JM’s Player Grid 18.25

JMToWin is a high-stakes tournament champion (Thunderdome, Luxury Box, Game Changer, Wildcat, King of the Hill/Beach, Spy, etc.) who focuses on the DraftKings Main Slate

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OWS Fam ::

This is not a complete list of all the good plays on the slate

This is, instead, a look at the player pool I’ll be fishing

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Sunday Morning Update ::

OWS Fam!

No big news dropped on Saturday (beyond Breece Hall being out, which removes him from my pool, of course, but doesn’t put anyone new in), so nothing has changed in my thinking from my Player Grid.

I did just scan through Adam Schefter’s late-night X posts around player incentives, however, and here are a few that stood out to me ::

Stefon Diggs :: 8 catches for one incentive // 30 yards for another; I could see the Pats trying to get him to both

Hunter Henry :: 5 catches; it’s a tight needle to thread, but the Pats can get both of these guys to their marks

Deebo Samuel :: 10 catches for one incentive // 90 yards for another; that’s a long-shot, but if the Commanders try to get him there, the pathways for a strong DFS game get a bit wider

Dawson Knox :: 6 catches for one incentive // 7 yards for another // a touchdown for another

I wouldn’t weigh these too heavily, but Diggs is already a good play, and Deebo has a case to be made as a strong play (albeit in what could still be a tough matchup), while Henry and Knox are in the mix among tight ends. This is just a little boost for these guys.

With that, I’m out of here.

Trust what you’re seeing — but also be willing to embrace a bit of variance this week.

I’ll see you at the top of the leaderboards!
-JM

The Grid ::

Bottom-Up Build

:: covered in the Angles Pod (it’s highly recommended that you listen to the breakdown of the roster in order to see the thinking behind it, and in order to understand what we’re talking about when we look at a “bottom-up build”)

Blue Chips

:: my “Tier 1” plays: the plays I feel confident leaning into across different types of builds; these players have a high ceiling and a low likelihood of price-considered failure

Build-Arounds

:: games, offenses, situations, or scenarios I’ll be looking to build around across my rosters

Building Blocks

:: unique player pairings that can be used as foundational building blocks for tournament rosters

Bonuses

:: players who don’t fit into the categories above — either Upside pieces who don’t have the floor to be Blue Chips (and are not being focused on within my game-focused builds) or players who may not have a strong shot at ceiling, but are worth keeping in mind from a “role” perspective

Beta

:: players who are not going to be “featured” on my tighter builds (i.e., one could show up on a tighter build, but they are not being prioritized as such), but who I will be mixing and matching across some portion of my MME builds

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Bottom-Up Build

Bottom-Up Build
DK Salary Remaining :: $6.4K

Tanner McKee
TreVeyon Henderson
Tank Bigsby
Darius Cooper
Jahan Dotson
Jameson Williams
Michael Wilson
Juwan Johnson
Vikings

Join The Bottom-Up Build Contest On DraftKings!

Buy-In:

Free

Rules:

Build with a salary cap of $44k or below!

Prizes:

1st Place = $100 paid out to the winner(!) (OR free Bink Machine access!)

<< Join Here >>

*must use an OWS avatar (found on your profile page) to be eligible to win

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An Important Note

Pete Overzet plays cash games in Week 18, so there was no Block Party podcast this week, and Squirrel Patrol just got home from Disney and said he couldn’t figure out what was going on with this slate yet, so there’s no Solo Ship this week, either.

In order to fill that content void:

1. I’ll be recording Winner Circle early this week (it should be live before the end of the day on Friday)
2. We’ll make Winner Circle available on both the Inner Circle podcast feed and the main One Week Season podcast feed this week

If you usually listen to OWS content on YouTube, you’ll need to move over to a podcast player for this one. Just search “One Week Season” on your podcast player of choice to find the feed where this podcast will be available. I’ll be talking through all the games from a high-level view, and I’ll touch on some deeper thoughts in places where deeper thoughts rise to the surface.

Finally, as you likely know: I don’t play this week. (There’s no way I’m flying out to reserve entries for such a mess of a slate! Especially when my own edge in DFS doesn’t sync up particularly well with the edges available on this week.) But I’ll still have an update on Sunday morning, touching on final thoughts based on final pieces of news that come out between now and then.

