Gross Bombs: NFL Props for Week 16
Josh Gross
Welcome back to the NBA season, and related, welcome back to daily fantasy basketball. Let’s take a moment to focus on lineup construction for NBA DFS.
One of the most important points we need to make is stacking. There is a focus on a few key points:
Look at the Las Vegas totals.
Look at the highest implied total by the top 2-3 teams.
Focus on the highest-paced teams and correlate it with the teams that have the highest implied totals.
Focus on a game stack to work off of.
If you game stack with 2-4 players from one team, make sure to choose at least one player from the opposing team.
I’m going to focus on the strategy for my five big wins in 2020, which resulted over $350,000 in profit. In two of my bigger wins on DraftKings, I focused on a high implied total and went three from one team and one from the opposing team. (The argument for stacking players on one team with at least one player from the other is simple: For your stack to hit its ceiling, it needs a high-scoring game. A high-scoring game on one side is likely to be high-scoring on the other side as well. Therefore, grabbing someone from the other side should boost your ceiling.)
As an example, I’ll use one of my bigger wins, a lineup that won me a live final qualifier Dec. 17.
Building from that day’s Nets/Pelicans game, I focused on Spencer Dinwiddie from the Nets and went with Josh Hart, Derrick Favors and Lonzo Ball of the Pelicans. The game ended 108-101 in overtime and all players crushed projections. Even though LeBron James scored 42 DraftKings points, I still won the qualifier.
Contest selection is key. LeBron scoring 42 points meant my lineup definitely wouldn’t take down any of the big GPP tournaments with 50,000-plus people. This qualifier, though, consisted of 200 entrants and ended up winning because of some leverage plays. The CliffsNotes version of leverage is switching to another player at a similar salary for a very chalky player. For example, Jrue Holiday came in at 72% owned and got hurt. I didn’t play the chalky Holiday and went Josh Hart, who was under 15% owned. Hart outscored Holiday by more than 20 DK points and I had leverage over the chalkiness.
Let’s use the example of one of my $100,000 wins, this one on FanDuel. On New Year’s Day, I decided to go the “set it and forget it” route and using FanDuel’s way of playing DFS NBA. I decided to use the game stack of Devin Booker and the Suns versus LeBron James, Kyle Kuzma, and the Lakers. I also added a second game stack of Julius Randle, Marcus Morris, and the Knicks against Hassan Whiteside and the Trail Blazers.
In other words, I used two of the three highest implied totals, focusing on stacks that were composed of two players from the favorites combined with one player from the underdog. My final two spots on this big winner were salary-relief guys, two one-offs. This tournament was a 100-man GPP tournament with three max entries — contest selection, contest selection, contest selection!
Stacking is key. Most of the takedowns consisted of game stacks and/or regular stacking of one team. It consisted of three or more players from the highest implied total with lower ownership numbers and building around that stack.
