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
Jordan Poole
Golden State will be one of the main targets tonight with Steph Curry sidelined due to a knee injury. Curry missed a significant stretch of games earlier this season, in which Poole saw a usage rate spike to over 36% and averaged nearly 40 fantasy points per game. Obviously Klay Thompson missed a few of those games as well, but it’s not wrong to expect Poole to be heavily involved moving forward while Curry is out. Oklahoma City has actually been really good defensively over the last month, but they’re still without Lu Dort to throw onto Poole. The sites weren’t quick enough to adjust his price, so with him priced like Curry is still playing he can be considered a top play in all formats.
Cam Thomas
Thomas dropped 50+ fantasy points over the weekend with Kyrie Irving out, and is a top mid-tier play on Monday with Irving out and the Mavericks guys not with the team yet. Thomas went nuclear in the second-half of that game, notably after Seth Curry went down, who is out tonight in addition to Irving. He dominated usage with a 27% usage rate in that game, and is a known chucker which is something I love in DFS. I want my mid-tier/cheaper guys to be aggressive with the ball in their hands and there’s no doubt that he will be trying to score early and often in this one. He got a price hike after his monster game, but $5,000 is still too cheap for what his role will be tonight and he’s my favorite Nets play on Monday.
I want to make a note since Giannis is the cover-man of this article — we have him projected for over 30% ownership tonight and with a plethora of value available he will be one of the highest-owned players in all formats. He is someone you will want in cash games, but you can pivot off him in GPPs to get a high-upside, low-owned correlated stack by using all the cheap value.
Value Plays
Stanley Johnson
San Antonio is down Devin Vassell, Romeo Langford, Jeremy Sochan and Tre Jones tonight while Keldon Johnson is questionable to play. Johnson has actually put up around 0.95 fantasy points per minute this season and should see an expanded role against the Chicago Bulls. He’s priced at just $3,300 on DK tonight, and we have him projected for over 22 minutes. If Keldon Johnson gets ruled out as expected, that number will rise and he will become even higher-owned than already expected. Overall, there is so much cheap value tonight he isn’t a must play but I will likely have him in my cash build especially if Johnson is out.
With the Mavericks, Nets and Spurs all very thin tonight we have plenty of value tonight. Guys like Edmond Sumner, Jaden Hardy and Frank Ntilikina (Q) are all catching heavy projected ownership numbers as of Monday afternoon.
Written by Ben Hossler (Follow @BenHossler on Twitter)
