A Step By Step Guide To Drafting An NBA Daily Fantasy Sports Lineup

Playing NBA Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS), especially if you’re brand new to fantasy basketball or don’t watch the NBA much, can be pretty overwhelming and intimidating. Many nights you have 10 to 12 games on the docket with at least four or five players to consider from each team that is playing. This leaves you with about 100 players to sift through to choose an eight or nine-man lineup. Try not to be too intimidated though because there are definitely ways to hone in on which players you should actually be considering each night.

Step 1- Identifying Injuries

The first and most important step in building NBA DFS lineups is identifying the injuries for the night. The reason this is so important is two-fold. First, it’s very possible that an injury has opened up a value play by getting to use the injured player’s backup. This player will usually come very cheap and be a key cog in opening up salary cap room for you to roster one or more of the studs playing that night.

The second reason is that there can be a trickle down effect if an injured player is someone who does a lot for his team. The backup to that player isn’t typically going to come in and produce at the same level as the starter he’s replacing. This leaves some extra opportunity for the other starters to pick up the slack when a really good player gets injured. For instance, Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving have been much more effective players for fantasy since Lebron James went down with an injury.

My favorite place to go for injury news is the Rotoworld Depth Charts page. Injured players have a little red box with an S next to their names that you can hover over to read a little about each player’s possible availability. Combining this page with the up-to-the-minute news you can get on Twitter can really help you identify the injury landscape each night.

Step 2 – Understanding Matchups

Once you’ve got a grasp on how injuries around the league can impact your lineup, you can begin to look at the slate of games from a matchups perspective. There are certain teams like the Lakers and Timberwolves that play at a fast pace and play poor defense. Targeting players in these quality matchups is usually a very good idea. Which matchups are best each night is usually reflected in the betting lines and totals. I always go to these to get a big picture look at which players I should be targeting.

For some examples of what to look for, you have to identify approximately what each team is expected to score on average. You can do this by looking at a team’s pace and offensive rating at nba.com/stats. So if you have a great team that plays at a fast pace, like the Warriors, they will probably project to score around 108-110 points on an average night. Most of their studs will represent a decent value anytime they’re in that range of projected points by the sportsbooks.

To find out a point projection for each team, you simply take the total points projection for the game and the spread and do a little quick math to get you each team’s ‘team total’. For instance, if the Warriors are -7 and the total is 212, that means the game is projected to have 212 points and the Warriors are favored by seven points. That would put the Warriors team total at 109.5 and the other team’s team total at 102.5. When you have a team like Indiana that is normally slow paced and not good offensively show up with a strong team total like 103 then you probably have a really good value on your hands for Indiana’s best players.

Step 3 – The Finishing Touches

Once you’ve got some injury fill-ins and some guys in good situations locked into your lineup, you’ve usually got to find that last player or two to finish it off. In my opinion, this is where it all goes off the rails for a lot of DFS players. If you become completely hell bent on playing certain players, then you’ll end up just throwing that last player or two in “because the salaries fit.” My goal when making a lineup is to have a real reason and desire to use each guy that is on my team. When you start throwing players in just to make the salaries work your team can easily be derailed. If you don’t like any of the options that are presented to you for your last couple players, explore other avenues.

My goal when I sat down to write this was to try to make it easier on someone who is new to get more interested in NBA DFS. About halfway through writing, it occurred to me that there is no way to make NBA DFS easy. It’s tricky and requires attention. But man it’s a whole lot of fun. I’m personally completely immersed in trying to solve the puzzle every day and wouldn’t have it any other way. If you’re a fan of the NBA or even if you just enjoy fantasy sports, give it a shot. I doubt you’ll be upset that you did.

Find me on Twitter @IanJ300 with any questions.

If you think you are ready to play, check out our Daily Fantasy Sports page. Card Player readers eligible for deposit bonuses of 100 percent on a number of the best DFS sites around.

You can play NBA DFS contest nearly every day of the week on both DraftKings and FanDuel.

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