NBA Yahoo Cup Daily Fantasy Basketball Picks for Round 24
Welcome to the Yahoo Cup NBA DFS Picks for Round 24! The NBA slate has 10 games on it tonight in total, but the NBA Yahoo Cup features eight of them, leaving out two games that start at 7 p.m. ET. However, the contest still has games that will have some very chalky options. The Oklahoma City Thunder only have eight players available, the Memphis Grizzlies are sitting the vast majority of their starters, and the Houston Rockets face the Sacramento Kings for the second straight game. That matchup proved to be extremely fantasy friendly on Wednesday and has every chance to do so again.
This is a free-to-enter, multi-round, single-entry Yahoo fantasy basketball contest with 24 rounds where the top 6,950 entries overall and top 540 entries per round share $50,000, with $10,000 to first overall and $100 to first per round. Scoring will be cumulative across all rounds. Your five lowest daily fantasy basketball scores will be dropped, and you can enter at any point, but enter today to give yourself the best chance to compete for the title. Make your Yahoo NBA DFS picks today and begin the chase!
The focus will be on three players — one guard, one forward, and one center — for NBA DFS picks for the Round 24 NBA Yahoo Cup contest.
Yahoo Cup Fantasy Basketball & NBA DFS Picks | Round 24
Best NBA Fantasy Guard: Theo Maledon, Oklahoma City Thunder — $19
The Detroit Pistons facing the Oklahoma City Thunder is going to be one of the more popular games of the night, and Theo Maledon is still under $20 — too cheap to ignore. Over the past two games for the Thunder, Maledon has played 34 and 40 minutes (the 40-minute game was an overtime contest) and scored at least 33 Yahoo fantasy points. He’s taken 17 and 14 field goal attempts, and that shouldn’t stop tonight against a Pistons team ranked 24th in defensive rating. It’s a little tougher to get a true picture of the usage rate because the Thunder have not had so few players available to play very often. However, there is a 246-minute sample size where he has a 26.5% usage rate and 1.13 Yahoo points per minute. That’s not a huge sample for this point of the season, but it’s a glimpse of how much Maledon is responsible for. Eight-man rotations are always appealing to target for fantasy, and that continues to be the case tonight in the NBA Yahoo Cup, where cheap options abound.
Best NBA Fantasy Forward: Anthony Edwards, Minnesota Timberwolves — $28
The field will undoubtedly turn to Kelly Olynyk of the Detroit Pistons, who is just $11 and is tracking as the most popular player of the night. It’s more important to pair Olynyk with a strong forward option if eating that piece of chalk, and Edwards stands out. The Minnesota Timberwolves play the Denver Nuggets tonight in a clash of Western Conference teams chasing a playoff spot. Denver could lock up at least the sixth seed tonight with a win, leaving Minnesota as the seventh seed. The game has a 241-point total, which is the highest of the night, and Edwards shouldn’t be under $30. On the season Edwards is second on the team with a 26.6% usage rate and 1.05 Yahoo points per minute, and his play in isolation could lead him to a big game scoring-wise. Edwards has 3.4 points per game in isolation, but Denver is dead last in points per possession allowed on the year. The hope when playing Edwards is he scores over 25 points and this game goes back and forth all night, as the spread is only 3 points and carries so much importance for the playoffs.
In addition to Edwards being a great tournament play in Yahoo fantasy basketball formats, the Awesemo NBA projections have him slated for 23.3 points. His NBA player prop for points is a great bet at over/under 20.5, and OddsShopper has an expected win rate of 64% when betting the over.
Best NBA Fantasy Center: Brandon Clarke, Memphis Grizzlies — $13
The Memphis Grizzlies have clinched the Southwest Division and have decided to give most of their starters a break tonight, including Steven Adams, Jaren Jackson Jr., Desmond Bane, Ja Morant and Tyus Jones. That’s going to open up a ton of playing time for Brandon Clarke when the Grizzlies play the Phoenix Suns, and Clarke has been efficient in his bench minutes this year. The usage rate isn’t going to be super high at just 17.6%, but the 1.19 Yahoo points per minute would be massive at this salary. Phoenix isn’t exactly a shutdown defense around the paint either, as they are 19th in rebounds allowed and fifth in points allowed in the paint. Phoenix is also sixth worst in points per possession to the roll man in the pick-and-roll, which Clarke could exploit. Clarke is averaging 1.43 points per possession in his role, and that’s sixth among players who have played 35 games and have run the play at a frequency over 20%. Much like the forward pairing, utilizing Nikola Jokic from the Denver Nuggets as a double-center approach is extremely appealing with all the cheap options to play tonight.
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