NBA GPP Leverage: December 1

I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving! Now that the NBA In-Season Tournament group stage has ended, it looks like we’re in store for a regular slate.

This week, I want to discuss the changing pricing dynamic that DraftKings has implemented to start the season. There has been a lot of discussion on this topic in Discord and on Establish The Show since the season started, but one thing we all seem to agree on is that there is certainly a change to player salaries. Players that were seemingly in the low-$4K price range are now in the high-$4K to low-$5K price range and it’s affecting the way the field is building their lineups. There is not a “best” way to handle it per se, and as fellow ETR contributor Jeremy King correctly emphasizes — each slate is its own, and pricing/plays should be evaluated relative to that individual slate.

With that said, I wanted to look at players who have recently seen a material amount of ownership on certain slates and see what they looked like last year.

To be clear, basically all of these players are either on different teams or in different roles this season — and simple averages don’t mean much in terms of how a player should be priced on a given slate. I have excluded all games where these players saw less than a few minutes of playing time so we got a better sense of when these guys were real rotation pieces in a given game. I will also add that the value column is calculated as the average of the values of each individual game (not just the average score divided by the average salary shown above).

So, generally speaking, certain guys are being priced up compared to how they were priced last year. Yes, there are far more things to account for here, including new teams and roles, etc. — but players with similar roles to last year such as David Roddy, Malik Beasley, Patrick Williams, Talen Horton-Tucker, Josh Green, Josh Okogie, Robert Covington, Sam Hauser, Ochai Agbaji, and others are all at least $500 more expensive in their “base” roles (i.e., not being priced up to account for their new role or after big games).

Before we try to ascertain what the response should be here, are these players deserving of this price bump? Let’s look at some of the data from last season (there’s not a big enough sample this year, but we’ll come back to this point later in the season).