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 (or Kyrie Irving)

We are going to once again have plenty of room to spend-up tonight, and I want to prioritize one of Young or Irving — assuming that Giannis plays so that don’t need to lock-in Bucks players. Irving is listed questionable to play, but he would become the top-overall option tonight if ruled in given that Luka Doncic is out for the Mavericks. If Irving is also out, we can look to Young as the top guard spend-up against the Minnesota Timberwolves. It’s a fantastic match-up, and his price has come down recently despite him still leading the Hawks in usage rate and point per minute production. He’s actually averaging north of 49 fantasy points per game over the last 30 days — so he should not be priced below $10K on DraftKings.

Isaiah Livers

Livers has been one of my favorite target in the betting market over the last week, and that’s the case once again tonight against the Pacers. He’s topped 35 minutes of action in three of his last four games — the outlier being 31 minutes — and should continue to see big minutes with Bojan Bogdanovic shut-down for the rest of the season. He’s not a huge point per minute player, but he took 20 shots in the Pistons last game, and that was with Marvin Bagley healthy to start that one. Overall, I think he is fairly priced in the mid-tier and it’s an above-average match-up against the Pacers. He’s one of my favorite mid-tier options on both sites tonight.

Value Plays

Killian Hayes + Pacers Players

There are plenty of value options tonight – particularly from Indiana with all of Tyrese Haliburton, Myles Turner and Benny Mathurin out for this game. In addition, Buddy Hield is also questionable to play. Andrew Nembhard and Chris Duarte will be very popular across both sites, while Isaiah Jackson will push for the highest-owned player on the slate. Jackson has shown great fantasy point per minute ability in the past, his issue has been minutes but that all changes with Turner out. He played over 25 minutes over the weekend, and there’s a reason he’s grading out so well in projections today. You can pivot him to Jalen Smith in GPPs, but for cash games it’s really hard to avoid Jackson on both FanDuel and DraftKings.

Hayes isn’t overly cheap, but will once again be a top option with the thin Pistons down Jaden Ivey. He’s tied for the current team lead in usage rate, and is the second-best fantasy point per minute producer behind James Wiseman. He will do it all in terms of facilitating the basketball, and is a top option for cash games again on Monday.

Written by Ben Hossler (Follow @BenHossler on Twitter)