3 NBA FanDuel Studs to Target on 10/23/19
Basketball is the most consistent sport for daily fantasy purposes.
A top slugger in baseball will have his fair share of 0-for-4 days, and an elite fantasy football player is at risk of having games where his team's offense as a whole is shut down. A high-priced NBA stud is generally going to get his, though. With so many possessions in a game providing opportunities to produce, top fantasy basketball options will be posting high scores just about every night.
While this consistency puts us in a good position to identify top plays, it also means you can't afford to miss when you're paying up for someone. Even with strong value plays in your lineup, paying up and getting a dud is likely going to leave your lineup drawing pretty close to dead.
Let's get right into it and look at which top players should be the focal points of your lineups tonight.
Luka Doncic, PG, Dallas Mavericks ($9,900)
Luka Doncic's 35.2% usage rate after the All-Star break last year was the third-highest for any player with at least 500 minutes played in that time, behind just Devin Booker and James Harden.
He only averaged 32.1 minutes played across those 17 games as the Dallas Mavericks had nothing to play for, but he averaged an elite 1.45 FanDuel points per minute (seventh in the NBA), lifting him to 46.6 FanDuel points per game.
We can likely expect an increase in minutes for Doncic as the focal point of the Dallas offense this year, and efficiency should be no problem in tonight's matchup with the Washington Wizards. The Wiz tied for just 27th in defensive rating last season, and their moves this off-season don't give us much reason to believe they're going to be significantly better on that end of the court in the 2019-2020 season.
Karl-Anthony Towns, C, Minnesota Timberwolves ($11,000)
Karl-Anthony Towns was one of only six players to average north of 50 FanDuel points per game after the All-Star break last year, and he was eighth in the league with 48.7 for the entire season.
His 24.4 points and 12.4 rebounds per game were both up from his 2017-18 marks despite playing 3.5 fewer minutes per game, and his 1.47 FanDuel points per minute crushed his previous career-high of 1.28.
The only thing about a matchup with the Brooklyn Nets that could give you pause is that he'll be facing DeAndre Jordan in the middle. Take the small sample size with some grain of salt, but KAT has eclipsed 54 FanDuel points in three of his last four games against Jordan, averaging 53.5 per game. He also dropped 30 points in both games against Jordan last year, despite not playing 35 minutes in either game.
Kyrie Irving, PG, Brooklyn Nets ($9,000)
On the other side of that game, we can expect Kyrie Irving to be a usage monster. Caris LeVert is the only other player in the Brooklyn Nets starting lineup that had a usage rate north of 20% last year, and LeVert and Spencer Dinwiddie are the only players on the team to hit that mark.
No stranger to creating his own shot, Kyrie has eclipsed 20 field goal attempts per 36 minutes in each of the last three seasons, while his work as a facilitator seems to be trending upwards after notching a career-high 7.5 assists per 36 in his final year with Boston.
T-Wolves starting point guard Jeff Teague ranked below average (48th of 80 players) at the position in ESPN's Defensive Real Plus-Minus metric last year, and he's not much of a threat to slow Kyrie down.
Our models also project Irving for the second-most fantasy points on the slate, which is easy to like for a guy priced down at $9,000.
Jason Schandl is not a FanDuel employee. In addition to providing DFS gameplay advice, Jason Schandl also participates in DFS contests on FanDuel using his personal account, username Jaymun. While the strategies and player selections recommended in his articles are his personal views, he may deploy different strategies and player selections when entering contests with his personal account. The views expressed in his articles are the author's alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of FanDuel.
