NBA GPP Leverage: November 10

Another week has gone by in the association, and yet again we have had oscillating slates throughout. Shout out to Discord member rzaroch36 for his Fadeaway-winning lineup last Friday, taking down the $100K! It seems we have another Friday slate with games being included for the NBA’s cleverly named In-Season Tournament.

Last week, we discussed our slate evaluation process and some ways that it differs between smaller and larger slates — this week, I want to dive a little deeper into that. Early in the season, we typically get a lot of the back-and-forth dynamic between 14-game and 3-game slates, with some occasional medium-sized ones on the weekends when the prize pools shrink in deference to the NFL — so I think it’s valuable to go more in-depth on this topic.

First, let’s examine some winning lineups in the flagship Fadeaway contest on DraftKings:

Wednesday, November 8th, 2023 – 14-Game Main Slate

The biggest slate of the season so far shockingly had very modest results with the winning lineups scoring a lukewarm 330.25 DraftKings points. Now, this was very likely the result of every player owned over 10% having an average result of a meager 4.47x their salary — however, that can be easily explained by normal variance. I skipped showing the second-place team out of spite, because, who plays Grayson Allen at an inflated price with Bradley Beal returning against the snail-paced Chicago Bulls? A DraftKings user who wanted EIGHT threes and a 26-8-4 stat line, that’s who.

Anyway, looking at the winning lineup from hankfarley, you will notice two correlated chalk plays in the best game environment on the slate, and then nobody else rostered over 7.6% — with four players owned below 1.7%. The third-place team from ‘kcelite13’ followed suit with just two players owned over 10% and the remainder below 4.2%. You will also notice that ONLY Jordan Clarkson ($6,200) was featured in both lineups, with 14 unique players across both teams. Now, both lineups were constructed extremely contrarian — and although it worked out for them, I’m not suggesting that we have to roster five players under 1% owned to make winning teams.

As I mentioned in last week’s edition, slates of this size just have so many players scoring fantasy points that it becomes a lot easier to beat the higher-owned options. A common theme, just six of the top 50 (12%) scoring fantasy players on the slate were rostered in more than 9% of lineups. The Charlotte Hornets were missing Terry Rozier, and LaMelo Ball ($8,900) was at likely the cheapest price he’s going to be all season after beginning the season on a minutes limit. LaMelo deservedly drew significant attention, coming in at 52.3% ownership, and he had a great game — lining 34/7/4 — for 50 DK points and almost 6x his salary. Everyone would be very happy with that score. LaMelo Ball was not in the winning lineup, and not in any of the top five lineups for that day. Including the above rosters and the second-place team that I omitted, 21 unique players were included in the top three lineups.