Welcome to the Final Round of the NBA Yahoo Cup! This free, multi-round, single-entry contest was run every Friday for the entirety of the NBA DFS season. Scoring is cumulative for the year-long points race, with your five lowest scores dropped. At the end of the season, a $50,000 prize pool is shared amongst the top 7,950 competitors, with a whopping $10,000 going to first. Even if this your first time playing in the competition, the top-15 finishers in tonight’s freeroll contest earn entry to the BetMGM Final Round, where multiple Las Vegas trips can be won. Click here to get in on the action!
Let’s focus on three players to utilize in your NBA DFS lineups for tonight’s Yahoo Cup contest.
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NBA DFS Pick No. 1: Jordan Poole — $10
Welcome to the Wild West of NBA DFS! With only three days remaining in the regular season, we’re going to see some funky things from a number of teams, for a number of reasons. First, we have the actual contenders, who are trying to jockey for position and get into the best possible seed. Then there’s the batch of teams that have seemingly been irrelevant for months, as there was never a prayer for them to reach the postseason. But last, and perhaps most interesting, for our purposes today, there are squads locked into their playoff seed and have no room for it to change in tonight’s game.
Enter the Golden State Warriors. They have sort of a hybrid situation, as tonight’s game is completely meaningless, but face the Memphis Grizzlies in perhaps the biggest game taking place on Sunday. With both teams entering at 37-33 and the season series tied at one game apiece, the winner will claim the tiebreaker and be the No. 8 seed. That’s a major distinction, as getting two cracks at winning one game in the Play-In Tournament is substantially better than falling to the No. 9 seed and having to win two in a row.
With that in mind, tonight feels like it will be a complete punt on the part of the Warriors, who already have every starter listed as questionable. So with that in mind, the likes of Jordan Poole, Juan Toscano-Anderson and even Gary Payton II seem like serious contenders to eclipse 30-plus minutes with all the usage in the world. Should Poole be in the starting lineup, he would be the priority for your NBA Yahoo Cup lineup amongst all the minimum-salary pieces on the board tonight. And if Poole isn’t starting (not the craziest thing in the world, considering he’s an actual part of their rotation), simply pivot to whomever the starting point guard ends up being, as they’re guaranteed to be $10 as well.
NBA DFS Pick No. 2: Nikola Jokic — $53
With so many incredible $10 plays that already jump off the page (with plenty more to follow), paying up for the raw points provided by the likes of Luka Doncic and Nikola Jokic is absolutely the way to go. With no Russell Westbrook available to us on the Yahoo main slate to autoplay, these two stick out as the only two major spend-ups anticipated to be active tonight. It’s incredibly simple to play both, but if only rostering one in an attempt to get different, the consistency from the Nuggets’ big man feels like the priority.
The MVP frontrunner has appeared in all 70 games for Denver this season, and now draws an incredible matchup against a nonexistent Pistons frontcourt that will most likely be forced to start defensive liability Jahlil Okafor. Awesemo’s world-class projections currently predict Jokic to play just 31 minutes tonight, fewer than his normal allotment of 34.6 he averages on the season. But considering his 1.58 Yahoo-fantasy-point-per-minute rate for the year, he still projects as the highest-scoring player on the slate at 52.98 points. That makes him a stone-cold lock to be a part of my NBA Yahoo Cup lineup, so long as he is active.
NBA DFS Pick No. 3: Saddiq Bey — $24
Small forward is truly terrible tonight, as Awesemo’s projections currently peg Kent Bazemore and Jae’Sean Tate as the most-rostered players at the position. Both make for fine options so long as they appear in the starting lineups for their respective teams, but there will be a crazy amount of minimum-salary plays that could emerge as better plays as the day goes on. But in the interests of not discussing a $10 backup that may or may not be a thing come lock, let’s take a look at Saddiq Bey, who may be my preferred play at the position no matter what.
The Pistons rookie has one of the more guaranteed workloads of anyone on an eliminated team right now, having played 36 or more minutes in four of his past six games. He averages just shy of 0.90 Yahoo fantasy points per minute over the last month, so that rate combined with the secure court time makes him somewhat reliable on a very unreliable slate. We’ve seen some 40-plus fantasy point upside within the past month, so rostering Bey feels like a low-risk/high-upside play that could pay dividends in your NBA Yahoo Cup lineup tonight.
