3 NBA FanDuel Studs to Target on 1/5/21

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-salaried 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 a heavy salary to roster someone. Even with strong value plays in your lineup, getting a dud from a stud is likely going to leave your lineup lacking.

Let's get right into it and look at which top players should be the focal points of your lineups today.

Nikola Jokic, C, Denver Nuggets

FanDuel Salary: $10,500

When seeking studs, you need to find guys who are going to come through no matter what. They need to have high floors, but they also need to have ceilings in order to break through a given value threshold. Nikola Jokic has that ability -- plus the opportunity cost unlike others in action tonight.

numberFire projects Jokic to record 56.8 FanDuel points. The next-best projection for a center on FanDuel is Rudy Gobert ($8,200) at just 37.4 FanDuel points. Yes, that's a $2,300 salary gap but also a 19.4-FanDuel-point gap. If all centers stick close to their median projections, Jokic would be a massive difference-maker on a small, five-game slate.

Jokic has double-digit shot attempts in every game this season with at least 44.4 FanDuel points in all of them, so there's the floor. He is averaging 1.53 FanDuel points per minute, third-best among those with at least 100 minutes played. That's paired with a solid 25.9% usage rate in a matchup against a bottom-eight adjusted center defense. That could bring with it a ceiling.

Kyrie Irving, PG, Brooklyn Nets

FanDuel Salary: $9,700

There's an initial -- justifiable -- reaction to shy away from teams facing the Utah Jazz, but the Brooklyn Nets still have an implied team total of 110.5 points in a game with a 225.5-point total, tied for second-best on the slate. The Jazz, also, are only 14th in estimated defensive rating to start the season.

What really should point us to Kyrie Irving is the absence of Kevin Durant. We've got only a 15-minute sample for Irving without KD this season, but we can extrapolate well enough because we know that Irving -- with no Durant or Spencer Dinwiddie -- should have numbers like these: a 33.5% usage rate and 1.60 FanDuel points per minute.

The Jazz are most vulnerable to point guards and present an NBA-average matchup to the position. Irving seems locked into a 30% usage rate and minutes in the mid-30s (we project him for 35.9). numberFire projects Irving for a slate-best 28.9 actual points, so even with some matchup concerns, the over/under is there, and the shot attempts certainly will be.

Zach LaVine, SG, Chicago Bulls

FanDuel Salary: $8,100

This one is a little bit of a two-for-one with Zach LaVine because his salary is low, and one of the main reasons to like him is that he is playing the Portland Trail Blazers in the game with the best total on the board (232.5 points). The spread is large at 9.0 points (pitting the Chicago Bulls as potential blowout losers), but that still gives them an implied team total of 111.75 points. The second part of the two-for-one is that we can stack LaVine with Damian Lillard ($9,200) and/or C.J. McCollum ($8,900) if we anticipate a back-and forth game.

Anyway, the Blazers are 20th or worse against both guard positions when adjusted for opponents faced since the start of last season, so LaVine has a pretty obvious path to fantasy points when you pair that with the high total.

LaVine is coming off a season-best game with 58.7 FanDuel points, but he has at least 47.0 FanDuel points in three of seven games this season, and the path to them is obvious: he has at least 13 shot attempts in every game and at least 15 in six of seven games. LaVine is up to a 30.7% usage rate, ranking him 10th among players with at least 15.0 minutes per game.

He can easily go overlooked with bigger-name studs available, but again: we're looking for floor and ceiling. He should have those relative to his $8,100 salary.