3 key stats to get started in NBA DFS

This is part of our DFS guide for the NBA, a look at the key stats to get started playing daily fantasy basketball.First and foremost, I would like to start off by saying welcome to FTN Daily and thank you for joining us on this journey. Our goal is to be the best daily fantasy provider in the industry, and with our top-notch tools and amazing team, I believe we will do that. However, a goal of ours is not to throw names at you every slate, while we will provide our favorite plays on every slate, our priority is to teach those who subscribe to us. Our education starts wit

h the basics, and this article will go over the three most important introductory stats for NBA DFS and how to use them when going through your daily process. These are going to be the three basic and simple yet extremely important stats to identify and analyze for DFS purposes. We will continue to breakdown more advance stats and data, but it’s important to start off with these three key stats.

(Check out our DFS glossary for a quick look at the game’s vocabulary.)

Fantasy points per minute

The name is quite self-explanatory, and if you are on the NBA DFS streets long enough, you’re sure to hear this term over a million times, and rightfully so. Knowing and projecting the accurate amount of fantasy points per minute a player produces, is vital to identifying how productive that player is for fantasy purposes. We have seen many players who may be extremely valuable on the basketball court to their teams, but that value does not transfer over to the fantasy side of things, and vice versa. NBA is the most projectable sport from a fantasy perspective, and it's largely because of the accurate transition from FPPM to total fantasy points on any given slate. Obviously, it's not perfect, but targeting high-FPPM players will typically go a very long way in NBA DFS. I would consider anything around 1.0 FPPM a strong number, while anything above 1.2 to be the baseline for the “elite” fantasy producers.

Minutes

I know, this one seems very simple. However, it’s often trickier and more misleading than some believe. The reason I am following up FPPM with minutes is that you can create a simple projection by multiplying a player’s projected minutes by their historical or even projected FPPM. You’ll hear me talking about projections quite often, especially in NBA DFS, because I believe a good set of projections can lead you to extremely consistent DFS play. In my opinion, projecting minutes is somewhat an art, in that it takes a lot of attention to detail and is very crucial to accurate projections. Projecting a player’s minutes correctly can lead to finding diamonds in the rough that others may be projecting minutes incorrectly for, while projecting a player’s minutes incorrectly can lead to you wildly overvaluing that player. I’m sure you all get that minutes give a player a great opportunity to succeed in NBA DFS, but the value in the minutes stats is projecting them correctly, as it can create a substantial edge.

Usage

This is another term that you’ll hear or read frequently when consuming NBA DFS content. Usage is essentially a stat that determines how often a player has the ball in their hands. During the 2020 season, Giannis Antetokounmpo has the highest usage rating at 36.2% of all players who played 30 or more games, while Jared Dudley is the lowest at 8%. Quickly, you can see and understand a small reason (along with immense an athletic skillset) why Giannis is a much better fantasy player than Dudley. Usage is another vital stat to use in projections, as it is often important to be able to project the correct usage for any given night, as we know the NBA often has players sitting on and causing changes in the nightly landscape.

Typically, when you find a player with strong production in all three categories, he is a solid fantasy producer. However, there are many guys in the NBA who fit the mold as someone who checks all these boxes, so further analysis is always needed. This is just a starting point. Conversely, there are also players who might not check all three boxes, but still make for strong fantasy plays due to filling only two or maybe even one of these criteria.