Dinkmeyer: GPP Leverage April 20

Welcome to the 14th edition of GPP Leverage for the 2020-2021 NBA season. This article is going to be a catch-all space for my GPP thoughts. In most of the articles, I’ll address some of the relevant GPP plays for that day’s slate, but some of the articles will be more focused on plays and others more focused on strategy. In today’s edition of Leverage, we’re going back to strategy as I wanted to look into some of the effects of mass rest on team’s defensive baselines.

The 2020-2021 NBA season has brought plenty of day-to-day challenges for DFS players. The injury reporting has been inconsistent (Clippers, I’m looking at you). The amount of unknowns we’re preparing for each night is often overwhelming, and the efforts to navigate this landscape can be both exhilarating and draining each and every night. NBA DFS has always been the sport that DFS players have referenced when valuing projections. The scoring is incremental as opposed to event-driven and the sample sizes are larger so the industry often refers to NBA as the gold standard in terms of reliability in projections. However, the dynamic nature of projections changing as information is released along with drastic differences in who is available each night has created challenges in assessing team baselines. This is something I’ve mentioned in passing on our live streams, but this NBA season is likely one of the best seasons ever to play NBA DFS with a contrarian lean. As projections get more fragile, the better it is for contrarian players.