NBA Fantasy Basketball: Kyrie Irving Shines, Celtics Struggle Thursday #NBA #fantasybasketball

There were games on Thursday. Yeah, some of them were real basketball games. We're gonna break down all five of them, give you an update on news, including a point guard in Charlotte who's actually maybe coming back. His name is Amelo Ball. I thought you worked that out. Michael Bolton. Thanks, Josh. It's Michael Bolton here, and it's time for another episode of the Locked On Fantasy Basketball Podcast. Let's get to it. Let's get to it. Indeed. You are Locked On Fantasy Basketball, your daily fantasy basketball podcast, part of the Locked On Podcast Network. Hello, and welcome to the Locked On Fantasy Basketball Podcast brought to you by Basketball Monster. My name is Josh Lloyd, and I taught Fergie how to sing the National Anthem. I'm also the lead fantasy analyst at BasketballMonster.com, and you can find me on Twitter as always at RedRockBball, on TikTok at RedRockBball, and on Instagram at LockedOnFantasyBasketball. Today's episode is brought to you by Jace Medical. Empower yourself when you purchase a Jace case, providing you with a personal supplier of five antibiotics to treat 50-plus infections. Get yours today at JaceMedical.com and use the code LOCKEDON to get $20 off your first order. That is, just off your order, not even your first order. That is J-A-C-E Medical.com. Thank you also for making Locked On Fantasy Basketball your first listen every day. We are free. We are available on all platforms. I'm going to keep playing this because I want to get a big crowd in. I want to get... What number do I want for the trade deadline show? 20,000 people? Yeah, that'd be great. If we can get 20,000 people in there, I would love it. The Friday... No, my Friday. Your Thursday. Thursday, February 8th, 1.30 p.m. Eastern. That is Friday morning for us here in Australia. Live trade deadline show. The final 90 minutes before the deadline hits. All the moves, all the repercussions off the top of the dome. Live show. Let's get 20,000 people in there. You will find that on the channel. Go ahead and give it a pre-thumbs up. Give it a pre-double bang. You are a double banger here, of course, so make sure you are hitting thumbs up and subscribing and ringing the bell and listening on the audio and going ahead and watching on the video side of things. Let's talk Thursday's action. Five games on, including a game over in France at Paris. And that's... Was that one of the better games of the day? Might have been. And that's not a great thing. I know people just, like, get up in arms completely about this. Oh, man. Adam Silva ruined the NBA. All these blowouts. Like, I don't know. I don't know where... I don't know how I feel about it. That's not true. The blowouts are bad, right? It's not good. But it just... It does happen in sport all the time. Not every game can be hyper-competitive. And I think I take that on board with a bit of a, like, yeah, look, it's annoying. It's going to happen. Be a great idea if you get with a back-to-back. That might help. Although, one of the teams that got smacked was on the first game of a back-to-back. And the team that did the smacking was on the second game. So maybe that argument doesn't hold water as much. Although it does when you look at the data over years and years and years and years. But it's unfortunate that it just happened multiple times on the one day. I just don't know what you can do about it. Like, what happens? Like, sometimes that'll happen. Teams will be bad. Teams will be good. Teams will be worse than they should be. There'll be outlier smacking. I don't know one sport in the world where there's not, like, big blowout-type performances. Yeah, it's annoying to have them stacked up on top of each other. But maybe I just don't get as upset about it as I could. And I'm sure many people will be upset about what happened in that Celtics game in particular. Also a good reason why you can bet unders. Let's talk about some news across the NBA. I referenced it early, cryptically. LaMelo Ball's been upgraded to questionable. I thought he might be back this weekend. He's maybe back a day or a game earlier. I don't even know if he's back though. He's listed questionable. That's obviously fantastic news if he is actually ready to go. But even if he doesn't play in this game on Friday, he's going to be back on Sunday, you would guess. So we're right on schedule for that, which is... Well, actually, no, we're not on schedule because these absolute anuses wouldn't tell us where we're at in terms of what the... Yeah, no updates. No