Last night, the Orlando Magic booked themselves a ticket to the playoffs with a 120-95 victory over the Atlanta Hawks in the first SoFi Play-In Tournament game, and the Golden State Warriors followed suit a few hours later with a 121-116 triumph over the Memphis Grizzlies.
Tonight, four teams will fight for their playoff survival. The ninth-seeded Chicago Bulls will host the 10th-seeded Miami Heat at 7:30 p.m. ET and the Sacramento Kings will host the Dallas Mavericks at 10 p.m. The winners of each game will face the Hawks and Grizzlies, respectively, and the losers will go home.
DraftKings is offering a SoFi Play-In Tournament special DFS contest with a big purse. Here are three must-start players from these four teams.
Set your DraftKings fantasy basketball lineups here: NBA $400K Play-In Special [$100K to 1st]
PF Anthony Davis, Dallas Mavericks at Sacramento Kings, $10,300
Don’t call me Nico Harrison, but I’m higher on the Mavericks than most. While, officially, Sacramento is a 4.5-point favorite for tonight’s contest, I’d venture that it’s more of a toss-up. In the playoffs, top-level talent and experience tends to win out, and Anthony Marshon Davis Jr. has both. This Dallas team also has the belief that it can make a deep run, even if it no longer has the man who brought it to the NBA Finals last season in Luka Dončić. Since Davis has returned from the adductor strain that he suffered in his team debut, he’s put up a few monster performances, including a 34-point, 15-board, five-block (68.25-FPT) outing against Atlanta on April 2 in which he also hit a game winner and a 23-point, 13-rebound, 10-assist, seven-block (72.25-FPT) masterpiece in his final game of the season.
In some ways, Sacramento does have the personnel to keep Davis in check: thanks to the immense rebounding prowess of their two-headed Lithuanian interior machine, Domantas Sabonis ($10,500) and Jonas Valančiūnas ($4,100), the Kings allowed the second-fewest boards in the league since Valančiūnas’ debut on February 6, and they also didn’t allow many points in the paint, a category in which Davis ranks fifth. But individually, Sabonis isn’t a great defender — while he held opponents to 3.3 percentage points worse than usual within six feet of the basket, that’s a below-average mark among starting centers — and Davis has had experience torching him. Davis was the player Sabonis guarded most frequently this season — a total of more than 40 minutes — and in that span, The Brow scored 53 points, dished out 15 assists, and drew 10 shooting fouls.
SG/SF Zach LaVine, Sacramento Kings vs. Dallas Mavericks, $8,700
Of any Sacramento player, I like LaVine the most; given his elite and consistent three-point shooting, he’ll have a significant advantage against a Mavericks team that likes to operate inside with its double-big lineup. LaVine went on quite the hot streak to end the season, scoring 25 or more points in five of his final six games of the season before settling for an efficient 16-point (20.0-FPT) outing in 27 minutes in the season finale against the Phoenix Suns. Especially with Malik Monk ($6,500) out with a calf strain, the Kings don’t really have a reliable three-point shooting option besides LaVine, whose 44.6% mark from deep was the best among players who played at least 65 games and attempted at least three triples per game.
Having LaVine fire away from deep — where Dallas has allowed average efficiency since Davis’ return — is Sacramento’s best chance for victory. Otherwise, its other top scoring options — Sabonis and DeMar DeRozan ($9,000) — have matchup disadvantages. In 30 minutes this season where Davis was marking Sabonis, he held him to 31 points on 13-for-33 (39.4%) shooting — the second-lowest field goal percentage among any player to guard Sabonis for more than 10 minutes — and Sabonis drew only three shooting fouls. The Mavericks have also allowed the second-fewest midrange makes on the fifth-lowest percentage since Davis’ return, which should somewhat stifle DeRozan as well.
SF/PF Andrew Wiggins, Miami Heat at Chicago Bulls, $7,000
Wiggins earns his place on this must-start list because I’m not sure how Chicago is going to guard him. The Heat have other weapons to contend with — namely, Bam Adebayo ($9,800) in the middle and Tyler Herro ($9,200) in the back-court — so the Bulls could conceivably target Herro with Josh Giddey ($9,200) and Nikola Vučević ($8,500) on Adebayo. Of Chicago’s starting five, only Giddey and Vučević graded out as net-positive defenders by Basketball Reference’s defensive box plus-minus statistic. That leaves Coby White ($8,200), Matas Buzelis ($5,500), or Kevin Huerter ($4,600) on Wiggins, and none of them are great options, although Buzelis is probably the best of the three. The Bulls’ lightning-fast pace also means they give up count statistics in bunches, individual matchups aside.
While Wiggins hasn’t been in the lineup for Miami much, thanks to a hamstring injury, he’s been okay when he’s done so and put up a few big performances. His best game in a Heat uniform came on March 23 in a matchup against the Charlotte Hornets, when he dropped 42 points (making six of his eight three-point attempts), snagged three rebounds, dished out five assists, notched one steal, and rejected two shots (62.25 FPTS). Otherwise, he’s only dropped more than 30 points one other time, but he has scored 10 or more in all but one of his games with Miami, and he’s also recorded at least one block or steal in all but one, making him a decent-floor, high-ceiling asset.
