’s clearly shown big time fantasy upside in the past and without Kemba Walker to suppress his minutes and shot attempts, Jeremy was an easy pick.
Jimmy Butler
Welp. This was the devastating blow of the night. Jimmy Butler was a guy I went out of my way to make sure was on every single roster I made on all three sites that I play on. He’s a premier player that was in a premier matchup. You sit back and look at E’Twaun Moore go off for nearly 40 fantasy points and it’s very disheartening. #ShouldaBeenJimmy
Paul George
After seeing the price tag drop on Paul George all the way down to the level of Rudy Gay and Gordon Hayward, I knew he was going to be a player that was going to be on my roster on Fanduel. As I surveyed the landscape of the games last night, I knew that I wanted to save money at power forward and load up at small forward due to positional scarcity.
Kevin Durant
So ultimately Kevin Durant put together a big enough second half that’s he offset the lack of exposure to Russell Westbrook. Most of the time I actually like a more balanced roster and will tend to avoid expensive players, but on this slate I wasn’t willing to accept the other options at small forward that I didn’t believe in. I saw a lot of value at power forward and went out of my way to load up at this position and save money at the other.
Thaddeus Young
So this Thaddeus Young pick was my last swap on the roster. Basically this spot was owned by Myles Turner. I started to look and realized that I could afford a more expensive player at this position. I debated these two players for quite a while and came to the conclusion that Thaddeus was a guy I like more than Myles Turner in this game. There’s a couple of reasons: 1) I thought Young contained more upside than Turner and 2) I knew Turner was going to be a heavily owned player and Thaddeus Young was going to be very low. The worst-case scenario would have been that Turner out scores Thaddeus by 7 to 10 points. That would not have been a massive blow to my team. The best case scenario would have been Thaddeus could’ve outscored Turner by 20. Strategically, it was easily worth the risk/reward.
Taj Gibson
I rostered Taj Gibson in this game knowing that there was a chance for a subpar fantasy output from him if DeMarcus Cousins played and Sacramento rolled out a big lineup with Willie Cauley-Stein. I was willing to take that chance hoping that maybe DeMarcus was going to sit out and Sacramento was going to roll a small lineup with Rudy Gay at power forward. In that scenario Gibson could’ve scored 40 points. I ended up getting the bad end of that scenario, but he was still able to salvage a 24+ point night at a very reasonable price tag.
Jordan Hill
This center spot was always going to be filled in by a value pick on my team. It was just a matter of which value center I wanted to roll out. I ended up going with Jordan Hill because one of the other guys was on a back to back and Hill was the cheapest of them all. No matter what happened the last two games, Jordan Hill is still an extremely volatile player. I knew that coming in but was willing to risk it for the opportunity to get Jimmy Butler and Kevin Durant on my team. Obviously with the Jimmy Butler late scratch it all blew up in my face. However I’m fine with that because as you here many times in daily fantasy sports: “trust the process, not the results”