NBA Opening Night Preview
Welcome to what I am calling “Data Driven DFS”. You can read a quick intro to this blog here, but for now I’m going to dive right into Opening Night of the NBA season.
Note that there is going to be way more we can do with the data once we actually have some. After each team has played a handful of games we’ll have a lot more fun here. For now I am going to rely on last year’s data and a lot of speculation, because what else do we have?
Slate at a Glance:
You can click the below images to make them bigger.
Game 1: Pelicans @ Raptors
Pelicans: They are an important team to figure out here on a two-game slate as they start the year without Zion Williamson. The DFS salaries came out before that injury was announced, so there has to be some big time value in this team that we can find.
The Raptors were a good but not great defensive team last year. They were 21st of 30 teams in Draftkings points allowed per game. As you can see above they were far and away the best defensive team of the four we are talking about tonight last year. However, the rosters are all different now so we can’t put too much stock into those data points. We know that Kawhi Leonard is gone, and you would think that that would make them a more exploitable team. For now, let’s think a little more generally about this game.
Last year the Pelicans averaged 238 fantasy points per game while the Raptors allowed 235 per game. The league average was 228. There isn’t much we can do with those numbers now since these were both vastly different teams a year ago. Let’s just take some educated guesses at what kind of scores we should expect to see for the main players on this team.
Jrue Holiday:
One thing I think we need to move away from when talking about numbers is overusing the average. I could tell you that Jrue Holiday averaged 1.22 fantasy points per minute in games he played more than 20 minutes in last year. However, that basically means half of his games were above 1.22 and half were below. It tells us nothing about his consistency, floors, or ceilings. The histogram shows us all of that.
These bars show us the distribution of Jrue’s FPPM totals for each game when he played more than 20 minutes. So you see the two tallest bars both have 8’s on them. That means he had 16 games between 1.05 and 1.24 FPPM. There were very few games when he had less than .85 points per minute. The team is different now and we don’t know how he’ll mesh in the new offense, but given what we saw from him last year we can feel pretty good about him being well above a fantasy point per minute tonight, and with him projected for minutes in the mid to high 30’s, he’s probably going to find his way over 40 points tonight which I think works very well at his $7900 salary on DK.
If I type that many words on all the key players, we’re going to be here all day. Here’s some more graphics and then I’ll wrap up the team.
We can’t feel good about making a prediction for total fantasy points scored by the Pelicans tonight, but I can tell you teams scored more than 200 fantasy points per game 89% of the time last year. Most of the Pelicans fantasy points should come from Holiday, Ingram, Favors, Ball, Redick, and Moore. E’Twaun Moore and J.J. Redick are very shooting dependent, and I want to take a wait-and-see approach with Lonzo Ball in this offense that doesn’t have Zion, so I really only have interest in Holiday, Ingram, and Favors here — and I’d lean more towards Holiday and Favors as Ingram is going to have to play a little out of position here and might end up banging against the Raptors quite a bit which I don’t think will go well for him. I don’t know anything about Nicolo Melli, but he could play some minutes tonight at $3000 so there’s a good tournament option for you as well.
All over Holiday ($7900) and Favors ($5600) here in cash.
Raptors:
The Pelicans were right up there with the Hawks in teams to attack last year, allowing 240 fantasy points per game (second worst).
The Raptors have only nine guys projected to play tonight and only seven going over the 20 minute threshold. They have a high projected total against what we expect to be a beatable defense, so there should be all kinds of opportunity for this team here. They are also all pretty cheap with Siakam ($7600) and Lowry ($6800) the only two players priced above $6,000 on DK.
I went through and filtered out all the games that Kawhi played in last year and averaged out the stats in those games for the relevant players tonight:
If we take those FPPM rates and multiply by tonight’s minute projections (this is a rough way of doing it but it gives some semblance of an idea as to what to expect), we see this:
It’s real tough not to love all of these guys tonight. I’d say Norm Powell is the only one that isn’t busting with upside just because he has not been a high FPPM player even with Kawhi out, but you might need that salary relief if you want two of the studs in the late game. I really like Lowry, Gasol, and VanVleet for their prices.
Game 2: Lakers @ Clippers
Much tougher game here without any pricing issues to exploit. Both of these teams are also total new look squads from last year so we’re basically guessing.
Lakers:
No Kuzma tonight and a questionable Rajon Rondo.
If Rondo is ruled out and you really need a cheap guy, Quinn Cook becomes somewhat interesting as he had some useful games last year from a FPPM perspective:
You could also sort of make a case for Caruso who would play some bigger minutes without Rondo there:
They are both priced at $3300 on DK so it’d be hard for them to fail if they get into the 20’s in minutes, but yeah it’s not exciting.
Most of the fantasy points, of course, are going to come through LeBron and Anthony Davis. From a basketball thinking point of view, the matchup sets up better for Davis against the Clippers bigs rather than LeBron who will have to deal with Kawhi on the wing. I think both guys are too cheap on Draftkings though, but I would prioritize AD for only $300 more.
That paragraph sounded like any other lame idiot would, but what else can I do? I don’t have any data with these two playing with each other or any comparable player. My safe take is to play one or both of those two and then ignore the rest of the Lakers.
Clippers: No Paul George for awhile leaves a somewhat uninspiring group of fantasy options on the Clippers:
Pretty deep projected rotation here. I have no idea how the Lakers are going to be defensively this year, but Vegas doesn’t seem to think they’re going to be the revolving door they have been in the past as the Clippers are projected for the lowest score on the board. The only guys that have been high FPPM guys in the past on this team are Kawhi, Harrell, Williams, and Zubac. Here are there distributions from last year, again these take only the games each guy played 20 or more minutes in
Centers against a high usage, athletic center like AD always carry some fouls risk, but I don’t think anybody views Davis as a lockdown defensive center. You’re taking some risk with Harrell and Zubac, especially considering we don’t know how the minutes will shake out, but I like them both okay and could even get behind playing both of them to play the negative-correlation game.
Negative correlation is something we’ll explore as the year goes on, but basically a negative correlation is when two variables are related, and one increases as the other decreases. In this case, if Zubac would start and get into quick foul trouble, that would be a positive thing for Harrell, and vice versa. The thinking from here is that if these two are the two centers in the rotation, you are going to get close to 48 minutes from them. They are both frequently high FPPM contributors, so you have a decent bet at getting high FPPM from them collectively. Playing them together costs $10,800. Here is a quick grid of the value you’ll get from them if they average a certain FPPM:
So how confident can we be that they’ll play 48 minute? Well last year they were teammates on the Clippers for 22 games, here is the distribution of the sum of their minutes played in those games:
In 15 of those 22 games (68%), they played 47 or more minutes. They played less than 43 only 3 times. Here is the distribution of their salary values at $10,800 for those games:
So using that data, if you play them both at $10,800 you have a 41% chance of getting 5.3x or greater, and a 32% chance of being at 4.7x or less. I’d say that’s a pretty good bet.
Lou Williams is a little pricey for me here, so I’m focusing on Kawhi and the Harrell/Zubac combo from the Clippers side of the ball tonight.
Okay this took an incredibly long time, so I hope somebody reads it! Good luck everybody!