With that, let’s get to what ultimately turned into a really fun Player Grid, and a pool I really like.

Blue Chips

None

As is often the case this deep into the season (especially in the final week of the regular season!), I don’t have any plays I’m seeing as true Blue Chips this week.

“Light Blue” Chips

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Build-Arounds

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Building Blocks

“Fly, Backup Birds”

Darius Cooper + Jahan Dotson

Story:

“Tanner McKee is at least average”

Why It Works:

The last five WR1 + WR2 pairings vs the Commanders have posted scores of 21.4 // 34.7 // 25.7 // 13.3 // 24.4, which is A) quite an underperformance for two wideouts combined vs a pass defense that still isn’t good, and is B) still a great set of scores to target for $7.1k in salary. Obviously, both of these guys will be popular this week. Both of these guys are good plays individually. But if you want to supercharge your savings, you can play these two together.

The push-back on this type of play is typically that you are limiting your ceiling, but as we have seen many times before, this isn’t actually the case. Imagine these two combining for 34 points (say 15 for one guy and 17 for the other), at price tags of $3.3k and $3.8k. Are you finding better salary-savers than that? (And even if such salary-savers are available, what are your percentage chances of finding them?) And even if they combine for “only” 20 to 25 points, you’re getting solid production for the salary spent, while having flexibility to attack whatever additional upside you want to attack across the rest of your roster.

Of course, I’ll concede that this is a stronger pairing in small-field play than it is in large-field play; but I also want to emphasize that this pairing is +EV in all formats.

How It Works:

Do we need to play McKee with this pairing? No. But you certainly multiply the power of a ceiling outcome by throwing McKee onto this build.

If starting a roster with this pairing, I’m biased toward including McKee.

But I’m also happy to add this block to a roster that’s being built around a different quarterback, and that needs some savings in order for everything to come together.

POTENTIAL DOWNSIDE:

The story plays out differently, and you don’t get first place — which is really all that matters.

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Bink Machine

A look at some of the rules I’ll be applying in the Bink Machine this week.

Fly, Wounded Birds

Trey McBride and Michael Wilson cost $14.1k combined, and in games mostly or fully without Marvin Harrison Jr., they have posted scores of ::

43.5 — 154-point pace
56.8 — 201
51.0 — 181
41.5 — 147
67.0 — 238

As we often talk about in situations like this :: it’s unlikely those points are split exactly down the middle…and with “worst games” of 41.5 and 43.5, a slightly uneven split of those points means we’re probably getting 24+ from one of these two guys (with pathways for that guy to score 30+; McBride has games of 30 and 40 without MHJ, and Wilson has games of 36 and 40). Can you think of another spot on the slate where you can confidently say you have a 50% shot at a score of 24+? Can you say that with Bijan? Can you say that with Gibbs? Can you say that with anyone at all? My answer is no; and with that in mind (especially with both of these guys also boasting elite ceiling), I like the idea of including one or the other of these guys on every roster this week, while also having a willingness to pair the two (which can be done with or without Brissett; though in larger-field play, I would prefer to include Brissett most of the time when playing both guys together).

The last few weeks, I have focused on rules I have used for “a set of builds exploring what’s possible with a certain combo” (i.e., rules that have said, “Do this on 100% of rosters,” but where I’m just trying to build a pile of rosters for idea-generation, and don’t actually want to use that specific rule on 100% of rosters). This week, however, I would want to run this rule in MME.

The first says, “On at least 70% of rosters, include one of McBride // Wilson” (I would be fine bumping this up to 80% or 90%, though I always like to leave a bit of wiggle room myself).

The second rule says, “On at least 15% of rosters, play both of McBride and Wilson.”

Bonuses

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If Building For Single-Entry // Three-Entry Max

This is my narrowest pool, which means it’s the pool likeliest to change a bit as I move deeper into builds. If it changes throughout Saturday night, I’ll add an update in this space.

If I were building for single-entry // three-entry Max, my tightened-up player pool would be:

QB ::

Trevor Lawrence || Jared Goff || Caleb Williams || Jaxson Dart || Tanner McKee

RB ::

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A Wrap ::

I’ll see you at the top of the leaderboards this weekend!

-JM