UPDATE (6:42 pm est) ::
With Butler out, lots of Heat are now waaayyyy more viable (and will be super chalky)
-Noel just got ruled out, which makes Mitch Robinson pretty interesting now
Time for the second inaugural Superdraft article! Before I get into this, make sure you’ve read our Superdraft Primer so you understand the details of how the site works, and of course if you sign up via the OWS link you get a really generous sign-up bonus offer (as well as help out OWS!).
Trade deadline day came and went and has resulted in some teams looking awfully thin tonight as they traded guys away but new players can’t join the team yet. The major impacts here for today’s slate are to the Heat, the Blazers, the Sixers, and the Kings. A lot of the value emerging on today’s slate are bigs: the Sixers traded away Tony Bradley, the Heat traded Kelly Olynyk, the Kings traded Bjelica. This means lots of value at center….and most of the relevant guys are also forward eligible (thanks Superdraft!).
At a high level, this is a 5-game slate, and on the shorter slates the high raw scores that can be found via studs can often be valuable even without huge multipliers – so unlike yesterday, in which I didn’t play any of the four main studs, today there’s some value in considering guys like Westbrook and Randle. Fro a strategy perspective I’d think about possible blowouts – the Clippers and the Sixers are the teams most likely to blow their opponents out, and while the spreads are not exceptionally wide here, we’ve seen so many blowouts this year and players in these games are going to be highly owned so we need to consider that possibility. The way I would approach this tonight is that any lineup with Leonard or George needs to have a Spur coming back, and any lineup with at least two Sixers must have at least one Laker coming back.
Let’s go position by position for today:
Guard feels thinner to me than forward today. Russ has shown an enormous ceiling, so even with the feared 1x multiplier he feels viable to me. Beal less so as he doesn’t have the same kind of ceiling, being no real threat to get a triple-double, while Lillard at a 1x multiplier does not feel very enticing to me now that C.J. McCollum is back. McCollum himself looks like a great play after having played 38 minutes last game and with no Gary Trent – he’s my overall favorite guard play. I also really like Barrett in a strong matchup with a good multiplier, Haliburton, Poole, and then I’m going to be distributing exposure Fox, Simmons, Westy, Murray, Johnson, Oubre, and…that’s probably pretty close to it. Guard is thin.
Ah, here we get all of those delicious forward-eligible centers. Howard, Holmes, and Adebayo all feel like very strong plays to me with some of their backup/minutes competition out. Kuzma has shown strong upside without Davis and LeBron, Randle has the best possible matchup, and you can take shots on some high-variance targets like Harrell, Wiggins, Green, and Covington. Overall I’m more confident in the strongest forward plays than I am in the strongest guard plays, so while my player pool at forward isn’t necessarily all that much larger, I’m going to have higher ownership on my highest-owned forwards compared to guards. Leonard and George are strong plays but I wouldn’t play them together, while Simmons, Harris, Butler, and Barnes round out my player pool.
At some point we’ll get a slate in which center is a more critical position. There are only 3 center-only plays on my radar: Zubac, Wiseman, and Kanter. You could consider Whiteside if you think the Kings just destroy the Warriors, or Mitchell Robinson if he moves back to the starting lineup today – but overall my center pool is super small.
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