Fantasy Basketball Night In Review: Thursday, October 21

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.

Thursday, October 21

Stephen Curry puts on a 45-point show, helps Golden State beat the LA Clippers, and reaches 66 points through two games in the baby season

I know. It's too early to name an MVP. But Curry couldn't have started the year with a better couple of games. After slashing the Lake Show last Thursday and dethroning old-foe LeBron James, all Curry did yesterday in his second game of the week against an LA squad--this time the Clippers--was dropping 45 pops on 25 shots hitting 64% of them from the floor and 8 (!) treys while at it. Sublime night for Steph, who cooked himself a 45-10-1-1-1 dub-dubbing line overall.

George finished second in yesterday's fantasy leaderboard, though his 25-11-6-1 effort wasn't enough to lift the Clips past the Warriors. More impressive, though, was the battle between the forever-linked Trae and Luka. The two of them finished with virtually the same FP (44.5 and 44.3) and put up lines of 19-2-14-1 and 18-11-7-1 respectively on below-38% shooting nights. If that was "bad", imagine when they things right.

• The Heat played their first game of the season in what seemed to be a tough matchup against the Bucks... until the ball got rolling. Miami put Milly through a blender and demolished the reigning champs with an excellent performance by Tyler Herro (27-6-5 with 3 treys in just 24 minutes off the pine) and a meh outing (given his talents) by Giannis (15-10-2-3) who was limited to just 23 minutes of playing time as things weren't going precisely well for the Bucks.
• Another limited player yesterday, yet a magnificent play nonetheless: Clint Capela. Captain Clint put up a 12-13 dub-dub with 2 blocks to spare on just 21 minutes after playing only one preseason game and 12 minutes back then. Capela is ramping up his playing time, and that means plenty of goodies will be coming Clint's way soon. Serious top-5 center in the L.

• When it comes to valuable/high-ROI plays yesterday and ROS, it was all about Herro... and Jalen Brunson! Jalen, playing backup to Luka in Dallas, was fantastic in his 26 minutes of second-unit play. Brunson, a weekly writeup in my waiver wire posts last season, dropped 17 pops going 7-of-13 from the floor and hitting 3 triples on the night while adding 3 boards, 3 dimes, and committing no turnovers at all.
• It's hard to buy too much into Eric Bledsoe's upside as he's not been a top-tier player in the past few seasons (three seasons in a row outside of the top-40 overall, and outside of the top-20 among guards), but his "re-debut" with the Clippers was good for an FP bounty thanks to a 22--3-2-3-1 stuffed line and a massive 62.5% shooting stroke from the field. Here's hoping he can keep it up, which he should do with Kawhi Leonard out for the year.

• Only three games on the slate, but we had a few injury scares from Tim Hardaway, Kyle Lowry, Dewayne Dedmon, Draymond Green, and Andre Iguodala. All of them had to leave their games at some point, but all of them ended returning to their benches too before the final buzzer. Iggy played 24 minutes (4-6-3-1-1), Dedmon 15 (13-9), Dray 34 (10-6-7-1), Lowry 25 (5-1-6-1-1), and Hardaway 28 (14-2-0-1).
• Disastrous day for new Hawk Delon Wright off the pine thanks to a measly 0-4-3 contribution on a putrid 11.3% usage rate. Also, signed this offseason by the Warriors, Nemanja Bjelica came back to earth after his great G1 and could only put up a 6-6 in 17 minutes yesterday. Lowry was the least-valuable starter of the slate with an unbelievable 1-of-8 shooting performance in 25 minutes of play.

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