What’s up everyone and welcome to Ben’s Building Blocks! If you’ve never read my content before, welcome. To those that have, welcome back. I truly appreciate everyone that reads and supports during NBA season. This article is designed for me to highlight the top plays of the day. Obviously, things can change rapidly in the NBA with injury news close to lock, so I would be sure to subscribe to our premium package for access to our Final Thoughts cheat sheet, our premium discord channel and my core plays. Our Core Plays product gives you the ability to tail all of our analysts in your contests each night. We do the work for you, and you simply plug and play with our premium Core Plays. With that being said, let’s hop into the plays…

Building Blocks

Trae Young + Lamelo Ball

Hawks/Hornets checks in with a massive 240.5 O/U tonight and will be the go-to game for our main builds across both sites. Trae continues to shoot extremely poorly, but we just have to keep expected that to correct at some point right? Even if the season rates don’t return to what we think, he is going to have a good night shooting the ball at some point. Charlotte is not a good defensive team, and Young’s usage rate is up to over 40% with no Murray, Capela and Collins. He’s top-five in raw points projection tonight, but provides a ton of salary relief over the top players. For example, everyone else in the top-five is over $1,000 more in salary tonight.

On the opposite side of this game, this is the cheapest we are going to get Lamela Ball for the rest of the season. He just returned from injury and responded with 34 minutes of play in his first game back. This is the clear best game of the slate and plugging in a Hornets player to correlate with our Hawks makes sense in all formats.

Jordan Poole

Poole is priced way up on DraftKings in the absence of Steph Curry — but now it appears the Warriors will also be without Klay Thompson in addition to Draymond Green and Andrew Wiggins. Even if Thompson is able to suit up, the last time we saw Poole playing without Wiggins/Curry/Draymond he posted nearly a 40% usage rate for an entire game. It’s not an easy individual match-up, but he’s going to dominate the offense and I think he can be used in all formats even with the price hike.

Value Plays

Onyeka Okongwu

Okongwu is projected to be the highest-owned player on the slate tonight in our Projections Portal — and rightfully so with both John Collins and Clint Capela out. As noted above, we are clearly stacking this game up in cash game / small field lineups and Okongwu is underpriced. He’s posted over 1.1 fantasy points per minute as a starter this season, and our projections have him at 30 minutes of play tonight. Charlotte has been one of the worst teams against big-men for years now and this is a don’t overthink it spot.

OwnersBox Top Play

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Jonathan Kuminga

Kuminga likely won’t start for the Warriors tonight, but he’s a virtual lock to see a bump in minutes and he could end up as one of the top point per dollar options on the slate. He’s going to have one of the better match-ups with a lot of defensive focus going to Poole – which makes him an underrated target in the mid-tier. He’s cheap, but there are other strong values tonight so we could get him a bit under-owned.

Written by Ben Hossler (Follow @BenHossler on Twitter)