Introduction
One of the first things that a lot of DFS NBA players do when they start their daily research is check out the Vegas lines from their favorite sportsbook or website. A few others monitor the movement of the lines throughout the day to try to gain an edge on the competition and correlate it back to player performance. Of course, we know the goal in daily fantasy is to maximize our fantasy point total and the best way to do that is to maximize the number of players who produce high fantasy points on a single team. Oftentimes, GPP-winning lineups are those with multiple players that have exceeded 50 fantasy points. There are plenty of ways to attempt to identify the most likely 50-plus fantasy point performers, be it DvP (Defense versus Position), expected minutes played or even using projection algorithms. But what I want to focus this set of lessons on is using the Vegas odds as a tool to guide you in making that decision.
One of the most common pieces of advice I hear from experienced NBA DFS players is to fade starters in a blow out, as they are likely to sit out in the fourth quarter and not check back in with the game already decided. This caps their projected minutes played, and in turn their potential fantasy output. Of course we can never be 100% certain how a game will flow, but we can use the Vegas lines to predict which games have the most likelihood of being close and which ones project to be over by the end of the third quarter. In those games, is it practical to target the high dollar superstar who may cripple your lineup if they are only playing 25 minutes instead of their usual 35-plus minutes? Or are you better off fading these players altogether and focusing instead on the “sure” things?
This course will examine historical data dating back to the 2013-14 season for a total sample size of two and a half seasons and attempt to locate the best situations for players to exceed their expected value using only the Vegas lines – the over/under’s and the spread of the game – to uncover which games make for “juicy” DFS targets. The object will be to take a quick look at the early lines in the morning and that should help you narrow your focus to a select few games to target for GPPs as they carry the highest potential to include high-scoring individuals. This should save you some valuable research time as well as situate you to look deeper into other important aspects of roster building, such as game theory and rotation analysis.
The value in this lesson lies in the fact that our data set includes more than 22,000 individual player games to examine with the associated Vegas lines for that game. Being able to pinpoint how likely a player is to reach a certain point total based on the Vegas lines can be what separates you from barely cashing in a GPP and finishing in the top 0.1% where the big money lies.