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Welcome to the RotoBaller NBA Recap. In this feature, we will highlight a few key fantasy basketball takeaways from the games played during last night's slate. These viewpoints can be both positive and negative and will hopefully help to provide insight into different roster moves you should consider making based on trends and statistical nuggets from around the Association.
Fantasy basketball has a lot of moving pieces with all the different scoring settings that are possible to play under, so I will always do my best to spotlight where players gain or lose value in certain game types. For the sake of simplicity and consistency, every time I mention Fantasy Points in these articles I will be using DraftKings' scoring system, which goes as follows: 1*PTS, 0.5*3PM, 1.25*RBD, 1.5*AST, 2*STL, 2*BLK, -0.5*TO. On top of that, bonus points are awarded for Double-Doubles (+1.5) and Triple-Doubles (+3), only one per player at a time.
Without further ado, let's get right into the latest slate of games from the 2021 season and try to figure out how to take advantage of what we saw transpire.
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Saturday, May 1
Nobody wants to face each other in the Western Conference; Indiana inflicts the worst home defeat to OKC in the history of the game
The closer we get to the end of the regular season, the weirder it gets. Memphis dropped one to Orlando (!?) yesterday by one point and the Griz are now just 0.5 games above Golden State (which won yesterday) for the no. 8 seed. The Pelicans won their game against Minny while refusing to call it quits on the season, and are now only three games behind San Antonio for the last play-in spot. Utah defeated Toronto and regained the no. position, but a little bit down the standings it was Dallas who overtook the Lakers for the no. 5 seed as Denver moved onto the no. 3 seed.
That was a mess of a paragraph, but to make things clearer where they matter the most: Denver would now face the Lakers... in a battle of the 3rd and 6th seeds, while the Clippers would go against the Mavs. That will move again, and again, and again during the next few days, so don't get too much into it. Who really got into it yesterday was Indiana, which mollywhopped OKC to the tune of a resounding 152-95 beating that went on to become the largest home loss in history, now in possession of the Tanking Thunder. God bless Sam Presti.
- Luka Doncic didn't have Kristaps Porzingis around to help him yesterday, so he took on the task of carrying the Mavs to the W with a massive 31-12-20 trip-dub becoming part of the select 30-point/20-dime group of triple-doublers: Magic, Westbrook, Oscar Robertson, and Luka; all of them with one such performance each.
- Speaking of triple-doubles: Russ missed on it by one assist yesterday, Lonzo Ball by two... but Domantas Sabonis returned for the Pacers in a "short" run of 30 minutes on the court he put up a great 26-19-14 line enough to rank second on Saturday's DK leaderboard with 76 FP only behind Luka's 81.
- Another returning player, LaMelo Ball, played for the first time in a few weeks yesterday for the Hornets and although he was limited to 28 minutes he still racked up numbers across the board with a stuffed 11-7-8-1-2 line and a high 5 TO on the day. A few more games like this one, and the ROY is definitely going Ball's way.
- Not that Anthony Edwards is giving up on snatching the ROY award, though. Another great scoring outing for the Wolves, who put up 29 pops to go with 9 boards, 6 assists, and a swat on the highest usage rate of all Wolves players including KAT.
- Why change the beat? Keeping it on the rookie side of things, what about Saddiq Bey!? Playing 40 (!) minutes against Charlotte yesterday, Bey had himself a night with a freakish 22-7-5-2-2 stuffed line in a game in which he hit 5 treys and went on to reach 49 FP even shooting a putrid 33% on 21 FGA. Detroit is starting its rebuilding effort, but there are very tasty building blocks around Motown already.
- Steal of the day: Doug McDermott. Sabonis came back and McDermott took onto the starting SF role, played a healthy 27 minutes, and finished with a great 31-1-1-1 line adding 6 treys to his stat line on a fantastic 79% shooting performance on 14 FGA. McDermott is rostered in just 11% of Yahoo leagues and should keep playing heavy minutes and getting ample opportunities ROS, with most of his upside coming from the scoring department as he's scored 13+ points in all last five games.
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