DFS NBA Top Plays: September 10th Showdown

Last Updated: September 10th at 6:30 pm ET

UPDATE: Markieff Morris will start over JaVale McGee. We’ve upped Morris’ minutes projection to the mid-20s, and he is a solid salary-relief play. McGee and Dwight Howard may not play at all today, which helps the wing players get more minutes, too.

Editor’s Note: We may not write up every player we consider to be a top play. Be sure to consult the chart at the bottom of the page. This page will be updated as news breaks. Please refresh this page for adjustments and notes on injuries.

Injuries

* Danuel House (#teamsex) – Out
* Dion Waiters (Groin) – Doubtful

Showdown Breakdown

For the purposes of this article, we’re going to focus on the game on DraftKings as the dynamic captain pricing is more sophisticated, less likely to get monstrous duplicates, and frankly a more compelling game. At the bottom of the article, we’ll provide projections/minutes of the players on the slate. The ranking list can be useful for FanDuel but the game itself on FanDuel will lead to heavy duplicates and it makes the game a bit more about creating unique lineups so when you do win you win very big. The process requires losing often so it’s a tough sell, but if you want to play on FanDuel and use this content we suggest deviating from grouping the top 5-6 plays together, especially in the same multiplier order. Those lineups will be massively duplicated.

Onto the more complex game. When I play NBA showdown DFS, my approach is through mass-multi entry. I believe my edge is through creating bulk lineup sets that are well crafted (careful rules), likely a bit more spread than the field on captain exposure, occasionally taking calculated risks, and of course strong projections. While my approach is geared towards mass-multi entry, it doesn’t mean you have to do the same. There are concepts here to utilize when hand-building lineups as well.

Creating Sensible Rules for Showdown 

Rules (or groups) aren’t unique to those who use an optimizer to help build lineups. They are ideas that hand-built lineups should put into practice as well. In showdown, the overwhelming majority of rules should focus on players that impact each other’s playing time.

Here are some players that their playing time impacts one another:

• Austin Rivers and Ben McLemore
• Markieff Morris and Javale McGee
• Kyle Kuzma and Markieff Morris
• Danny Green and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope

It’s worth noting that all of these players are cheap enough that they could be paired together in a winning lineup. With that in mind, we don’t recommend being particularly aggressive with rules on this slate.

Captain Selection

The majority of questions I get around showdown are focused on captain selection. I think the mentality comes from sports like NFL or MLB where on player’s performance can deviate so heavily from expectations that the selection itself is a big differentiator on the slate. In NBA DFS, the production relative to expectation is typically tighter and thus the overall lineup construction is more important than the captain selection. As a result, I’ll often try to take more spread approaches at my captain exposure. In this slate, LeBron James‘s recent performance will likely inflate his captain ownership. In 150 optimal lineups with no constraints, I get LeBron in the captain spot around 15% of the time. I imagine his captain ownership will come in closer to 25% or higher. This is an opportunity on this slate to naturally get a bit contrarian in an optimal way. There will be many other slates where this is more difficult and one player truly out-paces everyone else in projection by a wide margin. This isn’t the case on this slate though so consider building around a different captain.

Approach to Slate

LeBron James and Anthony Davis project a cut above James Harden and Russell Westbrook. Our preferred approach would be pairing LeBron and AD together and spinning the roulette wheel with the value plays. Due to his price, Ben McLemore is going to find his way into a lot of lineups. LeBron attacked McLemore mercilessly last game which makes us question McLemore’s floor in a must win game. Proceed with caution. Rondo is simply underpriced for the super-charged “playoff Rondo” that we’ve seen since his return.

Player Projections