Reviewing GPP winners on FanDuel recently has prompted me to give more thought to stacking in NBA DFS. Stacking is a strategy that varies so much by sport – in MLB, your batters can tee off against the same struggling pitcher while also driving each other in and in NFL, you can double your points by owning both ends of a QB-WR touchdown pass.

What about in NBA DFS? You gain a small benefit from an assist-layup combo, but that is nowhere near as beneficial as a QB-WR touchdown reception. So we can’t stack in NBA the same way we do in NFL and expect a whole lot. But can we stack in NBA similarly to the way we do in MLB – is there something to be said for loading up on a struggling opponent? The counter-argument here is that in MLB, players don’t steal production from each other, but in NBA, they might. In NBA DFS, there’s only one basketball, 48 minutes, and a finite amount of shots to go around.

Still, I’ve been monitoring GPP winners pretty closely over the past couple of weeks and there have been a lot of stacks near the top. Here is an extreme case from last Friday – this person stacked seven players from the Pistons-Bulls game, posted an absurd score, and took down the tournament thanks to some quadruple-overtime action:

 

Here’s another team from the same night. This person stacked Curry-Klay-Draymond and received 133.9 from the trio, or 4.98x their combined salaries.

 

This person had the exact same score as the GSW stack team and I think this one really demonstrates the argument against stacking. He stacked Bledsoe-Knight and while Bledsoe had a great night scoring the ball (29 points leading to 45.3 fantasy points), it came at the expense of Brandon Knight (10 points leading to 11.9 fantasy points).

 

I don’t think you can fully cover this topic in one standalone article, but for now, I’m going to look at how two popular stacks have performed to date. We’ll take a look at OKC (Durant-Westbrook) and Phoenix (Knight-Bledsoe).

Oklahoma City

We all know Westbrook is on auto-play any time Durant is out – last season, he averaged a little over nine more FanDuel points per game when Durant was sidelined.

When both players have been in the lineup this season, Westbrook is averaging 45.5 FanDuel points per game and Durant is averaging 43.5 FanDuel points per game. Their combined average salary has fallen somewhere in the range of $20,500. This means on an average night, Durant-Westbrook will combine to return 4.34x their salary. Now, at Fantasy Labs, we use the Plus/Minus system, which is a much more accurate way to compare salary and production, but this at least gives us a baseline.

If I’m stacking in a tournament though, I’m not necessarily too worried about average performance – I want to know if one of them is going to go off, can the other have a good game as well? First let’s look at how Durant did during Westbrook’s best games so far this season when both players have been in the lineup:

 

So this is really interesting – Durant crushed his implied point total in each of Westbrook’s three best games. In Durant’s three best games, Westbrook exceeded once, disappointed once, and fell right at his implied total once. Is Durant’s production more dependent on Westbrook than the other way around? I’d need to look at way more than three games to make that determination, but one thing is for sure – they are certainly capable of both exceeding value at the same time. If you played both guys against the Magic on 10/30, you likely won all the money.

Individually, Westbrook and Durant are generally both pretty popular DFS plays. What I like about the idea of stacking them is – 1) You can differentiate your lineup a bit since most will have one or the other, and 2) If both are playing well, you’ve already paid off about a third of your team’s total salary while only using two roster spots since both are so expensive.

Phoenix Suns

Next, let’s look at Brandon Knight and Eric Bledsoe. This will be an interesting one because both are obviously guards who can light it up. Here’s Knight’s best games:

 

A couple of interesting things here – 1) Knight’s upside in 2015-2016 has been higher than Bledsoe’s. Knight has had three games where he has exceeded Bledsoe’s high total of 55.6, and 2) When Knight is having a good game, Bledsoe seems pretty likely to have a bad game. If Bledsoe has a good game, Knight may still do okay.

Bledsoe’s game is a little more well-rounded than Knight’s – he averages 2.3 more points, 1.3 more assists, and 0.6 more steals per game – so he has more ways of accumulating fantasy points. Still, those aren’t huge gaps, so that’s probably not the reason here.

To tell you the truth, I’m kind of conflicted on this stack. Earlier in the season, you could have rostered Knight for $6,500 and Bledsoe for $7,100 and in their 10/31 game, their combined production would have given you 7.49x salary. If their prices do drop back to that level at some point, I kind of like stacking them although this is a much more volatile option. At their current price levels though, using them together is not a GPP option for me because there just doesn’t seem like a whole lot of room for profit.

Conclusion

These are just two popular teams you could stack and I think we can already start to see that whether or not a stack is viable depends on the players themselves. If there is interest, I’ll look at a few more specific teams in the future.

I definitely don’t think stacking in general will limit your GPP upside as much as I previously did before monitoring recent results and then looking into the topic a little more. Who knows, you may even luck out and wind up with seven players from a quadruple-overtime game.