We’re always trying our best to predict ownership levels in GPPs…with ranging levels of success. In this series, I’m going to take a look at a GPP slate that I found interesting within the past few days and try to figure out what led to the ownership levels being what they are using our models. The numbers are all pulled from FanDuel’s $5 Layup.

There are a few columns that require explaining in the screenshots below:

TOTAL:  I attempt to assign each player a total GPP score. This weighs ownership, price, and fantasy points scored. I weigh the most expensive salaries a little heavier in the calculations because a $10k player going 6x value is much more valuable than a $4.5k player doing so, in my opinion.

Points: Fantasy points scored

Value: Fantasy points/salary

Pos Rank: The player’s rank within their position on that day using Phan’s Model

The rest of the fields are pulled directly from Player Models

If you find the images hard to read, click on them to open a larger version in a new window.

Let’s get started. Today, I’m going to look at the $5 GPP on FanDuel on 1/5 (four games).

Point Guard

The point guard position in this GPP pretty well underscores the chaos of the past two nights in NBA DFS. Deron Williams, Derrick Rose, Michael Carter-Williams, Steph Curry, Jordan Clarkson, Daren Collison, and JJ Barea were all in some way affected by injury news leading up to tipoff last night – in other words, almost everyone. That makes this kind of an interesting slate to look at from a GPP perspective.

Backup point guards who are starting due to injury are often the best value plays and those are exactly the types of players most of us flocked to last night. The players who were questionable, but ended up playing – Williams, Rose, and Curry – all had depressed levels of ownership. Although I don’t believe Curry’s status was ever explicitly in question, a lot of DFS players were unsure whether he would be a last minute scratch due to his ongoing leg issues and the fact that Golden State had the Lakers on a back-to-back. Without those concerns, you’d have to think Steph’s ownership would have been MUCH higher than 21.9%.

Graham wrote an article yesterday about ownership levels on short slates in NFL DFS and you can read the full article here, but one of his points was that you shouldn’t actively avoid the most obvious play at a position just because. To his point, Darren Collison (IMO, the most obvious play) was rostered in nine of the top 10 teams in this GPP and Michael Carter-Williams was on all 10.

 

Shooting Guard

The shooting guard position turned out to be loaded last night. There were three players who stood to benefit from injury situations – Marco Belinelli (Casspi), Lou Williams (Kobe/Russell), and OJ Mayo (Bayless).

Despite Marco’s low price tag, high Vegas score, and increased opportunity, he was only the fourth highest-owned option at SG. On our News site yesterday, we declared Casspi a game-time decision at 2:19 p.m. ET and Rondo doubtful at 2:59 p.m. ET. And yet, Darren Collison’s ownership took off while Belinelli’s remained reasonable despite Casspi’s status being murky for most of the day. Collison does have more of a track record of being DFS-useful, but the point is, you can certainly find examples of players who are filling in for an injured player with reasonable ownership numbers, even in GPPs.

Really, the position as a whole played great last night, so it was hard to go wrong. The cheaper and lesser owned options (Afflalo and Belinelli) were the best plays, in retrospect.

 

Small Forward

I thought this looked like a pretty ugly group leading up to lock last night, but I was still surprised to see Mirotic lead the way in ownership, even though he had surpassed his implied point total in three of five games leading up to last night. His matchup wasn’t amazing, but maybe given the lack of elite plays, people went with the guy who has been known to get hot as the upside play.

Chandler Parsons had been a somewhat trendy play for the past week or so due to a depressed price point and playing time on the rise. After missing value in three straight games, he was only the fourth highest-owned player at the position, despite being matched up with the Kings.

Rudy Gay was the fifth-most owned player despite theoretically having an increased opportunity due to Rondo and Casspi being out. He is another player who hadn’t been playing great lately – if he had come into last night hot, I would suspect he would have led the position in ownership.

None of the value plays were able to match the raw production from the more expensive players, which meant that the teams who finished highest paid up at the position.

 

Power Forward

I’ll have to admit I got power forward wrong last night with most of my GPP teams. I liked both Taj Gibons and Pau Gasol last night and rostered them separately across several rosters. Many of the top teams in this GPP went one step further and actually rostered both players together.

On average, the Bucks grab 47.8 rebounds per game, second worst in the NBA. Last night, Gasol and Gibson combined for 25 rebounds against Milwaukee. The Bucks also rank in the top five in the league in terms of blocks against. Last night, Gibson/Gasol combined for 9-of-10 blocks by Chicago.

Pau and Taj both depend on rebounding for fantasy production and that seems like it would make them a bad pair to stack when they are both starting because they are taking rebounding opportunities away from one another. But last night, their shared strength was the Bucks’ weakness. Because the Bucks are so poor in terms of rebounding and having their shots blocked, the increased opportunity offset the risk of using the two together.

 

Center

This was another situation where there was one clear top option at the position. DeMarcus Cousin’s median projection was nearly 18 points higher than any other center prior to tipoff last night. When it was all said and done, he scored 24.4 more points than the next closest finisher, Al Horford. He was owned by almost half of the field and was the most expensive option, but you still really had to have him on your team if you wanted to win.

This sort of goes back to the idea of tending to be more contrarian when the options at a position are more evenly matched – in this case, unless Cousins got in early foul trouble (seemed unlikely against Pachulia) or injured, it was going to be really hard for any other option to out-produce him. Sure, he was owned by 49.4% of the teams in this GPP, but that also means the other half of the teams had a lot of ground to make up, right off the bat.

 

Closing Observations

Here were the most highly owned players at each position:
PG Collison
SG Butler
SF Mirotic
PF D Green
C Cousins

With that in mind, take a look at the person who finished eighth in this GPP:

He had the chalkiest option at each position except for Draymond Green and he only had two players under 20% owned. Not that contrarian.

The most interesting thing to me about this slate was the Pau-Taj mini-stack. The two seemed like a suboptimal duo to pair together, but the matchup played to their strengths, leaving plenty of boards and blocks to go around. They were 17.8% and 32.8% owned respectively, but the number of lineups who used them both together was somewhere well below those numbers.