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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.
Editor's Note: Our incredible team of writers received five total writing awards and 13 award nominations by the Fantasy Sports Writers Association, tops in the industry! Congrats to all the award winners and nominees including NBA Writer of the Year, Best NFL Series, MLB Series, PGA Writer and Player Notes writer of the year. Be sure to follow their analysis, rankings and advice all year long, and win big with RotoBaller! Read More!
Saturday, May 8
The Nets pull off a 21-point comeback against Denver to regain the no. 2 seed; Russell Westbrook, Bradley Beal, and Stephen Curry decide to break basketball
Before we go on to tackle individual performances, let's assess the race for the postseason first. And oh boy, was it packed with stories yesterday. The Nets fell 21 points down to the Nuggets only to come back and snatch the W with 33 pops by Kevin Durant and 31 by Kyrie Irving. The Wizards defeated Indiana and jumped above the Pacers for the better play-in seed. The Sixers, Grizzlies, Jazz, and Blazers didn't skip a beat... and Golden State demolished the Tanking Thunder which now have the fourth-worst record in the NBA after losing six games in a row.
Now, for the mojo. As devalued as they are, triple-doubles are still tough to get. Not for Russ, that is, as he reached his 181 trip-dub on Saturday tying legendary Oscar Robertson's tally. That's absolutely insane. Think about it. On similar ridiculous news, Bradley Beal went for 50 points in a game he left banged up but that shouldn't affect him ROS. Steph Curry, fighting with Beal for the scoring title, dropped 49 pops himself on OKC in 29 minutes of playing time including hitting 11 (!!!) treys. Lord have mercy.
- Russ was an absolute bulldozer on Saturday, finishing with 88 FP and 14 above no. 2 fantasy player Domantas Sabonis. Incredible game by the former, but what about Sabonis? He has played just a handful of game before being out for a while, and yesterday's 30-13-13-3 line was an absolute beauty to watch fill as the game progressed. Indiana will have a tough matchup with Washington in the play-in, but this man can't do any more to help Indy.
- Too bad for the Pacers that Russ and Beal combined for 83 points with their own Sabonis and Caris Levert going for "just" 65 total points. Fantastic top-3 finish for Caris, who got himself a stuffed dub-dub to the tune of a 35-14-8-2 on 30 FGA!
- Another game, another day in the office for Dwight Howard with Embiid's clock stopping at just 23 minutes. Dwight backed up JoJo playing 22 minutes himself, put up a ridiculous 19-14 dub-dub with a dime and a three-pointer. That last bit of info is obviously an outlier, but Dwight's been putting up über-efficient numbers for a while now and his 1.7 FP/min yesterday ranked fifth-best among players with at least 20 minutes of playing time.
- I have written about him in this weekend's last set of WW columns, and if you are still managing into a super-late, deep league, make sure you get some Kenyon Martin Jr. shares. 27-10-2-2 for the Rocket, who just doesn't know how to have a bad game these days.
- The Grizzles were able to defeat a lowly Raps squad, but it wasn't precisely because of Ja Morant's exploits... Quite a disappointing season by the point guard, who seems to have hit the sophomore wall. Memphis keeps relying on their big men Jonas Valanciunas (18-21-1-1-4) and Jaren Jackson Jr. (20-4-22-3-1) to get those W and fight for a place among the postseason teams this season.
- Blake Griffin can be very important in Brooklyn's rotation come playoffs time. Great game for BG on Saturday starting at the C spot, logging 27 minutes and hitting 20 pops with 4 treys on 10 FGA while adding a 2-3-2 rest-of-line in the Nets monster comeback effort. Not the safest of additions ROS, but hey, there's that, and Griffing sitting barely at a 50% rostership in all Yahoo leagues as of this writing.
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