Each morning, I spend time doing NBA DFS lineup study, leveraging the Stokastic Post-Contest Sims to learn from the prior night’s slate. This is the single most important part of my process and has led to a lot of success for me this NBA season.
This process consists of reviewing my own lineups, taking a look at the field’s exposures compared to 150-maxers and doing a deep dive on the lineups of 20 or so pros that I follow closely that have a strong, repeatable process.
In this series of articles, I will uncover daily learnings from my NBA DFS lineup study process.
Feel free to reach out on Twitter/X with any questions or topics you’d like to see covered here!
NBA DFS Lineup Study – Milly Maker Takeaways
Last night’s $2,500/entry, 1000 entry main event with $1,000,000 up top resulted in ChipotleAddict narrowly taking home the top prize over Mazwa.
Lesson No. 1: Paying up for two centers offered significant leverage off the “standard” build last night
With everyone flocking to Goga Bitadze (ORL C, $3,200) who was stepping into a starting role, many top pros chose to go to an entirely different construction to get different. Playing two high priced centers – e.g., Jarret Allen and Alperen Sengun – provided an entirely different construction than the field’s preference of Goga + Allen. And, last night, it sure paid off!
While Goga was certainly a strong play, there were still many paths to “failure” – his performance earned him the flame icon on DK, but it wasn’t what you’d want in hopes of winning a GPP. This is the danger of some of these low-priced center plays when there are true stud centers in great spots on the slate: monster performances from the studs can make even “good” performances from the cheapies irrelevant.
Lesson No. 2: Once again, top pros made better use of late swap than the field
With Georges Niang being announced as a surprise starter post-initial lock, pros aggressively swapped onto him. His final ownership number reached 31% in the Milly, in comparison to only 18% in the lower-stakes Micro-Max contest. This source of edge cannot be understated, and we continue to see it night in and night out. It makes the Stokastic Late Swap Tool even more valuable.
Lesson No. 3: Chipotle’s winning construction leaned heavily on finding under-owned studs
Alperen Sengun (9.5% ownership) and Kawhi Leonard (13.4% ownership) both came in relatively low owned for some of the top mid-range studs on the slate. ChipotleAddict paired these two together in his winning lineup and was well over the field on both players in his 30-lineup portfolio in the Milly.
Lesson No. 4: With such a small field size, game theory was critical to lineup construction
If we just examine the 12 pros that max entered the Milly last night, we see less ownership consolidation than we typically do for contests such as the Fadeaway. Given the small field size and huge first prize, it was natural that there would be differing game theory strategies. From that set of 12 pros, let’s examine some of the exposure ranges to the top plays on the slate:
- Cameron Payne: 37% min – 100% max
- Goga Bitadze: 17% – 77%
- Kris Dunn: 20% – 97%
- Jarrett Allen: 27% – 97%
- Kelly Oubre Jr.: 0% – 50%
- De’Aaron Fox: 13% – 50%
- LeBron James: 17% – 63%
- Georges Niang: 17% – 80%
- Luka Samanic: 3% – 57%
These ranges are far more spread out than we’re typically use to seeing in something like the Fadeaway amongst elite 150-max players. I speculate this stemmed from trying to have unique constructions and find leverage points to get different. However, what’s critical to to point out here, is that regardless of where someone fell on these spectrums, their complementary lineup pieces supported that narrative/lineup construction.
For example, those that were very low on Goga clearly jammed Sengun, Allen, Sabonis, etc. (alluding to my lesson #1 above). Those who were low on LeBron played more AD. Those who were low on Niang played more Samanic.
All of these pivots made sense from a game theory/correlation perspective.
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