nothing. That's how it is. And that'll probably happen with Mark Williams and then Gordon Haywood next. For the Grizzlies, we heard the news on Marcus Smart already talked about on two shows already today. The Mailbag Show and then the Lookahead Show. So I'm not going to focus too much on it here. But yes, you can drop Marcus Smart. In fact, Jack Armstrong. So he's out. Jaron Jackson is off the injury report. So that's good news. Santi Aldama is going to be out as well. So we'll get a little bit of an idea of what happens here with Tillman. How many minutes does Tillman play when there's no other center? How much does Jaron play at center? Still, we'd love to get Santi in there to see what happens. I think Tillman's an okay at this point. Losing Smart, actually, I know they play the opposite end of the positional spectrum. It helps. And the reason why it helps Tillman get minutes is that if you lose Marcus Smart, your point guard, your shooting guard, Desmond Bain, pushes down. The guy playing the three, Luke Kennard, pushes down. Vince Williams is playing a lot of the four. He pushes down to the three. Meaning that those big men who might have stretched out a little bit more and you could have seen more Jaron and Santi playing the four and the five, you're going to need more of Jaron at the four because you're going to need to go bigger at times and playing Santi at the three because there's just not as many options there. So without that guard depth, you have to sort of push everyone down a little bit. And it doesn't seem like that would be the case, but it is, I think. So that does help. Amazingly, it does help Tillman. And then there's Vince Williams, who's a workable ad as well. Then you go down to Kennard and then Williams, Zaire Williams, that is, and Santi Aldama as maybe other options. One thing to watch out for. There are nine teams playing a Friday-Saturday back-to-back and the Pelicans have already signaled their intentions. The problem here is we don't know what they're going to do. They've listed CJ McCullum, Brandon Ingram, Zion Williamson, and Trey Murphy as questionable for Friday's game. Now, I can guarantee you that Zion Williamson and Trey Murphy are going to sit one of these two games. I don't know which one. And I would guess, given the load that the Pelicans have had recently, they're flying at the moment as well, that you will probably see a game that Ingram is out and McCullum is out, and they just distribute across this back-to-back. Unfortunately, we just don't know. I don't think they'll sit all four of them together. I don't think they'll do that. And even if McCullum and Ingram play both, you're going to have one game with Zion out, one game with Murphy out. So just be aware of that. And that means that the value of the Dust Buster, Dyson Daniels, steps up. Deeper Leagues, Jordan Hawkins, Jose Alvarado, even Jonas Valanciunas, because a game without Zion means Valanciunas is probably going to have to do more. So just be aware that there are going to be some absences across these next two days for the Pelicans. We just don't know exactly how it's going to work out. Jimmy Butler is going to be out on Friday. They've got a back-to-back Sunday, Monday. He's going to sit one of those games, but it looks like he'll return there. That's good news there. We've got Kyle Lowry still dealing with his issue. So he's out, but Caleb Martin's on the return. So one other player to add into that rotation to see how it impacts Jovich and Highsmith and Jaquez and those sort of players. And then Darius Garland's about at that four-week mark now, and they said he's a couple more games away. So maybe towards the end of next week, with his jaw issue, that Garland would be hopefully available to return in that situation. Let's look at some waiver wire trends over the last 24 hours. Who's been added? Who has been dropped? That would be a good thing to do here. Number one most added player is Dennis Smith Jr., who once again played more minutes than Spencer Dinwiddie. He didn't perform hugely, and we'll talk about that soon, and they don't play now Friday, Saturday, Sunday. But there is a game on Monday, and he's looking like he might become a 12-team at Dennis Smith. I wouldn't say that you have to go and scoop him now to hold on to three days of zeros for maybe who's a fringe player. I think that's a fair way of looking at Smitty, but he's definitely into that 12-team mix, and I would add in 14s probably at this point. Derek Jones added for today's game, and with Luker out, no problem with that. Leaky Beasley, this is the good portion of the Bucs