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Tonight we have a quandary. There are six games from which to choose players, so there needs to be a strategy that accounts for so many choices.
So today, I will make like the fantasy player “youdacao” — a player I see on the leaderboards almost every single night.
I don’t know how much money “youdacao” puts into play on DraftStreet each night, but it has got to be substantial. In the $22 Tuesday-Wednesday league that I wrote about yesterday, “youdacao” finished 2nd, 8th, 10th, 11th (with the same team entered four times),18th (with the same team entered twice) and 24th. The 2nd place finish was worth $800, 8th place paid $160, 10th was $120, 11th was $100 and 18th was worth $60, and 24th had a $40 prize.
Add it all up, and this fellow took home $1,640 by entering multiple teams. “youdacao” entered the $22 field with 20 teams, for a cost of $440. He netted a nifty profit of $1,200.
So we are going to steal a page from his book and go hard in the $2 entry fee league with 6 teams in play.
That’ll allow us to mix things up rather than have all our eggs in one basket, as we did in the $22 contest as Tim Duncan (only 5 FGA in 30 minutes) and James Harden (6-for-19, five turnovers) sunk our chances, leaving us 99th in the 500-player field. (You will note that the winner, Marcin25, got away with having two relatively unproductive players in his lineup, Tony Parker and Jose Calderon. He overcame it by having three studs, LaMarcus Aldridge, Dwight Howard and Paul George, and making two shrewd low-money selections on Shaun Livingston and Amir Johnson).
Amir Johnson was one of the players I touted at the beginning of this week, and I am going to count on him in the Thursday-Friday and Friday-Saturday contests as I go with my multiple entry strategy. With the Nets playing so small, he is a player involved in a mismatch with Paul Pierce. And if Dwane Casey knows what is good for him, he will stick with Amir Johnson and Jonas Valanciunas as long as possible.
| DraftStreet | Price |
| Stars | Over $19,000 |
| Kevin Durant | $21,448 |
| LaMarcus Aldridge | $20,265 |
| Stephen Curry | $20,049 |
| James Harden | $19,584 |
| Chris Paul | $19,454 |
| Value Plays | Under $9,100 |
| Andre Iguodala | $9,040 |
| Amir Johnson | $8,901 |
| Luis Scola | $7,333 |
| Kyle Korver | $7,243 |
| Kendrick Perkins | $5,193 |
Once again, I am going hard on Scola because of his price tag. With Roy Hibbert slumping so badly, it would not surprise me if Frank Vogel goes with Scola at center for the bulk of the minutes. Scola plays center for the Argentine national team, and his low post game is much better than the underwhelming high post game he has displayed this season.
I also like Iguodala, because a player of his caliber cannot possibly stay as unproductive as he has been forever.
The danger in going with so many “value plays” is that you need all of them to hit, plus you need your stars to do their thing without any slippage.
I paid big time for having so much money tied up in James Harden last night, so tonight I will go the safer route and take Kevin Durant on several of my teams despite him having the highest price of any player — $21,448.
I’ll also go with the lightning strikes thrice theory and play LaMarcus Aldridge, who has gone for 40-plus points in both games of the Rockets-Blazers series.
So my key guys are Amir, Scola, Iguodala and some studs. I have also found reason to use Derek Fisher of the Thunder, given how poorly Reggie Jackson has been playing off the bench. Fisher’s price tag is a mere $4,038 (and you know as well as I do that he has one good game left in his arsenal.).
The studs and duds theory is hereby put to the test, and I’ll be back tomorrow to let you know how it went.
For those wanting to join in on the action, here are the rules: You pick three guards, three forwards, one center and one utility player using a salary cap of $100,000, and then you root for them to fill up the box score. You can sign up here, or by clicking the banner at the top of this post.