NBA Rising Stars 2018 DFS Slate
In case you don’t know who I am, my name is Ben and I go by xBenJamminx on Twitter and all of the DFS sites.
I recently joined up with the DFS Army and will be providing content for the site and it’s members. I specialize in small slates and NBA is one of my main focuses for DFS.
My DFS Army Slack Channel is #benjammin-nba-mlb
Here is an overview for today’s slate
What I did was go back and take the data from the last 3 years (2015-17) of the Rising Stars game to see if there’s any trends we can identify. I’m not sure if I can create projections for this but what I can do is show you how past games have played out and see if the past can help us with the future.
I’ve noticed a few patterns that may help us and I’ll highlight them with pictures.
I made a spreadsheet for the games tonight which I’ll be referencing but if you want to access it you can find it by clicking the NBA logo here ..
NBA Rising Stars Stats and History
The first thing I noticed from the data was that in the past 3 years, whoever was starting for the teams got significantly more playing time and opportunity than the reserves.
First pic is both teams combined.
What we can see here is that if we know the starters, we know who is going to get the production, or at least opportunity for that production.
It looks like the USA more evenly distributes it’s playing time so there isn’t a huge amount to infer from there but still, starters have averaged more DKPts and FGA.
For the World, being a starter seems to be a little more significant. I can’t reason why, but 7 more minutes per game and almost double the amount of DKPts per game, there’s a large gap between starting and coming off the bench for the world team.
Now we have to look at the positions that have performed best.
This is the combination of both teams and we can see that while there’s a general consistency among the positions, two stand out at SG and C. I would normally write off something like that but over 3 years and two different teams, seems the sample size is large enough. Minutes wise there isn’t too much of a difference but those two lead in DKPts per game and SG stands out with 6 more FGA per game.
Based on the groups that ran together at practice: USA -> Dunn, Mitchell, Brown, Tatum, Kuzma and World -> Murray, Hield, Simmons, Saric, Embiid. World I’m 99% sure, not as confident on USA but think it’s right
— Seth Yates (@SethayatesDFS) February 16, 2018
It looks like we want Shooting Guards since they take 6 more shots per game on average. We also know we need a Center, those positions seem to dominate the games. Donovan Mitchell is probably a lock for tonight, and it looks like they’ll be running a small lineup.
Since it’s true across both teams, we want a Shooting Guard so Buddy Hield/Jaylen Brown should be in play as cheaper options. Joel Embiid will probably be popular but he’s injury prone and also in the real all star game so he’ll probably be limited on minutes.
I’ve highlighted the SG and C but obviously on DraftKings the multi eligibility changes it a little bit but it still holds. The way I see it, these are people I’ll be looking to be the ppl I pepper in and make sure I have them just because of the numbers we’ve seen so far. It’s important to note that Jamal Murray was the MVP last year so maybe he’ll try and get a repeat. Sometimes it’s not just about the players on the team, it’s about the effort. I think he’ll probably be decently owned but
I’ll post the salaries again because I’ve shown the minutes here but we don’t have anyone under 20 mpg so we can rule that out but we see the Ben Simmons and Brandon Ingram play the most regular season minutes and there’s a few who play over 30. I’ll be splitting hairs if I listed them all so we can say that besides Embiid, the top 10 guys on each side, starting or not should see 20ish minutes or so.
We can also see that Donovan Mitchell and Lauri Markkanen shoot the most 3s per game, while Joel Embiid and Lauri lead in rebounds. For me it looks like Lauri Markkanen should make for a pretty nice play tonight. Domantas Sabonis, Ben Simmons, John Collins and Dario Saric are rebounding options that don’t shoot. Kyle Kuzma over both 5 3s and 5 rebounds per game, similar to the #s of Taurean Prince whose the cheapest on this list. I looked at the low usage guys who don’t shoot much and games like this are more offense than defense so that puts some of the guards in play for me. It helps me consider Kris Dunn who might be starting and Dennis Smith Jr. who is one of my favorite young players who loves to put on a show.
*Note: Game is in LA so Kyle Kuzma and Brandon Ingram get narrative bumps*
When looking at trying to see the minutes of players, we can focus in a bit more. It looks like there’s a small correlation between minutes played in a regular season and the all star game. It’s not 100% but we can at least try and figure out who is NOT going to get over 20 minutes. The one thing that stands out to me is that if a player doesn’t play at least 20 MPG, they probably aren’t getting more than 20 in the game here. If a player averages over 30 MPG then there’s decent odds he’ll play over 20 in the game.
Here I’ll show the data from the past 3 years for the players who played in the Rising Stars game. First USA, then World both sorted by 3 point attempts.
The reason I sorted by this is because it seems to be the most correlated to DKPts than anything else besides TRB (Total Rebounds), so if we can figure out who is going to shoot the most 3s, and who will be there to grab the misses, we should have a decent grasp on the slate.
