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The featured simulated basketball contest on DraftKings for Wednesday afternoon is between the Detroit Pistons and Chicago Bulls. Here, we’ll go over how to approach lineup construction for the fantasy basketball contest. This is a link to the contest and be sure to check out the rules before locking in a lineup.
Captain’s Picks
The return of Blake Griffin? Don’t mind if I do. Griffin is priced down at $13,500 for the Captain’s spot in the contest. The good thing about that is Griffin only played in 18 games this season and started each of them, averaging 15.5 points per game. That may seem low but it’s mostly because some of his box scores were lackluster. Others weren’t do bad. There’s only 18 of them, and it looks like around 8-9 of those boxes would come out on the upper side of the value chart. I think he could go overlooked in the contest a bit and isn’t too expensive as Captain.
If we’re going a more traditional route, I like either Derrick Rose ($16,200) or his mini-me Coby White ($10,800). Rose is the Pistons’ leading scorer at 18.1 points and 5.6 assists per game this season. Rose hadn’t played much in February, but had a January to remember. Rose scored at least 20 points in 14 of 15 games in the month, landing any of those box scores out of Rose’s 50 would net you a decent return. White has only started one game as a rookie in 65 this season. But his past two months worth of boxes were impressive. White won Rookie of the Month for February and had been averaging over 20 points per game since the beginning of that month.
FLEX Options
There aren’t many ceiling plays, so trying to fit in Zach LaVine ($12,400) should be a priority. He’s really the only player in this entire contest that has games with 35-40+ points this season. There’s some value in Wendell Carter Jr. at $6K in the UTIL spot given he’s dealt with injuries this season and has only played in 43 games. The thing is, most of those games he’s hovering around a double-double. Carter’s numbers through Jan. 6 are impressive and this price doesn’t do them justice.
As for extreme value, Luke Kennard is only $3,000 and is probably an even more appealing play than Griffin. Kennard had only played in 25 games due to injury before the NBA stopped. Shaq Harrison ($1,600) and Chandler Hutchison ($1,200) are both good value plays on the Bulls side. Hutchison was getting run earlier in the season before he got hurt, and Harrison was benefitting from guys like Hutchison, who got hurt.