DraftKings Contributors Garion Thorne and Matt Meiselman join The Sweat to give their favorite DraftKings plays at guard for tonight’s NBA slate.
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Video Transcript
Emerson Lotzia:
A guard with building block potential here—you consider the Capela-Trae Young stack?
Matt Meiselman:
Yeah, I actually do think that’s worth considering, but I don’t want to go all three Hawks, so I’ll just leave that one to the side. I do like it in theory, but I’ll pay up for Luka Doncic for the guard spot. I think he might be a little less popular than LeBron and Giannis and possibly Towns. I’m not really sure how people are going to react to that 60-point game but I do think more people are going to pay up at the forward and center spots because this is a slate that should have a lot of guard value plays and Luka gets a really good matchup against the Nets, who are not a great defensive team right now.
I think they really need Ben Simmons for that element, we talked about Kyrie Irving, I think their offense is fine. They don’t need Ben Simmons to be good enough at offense to win a championship, but for defense especially on a back-to-back, I do worry about them, and Luka obviously is a great fantasy player. You don’t really need to sell him too hard on any given slate, but I think the fact that the Nets are not a great defensive team and also that they just played last night, have to travel home from Orlando, it sets up well for Doncic, who has just been amazing almost every time out. So I think the combination of the good matchup and the low ownership makes him pretty appealing.
Emerson Lotzia:
Yeah, currently leading the NBA with a 37-percent usage rate, and it’s been even higher since that Porzingis trade. Garion, who are you looking at for guard?
Garion Thorne:
Yeah, Matt alluded to this situation earlier, but it is worth talking about. I think there’s probably like an 85 to 90 percent chance that Shai Gilgeous-Alexander does not play tonight. I think the Thunder pretty much showed their hand the last season-and-a-half when it comes to these injuries. I mean, we didn’t see SGA at all in the second half of last season, and yes, there was some plantar fasciitis, but I think there’s probably pretty good reason to think that it was not quite as bad as the team made it out to be.
You know, this is a team that literally announced two weeks ago that three of their rotation players were just going to be out for the rest of the season because they all had surgery on the same day. I think the Thunder know what they want to do and if there’s any reason at all to consider the future of the player, their franchise cornerstone, I think they probably play it pretty safe with SGA tonight. So we’re probably going to see a situation where the Thunder don’t have Giddey, they don’t have SGA, they obviously don’t have Lu Dort.
So Tre Mann, who’s a little above $5K, I think is going to be a really popular play and he’s probably going to be “the lead guard” for this team, but I think Theo Maledon is another name that is going to be popular as Matt was talking about because he’s less than $4K. But you know, this is someone who started the last two games for the Thunder, so I think his minutes load is pretty secure even depending on the script of this contest, but the matchup here is also really nice. The Spurs across their last 10 games are second in pace and have the fourth-worst defensive rating in basketball across that span, so there aren’t many talented offensive players left on the Thunder if Shai Gilgeous-Alexander isn’t playing. But I still think because of the matchup, some of these scrub Thunder guys are going to be able to put up some big numbers.
Matt’s Pick: Luka Doncic ($11,500)
Garion’s Pick: Tre Mann ($5,100)
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