schedule. They've got the Thursday, Saturday, Sunday combo. So even though it was a blowout, you get the three games, makes total sense. Mo Wagner up 14%. Wendell Carter might return, but they've got a back-to-back in one of these games Friday, Saturday as well, the Magic. So I don't think Carter will play both. So Mo's going to have an extended opportunity. And then there's the two Grizzlies guys there, Xavier T. Illman and Vincee Williams, the bug. 13% for Williams, 11% for Tillman. I would add Tillman. Vince, I would consider as well. They can be 12-team league guys. I wouldn't add both. They're both sort of back-end fringe-type players in a 12-team. I would add both in a 14-team league scenario. Onto your most dropped, pretty obvious here, the big avocado, Andre Drummond, the number one down dropped player there. Yep, we go and move on from him. The wicky Chris Boucher, what an absolute stinker of a back-to-back stream that was. Yep, move on. I can see it happening again. I think if they sit Siakam next game, I can see this guy having 27-7 with seven blocks and 15 assists. Well, something just to completely break my brain. Don't. That's not going to happen, but I wouldn't be shocked. Drop him. Simone Fontecchio, down, dropped, cool. Shouldn't be a 12-team league player. Sticks is down 8%. Jalen Smith, yeah, look, it was annoying that he missed the last game, but not sure you needed to be that quick on the trigger. The game before that, he was pretty good. I do get it, but I'd be okay adding him back. Dunk Robinson, down 8%. He struggled last game, but he'd been putting up a really strong top 100, top 120 run. He had that one bad game, and everyone just went, nah. I don't know why did my accent change that? He had one bad game. I don't think I'd be all that quick, especially with Butler and Lowery still out. I'd be okay adding him back. And then, of course, Jamarant is out for the season, so he's been dropped, and he will continue to be dropped until people finally realize they need to drop him. Today's episode is brought to you by Jace Medical and the Jace case. There are supply chain issues through the world with so many different things, but there's not many of those things which are life and death situation, like buying a pair of jeans, not a life or death situation. Medicine can be, including antibiotics. We can have life-saving situations where we have these medications at home, including just basic things like amoxicillin, but lots of other things, flucloxacillin for staph infections on your skin, other types of antibiotics for respiratory tract infections, sinusitis, skin infections, UTIs. Whatever it is, those infections, having that antibiotic kit at home can be really useful. It might be that you're also in a disaster scenario where you can't actually get to a medical provider to get them sent to you. So with Jace Medical, you go on there, you get these five antibiotics, and you have them at home. You deal with your physician encounter. It's checked over by that board-certified physician, and the medications get dispensed and dispatched by a licensed pharmacy at a fraction of the regular cost. It's never been more important to be prepared than today. So go to jacemedical.com and use the offer code LOCKEDON to get $20 off your order. So that'll bring us into talking about the games. Let's head across to Paris and look at the first game. It was the Brooklyn Nets, an early one here. They took on the Cleveland Cavaliers. The Cavs win it in the end, 1-0-2, 1-11. For the Nets, I said, let's keep an eye on what goes on with Lonnie Walker. He had 20 points in 25 minutes with four threes, a steal, and a block. Now, everyone knows that I don't think Lonnie Walker is a particularly strong player, but he is shooting the absolute lights out at the moment. It has been amazing. And that level of efficiency, when you've got spuds like Spencer Dinwiddie out there, the coach takes notice. So a lot of minutes for him, and a lot of minutes for Cam Thomas, and a lot of crossover between those two, which is intriguing. I'm not adding Lonnie Walker, but if I'm in a deeper format, that level of scoring is really useful. He shot 67%, so I already know, huge red flag that it's not going to stick. But he was good. I'll talk about Thomas now as well, because it was very clearly his best game in a long time. This brings him to 414th over the last two weeks. He had 26-6-2 and played 35 minutes, which is probably the more important thing. But then after the game, Jacques Vaughan was very, very clear when they answered the question, hey, what do you think? You started Cam Thomas