NBA Daily Fantasy Helper: Friday 4/26/19

If you're new to daily fantasy basketball -- maybe you started your DFS journey during the MLB or NFL seasons, or maybe basketball is your sport and this will be your first year giving it a shot -- you're in for a treat. The NBA scene changes hugely on a week-to-week, day-to-day, and -- depending on injury news -- even a minute-to-minute basis, making every slate a unique one that requires an ever-changing approach.

With so much changing so quickly, we're here with plenty of tools to help you out. We have daily projections, a matchup heat map, a lineup optimizer, and a ton of other great resources to help give you an edge.

We'll also be coming at you with this primer every day, breaking down a few of the day's top plays at each price point.

Let's take a look at who you should target on today's one-game slate, which follows a different format than typical NBA contests on FanDuel. Your lineup consists of five position-less slots, with one designated "MVP" having their fantasy score multiplied by 2.0, a "STAR" multiplied by 1.5 and a "PRO" multiplied by 1.2, as well as two utility slots receiving their usual points.

Stephen Curry, Golden State Warriors ($14,500)

While it made sense to pay all the way to the top for Nikola Jokic on yesterday's one-game slate, this slate doesn't offer as many appealing cheap options, so foregoing Kevin Durant ($17,000) for Curry is the way to go.

Durant has been much more productive in this series, averaging 50.5 FanDuel points per game to Curry's 42.1. We've seen that they offer very similar upside though, as the two highest single-game fantasy scores from the series belong to KD (69.2) and Curry (65.5).

Durant's played more minutes per game (35.0 to Curry's 32.6), but with the way a single-game slate works, we want to chase upside, and their ceiling for minutes is pretty close, with Durant having played 41.2 to Curry's 38.1 in Game 5.

The betting lines over at NBA odds give the Golden State Warriors a heftt 121-point implied total (compared to 111 for the Los Angeles Clippers), and so you want to get a Warriors stud into your MVP slot. In a vacuum, you'd like it to be Durant, but the gap in upside between Curry and Durant isn't huge, and a $2,500 difference in salary is just too much to overcome for ideal roster construction.