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FanDuel NBA: Best Buys For Nov. 18

By Michael Yaffe

Nov 15, 2015; Sacramento, CA, USA; Sacramento Kings guard Rajon Rondo (9) and forward DeMarcus Cousins (15) watch a free throw during the fourth quarter against the Toronto Raptors at Sleep Train Arena. The Sacramento Kings defeated the Toronto Raptors 107-101. Mandatory Credit: Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports
Nov 15, 2015; Sacramento, CA, USA; Sacramento Kings guard Rajon Rondo (9) and forward DeMarcus Cousins (15) watch a free throw during the fourth quarter against the Toronto Raptors at Sleep Train Arena. The Sacramento Kings defeated the Toronto Raptors 107-101. Mandatory Credit: Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports /
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$11,500? That’s not too much for one player on FanDuel… Mandatory Credit: Nelson Chenault-USA TODAY Sports /

Elite Options ($10,001+)

Russell Westbrook ($11,500) is doing that thing where he plays out of his mind again, but just like last season his cost has become unmanageably high to the point where it would be fiscally irresponsible to roster him with eight other mouths to feed.

Just as his monster performances don’t always equate to Thunder victories in real life, the same could be said of his ability to influence your FanDuel NBA lineup by himself. Even though his stat line equated to 63.8 FanDuel points on Monday night, you would have had to make a number of correct choices on a shoestring budget to complement his cost.

In the case of my FanDuel GPP on Monday night, nine of the top 10 winning lineups had a combination of Westbrook and the Suns’ Brandon Knight, who at $6,900 actually scored higher (70.5), and the other had Knight but not Westbrook.

It sounds easy enough (I did recommend using Knight in Monday’s post) but the reality is that only 26.5 percent in the tournament had Knight in their lineup, and not all 26.5 percent had Westbrook and Knight together. By contrast, 42.6 percent of the participants had Westbrook in their lineup, so there clearly were lineups in play that had Westbrook without Knight.

So, like an idiot I scrolled through all the top lineups to see how far down I had to go to find a Westbrook lineup that didn’t have Knight in it. I did see plenty of Knight without Westbrook combos along the way (mainly Knight plus Isaiah Thomas and Knight plus Mike Conley), and finally entry No. 114 (Westbrook plus Conley) put me out of my misery.

Conley was only 13.3 percent owned, and the best lineup with Westbrook and Conley out of 34,479 entries was outside of the top 100, so hopefully you see where I’m going with this because we only examined point guard combinations for this exercise.

It’s not that you can’t win a tournament game with Russell Westbrook in your lineup because obviously some people did, but as I have said before you have almost zero margin for error if you pick the wrong supporting cast.

More than two-fifths of the entries had Westbrook in their lineup but only the top 17.9 percent of all entries were prize-eligible, so that excludes a large portion of them off the bat. And as I learned in the most primitive fashion, many of the top contestants didn’t have Westbrook in their lineup at all (including the second-place finisher).

Furthermore, some unlikely lower-end players had to return value (e.g., T.J. Warren, Taj Gibson – good luck getting that to happen again simultaneously) for the Westbrook owners to get paid on Monday night, and even then you would have had to include Knight in their other PG slot or forego the big money altogether.

So I’m fading Westbrook tonight. If you want to go big with him I can’t say don’t do it, since a select few were successful with that gambit. But given the amount of risk involved, you might be better off buying lottery scratch-off tickets. Or you could play Westbrook, Warren and Gibson again (they are all in action Wednesday night as well) and see how that goes.

In other news, the Sacramento Kings’ DeMarcus Cousins ($10,700) has seen his price go up as well, albeit to a slightly more palatable level. The way Boogie and Rajon Rondo have been playing lately, it’s hard to advise against a Kings mini-stack at this point.

Having said that, in two games versus Atlanta last season, Cousins averaged only 16.0 PPG on 35.7 percent shooting from the field and he would be facing the same frontcourt. In this category, something closer to a sure thing is preferable, if not mandatory.

Next: Solid Buys