NBA Fantasy Lineup Strategy – Draftkings
How to Win on Draftkings NBA
A question often asked by new comers to the Daily Fantasy Sports arena. In my opinion, keep playing and play often. You don’t need to spend a lot when starting as there are plenty of free games that you are able to take part in to learn the ropes. But these tips will also help. Enjoy the read.
Understand Draftkings NBA Scoring
If you want to be successful with your Draftkings NBA fantasy lineups, you are going to want to understand the Draftkings scoring system. If you don’t, you are going to be blindly picking NBA fantasy lineups that simply will not yield the scores you need to come out amongst the winners.
The Draftkings scoring is fairly standard, but they do have some unique points applied to bonuses for on court actions.
- Bonus points of +0.5 are applied for 3 point shots made
- Bonus points of +1.5 for Double Doubles and
- Bonus Points of +3 for Triple Doubles.
You can go to this link to see all Draftkings NBA Scoring.
High Player Minutes = Fantasy Points
I cannot stress this enough, you need to make sure the players you put into a DraftKings NBA lineup are going to get the minutes, because minutes = fantasy points. The high scoring players are typically going to be on the court for 25-32 minutes per game, so you are going to need to make sure that you do some research beforehand to make sure your players are healthy. Pending injuries could cut into playing time, as can a blowout, where a top team is playing a poor team. When a blowout occurs, top players can be taken off the court to be rested and avoid injury.
The flipside of a blowout however, is that a contrarian pick could get an uptick in minutes and be the difference between winning nothing and winning it all. Keep your eye out for opportunities to add contrarian picks.
Back to Back Games
Kind of moving along the same line as the previous section regarding minutes, you are going to want to keep in mind when teams are playing back to back games or perhaps their fourth game in seven days. The reason is once again because of minutes, coaches have a tendency to rest starters or cut back their playing minutes. It can be difficult to predict when a coach might do this but worthwhile considering when building Draftkings NBA fantasy lineups.
Player Hot Streaks
Hot streaks can be tricky as streaks do tend to have an end, but at the same time they can offer you great value. Players on hot streaks can be given more minutes if they are showing that they are providing upside for the team, so if there is a player that has had 2 or 3 great games running, you might want to consider adding that player to your lineup. Same goes for an average or below average player, typically cheap to add to your roster, but if they are having a good run, it could be a contrarian pick to add which can give you some low owned upside.
The one thing you will need to watch with players that are on hot streaks is how much their price rises in Draftkings. If they start to get uncomfortably expensive, you might be best to leave that payer out altogether and keep the cash to be used elsewhere.
News Coverage – Keep Yourself in The Loop
There is probably nothing more important when it comes to being successful at Draftkings NBA fantasy than knowing what is happening from a player news perspective. NBA has more late news than most sports due to injuries, inactive players and lineup changes. Because of this fact, it is also important that you are creating your Draftkings NBA fantasy lineups as close to start time as you possibly can, to ensure that the players you are selecting will actually play.
If you are already a DFS player, I’m sure you have felt the pain of putting on a lineup and having a player not take the court. Once you feel it, you learn how to not let it happen again. NBA news is your friend.
Here are some of the best sites to keep up to date on NBA news:
- NBA.com (of course…)
- Rotoworld NBA
- ESPN.com/NBA
- Yahoo Sports: NBA
- Hoops Hype
- FOX Sports NBA
- CBS Sportsline NBA
Vegas Lines
Keep your eye on Vegas betting lines to understand the likelihood of the game result. Book makers are pretty good at determining the lines, they of course do not want to lose money,so they need to be!
The spread will tell you which team is likely to win and by how many points. The total is the points that will be scored by both teams by end of the game. Higher totals can suggest higher fantasy points so this will be important. If you are picking players outside of high total predicted games, you might be missing out on fantasy points, and therefore; cash.
Making predictions using Vegas lines can reap benefits as well. Let’s use one example of a team on their second straight back to back game, and they are -17 (17 point favorites), they could take a decent sized lead and if that is the case, coaches are likely to rest starters, which of course means loss of minutes.
Take a look at the following sites for Vegas lines:
Predicting Player Ownership
Predicting player ownership is another important step to include in your arsenal of DFS tips, if you want to gain the edge over your opponents. What we are talking about here is knowing which players are going to be owned by the majority of the DFS player group for a particular contest, and whether it makes sense to fade that player, in favor of hoping they have a lower scoring game, and you have used that cash to roster a lower owned player.
To use an example, let’s say that you know James Harden is going to be 70% owned. You can make the decision to fade him in favor of spending that money on another player, preferably one that is much lower owned but has potential for big points. If Harden has a bad game, you are going to be in the 30% group that get the advantage of Harden’s poor performance.
There a plenty of lineup optimizers out there that predict ownership for you. You could take a look at the following list to see if any of them suit your needs in this area:
Picking Elite Players
There are going to be that group of players that are always hard to fade, simply due to the fact that more often than not, they always perform. You don’t have to be afraid to add these players to your roster often, and in fact, when they are matched up against a top defensive team, their ownership levels may drop.
They are going to have their off days, it happens and cannot always be predicted, but for the most part, they are fantasy point superstars and you shouldn’t ignore them.
NBA Stats for DFS
Make sure that you are aware of what the stats mean when you are building Draftkings NBA fantasy lineups. We have already spoken a lot about minutes which you will often see as “MIN” in different platforms and lineup optimizers. When building lineups, USAGE is important as this stat tells you which players are more involved in team plays than others, the higher the %, the more active that player.
Get involved with a lineup optimizer to use NBA stats to your advantage and crush the competition.
