What a great Christmas Day and/or Happy Holidays? That was not the case in the DraftKings NBA DFS realm for regular players, especially 150-maxers. As snow flakes accumulated in lineups for high-owned players, it became clear during the first game that this slate was not going as planned, and to a larger degree than normal. Let’s dive into the Christmas Day NBA DraftKings lineup review.
[CARUSO]
[SportsbookAffiliates]
DFS Rewind: NBA DraftKings Lineup Review | Christmas Day
Yesterday, we had a five-game slate. The Main DraftKings GPP was the NBA $2.5M Holiday Basketball Millionaire ($1M to first). This was a $25 entry fee with 100,432 entries instead of the 117, 600 that DraftKings was hoping for. A whopping 48,298 unique users and 11,296 (23.4%) made sweet profit, which is actually quite a bit more than normal. I believe this was to do with the performance of the 150-maxers, which we will look at below. The average user played two entries.
The Winner
Congratulations to gbstrohm, who entered three lineups, cashing all three with first, fourth and 5,230th place, and turning $75 in entry fees into $1,029,980. His best lineup posted a 322.75, winning this GPP by two points — his second-best lineup scored four points lower. This lineup is within the range of salary and cumulative team ownership I would expect in a five-game slate. gbstrohm used all $50,000 team salary and this squad had a cumulative team ownership of 158.1%. This squad only one chalk player in Jaylen Brown and two players at less than 10% ownership.
Salary and Ownership:
Only four of the Top-50 finishers used $49,700 team salary. All others used $49,800 or more. Here are the top salaries used in the GPP:
- $50,000 | 43%
- $49,900 | 24%
- $49,800 | 13%
- $49,700 | 8%
Cumulative team ownership on the Top 50 was generally between 140%-160% with outliers, of course — most of those being below the 140%.
The 150-Maxers
We had 114 150-maxers, making up 17% of the field. In what is the worst performance of a group of 150-maxers I can remember, only one made money and that profit was $50. Of the 114, 113 lost money, none less than $600; and 110 lost a minimum of $1,600. Forty-five cashed 20 lineups or fewer and two cashed none. These two enter the same lineup 150 times almost every slate. That equated to a $3,750 whiff on this slate. The highest score posted in these 17,100 lineups was a 307 for 31st place.
Instead of showing the lineup of the best 150-maxer, here are the top 10 exposures of all 150-maxers:
None of these players were welcome in DFS lineups at the end of the day besides Jaylen Brown and Duncan Robinson.
Miscellaneous
The boom of the slate goes to Nicolas Batum, who put up 37 DK points for $4,5000 (8.2x) at 9.7% ownership. The bust of the slate goes to the most rostered player in the GPP, 45% owned Jeff Teague, who scored 5.25 DK points for $4,200 (1.3x).
1,075 lineups were reserved and not played. The lowest-owned lineup that cashed (min-cashed) featured a cumulative team ownership of just 36%:
The lowest salary team that cashed (min-cash) used $47,100 team salary:
The best single bullet (one entry in an MME GPP) last night goes to Spamskins, who turned $25 into $100,000 with this lineup:
The most popular lineup played was used 716 times and did not cash. 259% cumulative team ownership!
The best possible lineup you could have played last night scored a 349.25 using a team salary of $49,9000. It would have won the GPP by 26.5 points:
[NBAContentLinks]
Follow us on all of our social channels! Check out our Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube for more great Awesemo content.
Looking for more NBA DraftKings lineup review and DFS picks content? We have loads of NBA DFS articles, DraftKings data, cheat sheets and more on the Awesemo NBA home page. Just click HERE.