NBA DFS Picks: The NBA Slate Starter for DraftKings + FanDuel

I know a lot of you are out there sweating/tilting your NFL lineups, but there’s still some massive NBA contests out there as well. Let’s get right to it with a quick breakdown of Game 2 between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Denver Nuggets.

Second Verse, Same As the First

If you’re a Denver Nuggets fan, Friday’s Game 1 couldn’t have been fun. The final score was not nearly as indicative of the drumming Mike Malone’s team received, as the Lakers were comfortably up by 20 most of the second half until a Michael Porter garbage-time surge.

Speaking of that, somehow Porter is the fifth-most expensive player on DraftKings. He was utilized as a one-off in every winning lineup on both sites Friday and makes sense as the single Denver play in a blowout. But you’ve got to expect the Nuggets show up in this one, right? Nikola Jokic can’t be in this mountain of foul trouble again, right? But I would go as far as to say Denver is in such a heap of trouble trying to contain the likes of Anthony Davis and LeBron James (just like any other team would be) that I’m going to script my lineups a lot like the winning ones from Friday.

Two Sites, Two Strategies

On DraftKings, firing up Davis and James in the Captain slots and filling in at least three more Lakers in every lineup will be the route I go. Almost every Denver role players’ salary is elevated above $5,000, making the Lakers exponentially better values. Dwight Howard inexplicably went down $600 to $2,800 and will be mega-chalk (and I’ll eat it). Alex Caruso went down $600. Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Danny Green maintain prices in the $4,000-range. There’s no way around it in my opinion: Play a minimum of three Lakers today on DraftKings and in most cases four or five.

On FanDuel, the pricing has been toyed with enough to make roster construction more enjoyable. However, it’s still the same conundrum as in Game 1: How do you get off of the Stud-Stud-Jamal Murray build in the MVP-All-Star-Pro slots? The answer from Friday was to put Porter in the Pro slot instead and surrounding him with four Lakers. But if this game doesn’t blow out, I still find it hard for Murray in the Pro slots not to be optimal.

Which means if you want to get really different like me, I’m toying with a lot of Rajon Rondo and Kyle Kuzma in the Pro slot builds. Rondo saw no true effects of the back spasms that listed him as questionable; he continues to defy the laws of aging point guards. As for Kuzma, I almost never roster him, as he’s generally overpriced for his role on this team, evidenced by his 16% usage in Game 1. But there’s always an upside there as the Lakers’ third-leading scorer, so I’m willing to take some shots there.

Final Thoughts for your NBA Showdown Lineups

As I discussed yesterday, be sure to build Showdown lineups with game scripts in mind. Try to create plausible things that could happen throughout the game, such as the Jokic foul trouble that led to a decent Mason Plumlee outing in Game 1. And as always in these contests, don’t be afraid to be different.

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Author

Eric Lindquist

Eric Lindquist hails from Sioux Falls, South Dakota (yes, that’s the one with Mount Rushmore). A steady diet of three SportsCenters a day at an early age led to his obsession with sports, one that 30 years later is paying dividends for him as a successful DFS player and sports bettor. Despite over half a million dollars in net career earnings, he’s most passionate about helping others achieve their financial goals, an energy you can witness on the daily in his current role as a host and analyst at Stokastic. He’s a former Division I golfer at Iowa State, wishes he was a former Minnesota sports fan, and is a proud father to a 100-pound Bernese Mountain dog named Duke that wishes he could just eat people food instead of the crap he and his wife feed him on the daily.