The Daily Grind: Wednesday, December 21st
As the managing editor of the site, it’s crazy how much content I’m consuming each and every day. My work is a grind, in and of itself, but I’m certainly not complaining. I love what I do, and I know how lucky I am to work in this industry.
Thing is, I’m also an avid daily fantasy sports player who partakes in essentially every sport available, and balancing work and DFS can be extremely challenging, as many of you know.
Recently, I wondered to myself if there was a way I could turn my day-to-day work into a helpful article that readers could enjoy and learn from. It would probably help me grow as a player too, I thought. So here we are.
This will be an ever-evolving article and will take on many different forms going forward. But, to give you a general idea, I’ll be dropping in interesting tidbits I come across throughout the day, from both my work and DFS research, as well as some random thoughts, ramblings, gut calls, statistics, tool walkthroughs and the like.
When people first stumble upon RotoGrinders, they may be overwhelmed at first by all of the incredible resources at their disposal. Hell, there are still certain areas of the site that I’m not utilizing efficiently. Hopefully this “live blog” of sorts will help you discover new content and tools that you didn’t even know existed, or that you just didn’t know how to make the most of.
Above all, hopefully it can help you fine-tune your own process when it comes to the daily grind.
Wednesday, December 21st
— 3:15 PM ET —
CourtIQ was briefly mentioned earlier, but it’s a tool that deserves further explanation. It allows you to adjust player combinations (by selecting “ON” the court and “OFF” the court) to gain situational insight.
Designed to help you quickly and seamlessly crack the code when a player will be missing-in-action, CourtIQ can be extremely powerful if you use it correctly. NBA IQ, our Premium article written by @INSPYR, dives into the most relevant searches (along with DFS Takeaways) each day to give you a narrowed focus on that day’s slate. Today his first entry is on the Thunder without Victor Oladipo in the lineup.
Some of the other suggested (and most recent) queries for today can be seen below:
— 2:30 PM ET —
I’m seeing a lot of comments on Jokic burning people. Well, I was one of them.
Here’s what I learned from it though: The Nuggets had just played the night before, and Jokic was obviously insanely effective. He also played a ton of minutes…38 to be exact. His previous season-high in minutes was 34, way back in late October. I’m sure the big man’s legs were a bit heavy last night. Meanwhile, Kenneth Faried played just 10 minutes on Monday, so he was a lot fresher for LA.
In hindsight, it was silly of me to chase those Jokic points in a back-to-back situation, especially knowing how popular he would be. Malone may have very well been “saving” Faried on Monday in preparation for last night, and so he wasn’t afraid to lengthen the leash on Jokic against the Mavericks. Of course, it didn’t hurt that he was putting on a show out there.
— 1:30 PM ET —
If you’re not using our NBA Projections page, you need to start. FanDuel and DraftKings projections are free and are updated throughout the day based on the news. This is another page that includes some useful numbers, including salary rank differences, Vegas totals, line movement, floors/ceilings, and more. Premium subscribers will also see projected ownership and each player’s contrarian rating included.
As of this writing, Ricky Rubio (5.51 Pt/$/k) is the projection team’s top point-per-dollar play on FanDuel. He can be hard to trust, but the price is fair and the matchup couldn’t be much better against a truly awful defender in Dennis Schroder.
Over on DraftKings, here’s where we stand:
— 11:30 AM ET —
One of the first things I do to prepare for the upcoming slate is head over to our incredible Starting Lineups page. It shows all of the projected starting fives as you’d expect, but the page also displays Vegas team totals and both site-specific salaries and projections for each relevant player. There are also a ton of different filters you can use. It’s an amazing resource.
Scanning the page gives me a feel for the overall landscape of the slate and serves as a good starting point for my research. Our hard-working development team also recently added the Starting 5 CourtIQ for each team, another handy feature, and you can use the tool to analyze changes in performance as players move on and off the court.
Beer’s Six-Pack for Wednesday is now out as well, and you can find it here.
— 10 AM ET —
It can be painful after a rough night, but it’s important to look back and learn from mistakes. I made a few last night, namely not rolling out DeMarcus Cousins in an extremely favorable matchup against Portland’s laughable frontcourt defense. Boogie also had reasonably low ownership (18% in the JUMBO Slam) because everyone was busy jamming in CP3 and LeBron.
Below you’ll find yesterday’s top NBA performers on FanDuel, easily accessible and sortable using RG’s free Player Stats tool. Just click your site of choice, then select “Yesterday” and sort by “FPTS” to get a quick recap of the biggest individual scores. You’ll need to click “Filters” and then highlight the rest of the teams to see the full list; by default it only shows players that also have games tonight.
What were your biggest hits and misses on Tuesday?