How To Tackle The One-Game Showdown Between Boston And Milwaukee In The NBA Switch And Hedge For 4/26

There’s only one NBA game tonight as the NFL Draft and The Avengers capture the public’s attention. But I’m going to do my best to get you all ready for the single-game showdown playable on DraftKings and FanDuel where there really isn’t a universal strategy established similar to the “5x value” threshold we’re used to in NBA daily fantasy sports. I consulted with the Awesemo team to try to figure out how to tackle tonight’s Boston-Milwaukee matchup and hopefully can provide you with some useful tidbits.

Make sure to tune into our live-before-lock show on the Awesemo YouTube at 6PM Eastern tonight as we talk about the NBA game, MLB, and probably some NFL Draft too because it’s never a bad time to talk football. Subscribe to our channel now to get notified when we go live. And now onto the slate:

Boston Celtics (98.5 implied points, -6.3 on their last 10 games) at Milwaukee Bucks (102.5 implied points, -8.2 on their last 10 games)

Before going into my thoughts on the players on each team, I’m going to share some game theory stuff on the Showdown based on feedback from our Awesemo.com team. As you might expect, there tends to be a lot of sameness in Showdown lineups due to the limited options. In fact, some pros will max-enter the tournaments but not even make 150 unique lineups and may end up running the same lineup out there for a significant portion of their entries because the projections drop off too much after a certain point. The result is there are a lot less “good” lineups in the tournaments and a lot of potential to end up in a logjam with 100 other lineups even at the top of a GPP. One strategy to deploy would be to use our ownership projections and multiply each player in the lineup them by the number of entries in the tournament to determine how many other entries may have your lineup.

For example, if each player in your DraftKings lineup is projected at 50% ownership the “ownership product” of your lineup would be 0.5^6 = 1.6%.  This means that in a tournament with 39,000 people like DraftKings’ largest of  tonight, you can expect 1.6% of entries or approximately 600 entries to have the exact same lineup.   If the results indicate that a significant amount of people would have your lineup, let’s say more than 1 out of 3000 in the DraftKings tournament today for example, it may be logical to try to find a lower owned pivot somewhere in your entry to help you avoid “winning” a tournament while being tied with 100+ other people.

For the Celtics, Al Horford was the big play in Game 5. It’s worth noting that he’s been significantly worse on the road this series but his usage last time out was so high relative to his usual output that I wouldn’t necessarily be afraid of that home/road split here. His usage came pretty directly at the expense of Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum. The latter also had a bit of a minutes haircut with Semi Ojeleye being summoned for his defensive efforts. I think Brown can bounce back and may be a logical pivot from the likely very popular Horford while Tatum’s minutes cut and Marcus Smart’s negative impact on his per-minute performance make him a bit less interesting to me tonight. Smart looks solid again and should improve on his performance from Game 5 and while he has a negative impact on Terry Rozier in general, I don’t have a problem with Rozier either given his price and his run of minutes. Marcus Morris was hot in the beginning of Game 5 and then sort of petered out down the stretch. He’s an okay play if the salary makes sense when you particularly like the rest of your lineup.

On the Bucks’ side, Giannis Antetokounmpo is about as sure of a thing as you can get. His salary is way higher than everyone else on the slate but on FanDuel in particular there is a high likelihood of you needing to own him to achieve success tonight. Khris Middleton had a tough time with Marcus Smart and Semi Ojeleye’s defense but his usage was there. If he can overcome the tough guarding, he has a really strong ceiling. Eric Bledsoe seems like a solid play and even though we’ve seen some of his downsides this series, the fact that he was able to put up 35 DK points in Game 5 while shooting 5-for-15 gives me some hope that he can stay in that range tonight even without some of the defensive stats that boosted him last game. Jabari Parker has been a very steady play since John Henson went out and I have no problem looking his way again as long as Henson stays sidelined tonight. Shabazz Muhammad stepped in for the highly ineffective Malcolm Brogdon and kicked ass in a lineup with Jabari and Giannis. If there were one super cheap guy I’d look at tonight in the hopes he gets hot again, Shabazz would be the one for me.

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And there we have it, another “slate” in the books. Make sure to follow me @ChrisSpags, keep an eye out for Awesemo’s rankings and ownership projections as they come through shortly, and tune in to tonight’s live-before-lock show on at 6PM Eastern on the Awesemo YouTube. See you then!