early in the season. Is he going to get that starting job back? And Vaughan was basically like, yeah, when he started, we couldn't actually get any rebounds. We were too small. So yeah, no. And maybe when Ben Simmons returns, it'll make sense to have Simmons, or sorry, if Ben Simmons returns, it'll make sense to have Simmons and Thomas there. But until then, no, he's just not going to do it. And that was the vibe that I got from that press conference. Thomas did still have 26 points. Again, it's a great start to a box score. No defensives. That's not true. Lied. He had a block, but he shot 43 from the field on 21 attempts. We know the man is going to hijack offensive possessions. And then he also stunk from the line at 64%. So is this a good game? I guess it's alright. Is it one that I'm rushing to add? No, I'm not doing it. What I am doing though, is if I have Cam Johnson, I am holding. People are dropping him. And I don't think you need to do that at all. Yes, three points in 23 minutes on 14% stinks. Yes, 203rd ranked player over the last two weeks stinks. Yes, his free throw percentage is weirdly down this season. Yes, he's definitely not going to hit the highs that some people thought that he might hit this season. I think I had him in like the 70-80 zone, and he's probably not going to get there. I've revised my projections to have him around 100-105. But I wouldn't be dropping him. I just wouldn't do that. McHale Bridges, inefficient, but 26-6. Oh, that's like Cam Thomas's line. But he actually went 92% from the line. Didn't shoot well from the field, 33%. And I think we've all sort of come to grips of who McHale Bridges is as a player now. And I don't think we're ever going to overrate him back as a second-round player. Again, I say we. I didn't do that. Most of you or some of you didn't do that. Some of you did. But we just take it as a collective owl across a community, I'm guessing. I talked about it already, but Denny Smith, 23 minutes, two points. Now that stinks. He only took two shots, but four rebounds, five assists, and a block. There's just always a little bit of something there from Smith. Even in this little tight run though, he's 131st over the last two weeks. That's not 100% a must-roster sort of a guy. And with the three days off, we don't have to necessarily go that way. Just keep an eye on it. But I'm more than happy to Jack Spencer Dinwiddie. Get that cabbage out of here! Bitcoin Legend had two points in 16 minutes with three assists, no threes, no steals, no blocks. He's always been a bad Category League guy with a bad Category League profile. He's now outside the top 150 for the season, and there's just no reason to hold on to him. Points leagues, but things are trending down in a hurry. In terms of the backup minutes with Daron Sharp out, we did see it go to Trenton Watford, so that's a deep league guy to look at. 8-4 with a steal there, and not much else went on here. Royce O'Neill stunk. Darren Finney-Smith left the game early with an illness also. Our Klaxo had 13-11, so good for him. But the Cavs, Don Mitchell, 45, 12-6, four steals. Awesome. Jarrett Allen. He hasn't been blocking shots at a high rate this season, but he just dropped in four of them here. He had 12-12 with four assists and two steals. Another really strong game. A massive sell high, one of the biggest you'll see. And Karras Levert had 21-3 in 35 minutes. Now, of course, the 35 minutes is very eye-opening there for Karras, and what is really interesting about this is that I thought that Karras was playing 28-29 because he was dealing with that knee soreness, but no, maybe they just didn't want to play him those minutes because the reason he got the extra minutes here is because the Winter Soldier went down. Seven minutes for Max Struess with knee soreness, so they bumped more minutes into Levert, meaning that he could have been playing those minutes all along, and he did not. We're still holding Levert, but when Garlow returns, it might be a tough ask. As for Struess, Struess, Jesus. That's a real Elf Steward there. It's bloody Struess. Maxie had a seven trillion. Shout out to Tony Snell. He has obviously not been playing particularly well, but he's still just hanging in there. He's very much a must-roster 14-team league guy. I do think you hold in 12s, but in 10s, I don't think you do. I don't think you need to hold Max Struess in a 10-team league. Get that garbage out of here! Slammin' Sammy Merrill played 32 minutes as well. He had six points with two threes, and Okoro had 12 and four. He's a nice 16 to 14-team league player, and all of this will change again when Garland does eventually return, hopefully not too far away. The next game was a game that I don't need to talk about a huge amount because this was over immediately. 135 Milwaukee, 102 Boston. Boston pulled off their starters at halftime, and they didn't come back. They were on a back-to-back. They were getting smacked. They just didn't play. So we had the end of Derek White, Tatum, Holiday, Jalen Brown, and Porzingis at halftime. And then we had a starting lineup of Pritchard, Hauser, Mihalyuk, Stevens, and Cornett in the second half. So I don't even know what to tell you about this. Al Horford's going to play in the next game, but what is there to take out of it? Pritchard had 21 points in 31 minutes. Sick. Doesn't mean anything. Hauser had 15 with four threes. Well, that's actually not that far away from what he usually does. Mihalyuk dropped in nine points in 17. Again, I just don't think we need to even talk about the Celtic side because it's wholly unrepresentative of anything as we move forward. Although, I will say this. I apologize to one of my favorite players in Derek White and putting him on the Bilo Sal High show a couple of weeks ago. I apologize because ever since I did that, it has been an absolute shitshow for Derek White. So much so that I have had multiple people, multiple people today ask, hmm, I think I need to move on from Derek White. That's not really an ask. That's like a, I'm doing it. Can you convince me otherwise? And I did. I said, no, you like, have you lost your mind? But people are at that level already, which is crazy. There was a guy that was like, oh, well, the last four or five games, he only had 20 fantasy points. Why do I need to hold him? Well, because he's good. Like, I know that it's been a poor little run of form here, but it happens. This is what happens. Players drop off pretty regularly. When did I have him on the Bilo Sal High? Trying to have a look. It was a, well, maybe it was a little bit of a time ago. Anyway, my bad. I thought it was last week, but it was not. Anyway, regardless, he is struggling in a huge way at the moment. The shots just aren't going in. We've talked ad nauseum about the things that were propping him up, and they've just fallen flat on his face. So don't worry. But it is, once I get those come through, and if you're the people that asked that question or have asked that question of yourself on your inner contemplation about Derek White, about who do I drop him, just you're the person who we're going to target now to buy low off. So don't do it. If you've got him, don't sell low. But if you don't have him, now's the time. Find the panicked manager and go grab him. For the Bucks, Bob Portis had a huge game. 28 and 12 with five threes. Absolutely fantastic. That brings his two-week ranking up to 274th, to tell you how shitful he has been prior to that. Does this one game change the trajectory of Bobby Portis? Almost definitely not. But the value here of Portis is the weekend back-to-back. I don't think you need to have him as a must-shot to play. He's going to go up and down and up and down, but mainly down, but he will have some ups. And he just dominated this game. Cool. If you had Damien Lillard, you're pretty happy to get 21, 4, and 4. Yarny dropped 24, 12, and 6. Lopez, who'd also been struggling in a pretty big way as well, he also had a good game. 15, 5, and 3 with two blocks. Good game. Love it. Leaky Beasley, 16 points, 4 threes, 27 minutes. We hold through the back-to-back, but what else do we get out of this game? Nothing. We can look at it and say, well, Chris Middleton didn't join the party. Five points on 22%, but he had seven assists. The big thing for the Bucks is going to be what happens with Middleton on Saturday-Sunday. Does this fact that he played 20 minutes here mean that he plays full minutes in the back-to-back? Do we get the first half nonsense again? It's possible. Bet you're unders. So just, that's what we've probably got to have a look at. I wonder how the Bucks will actually adjust that for the points props and all the other individual player props for Middleton on the weekend. That will be something to pay attention to, because, you know, we obviously know what they did last time with that scenario. Today's episode is brought to you by PrizePix. PrizePix is the largest daily fantasy sports platform in North America. It's the easiest and most exciting way also to play DFS. It's just you up against player projections. You don't have to worry about going up against thousands of people in these gigantic tournaments and worry about people coming in and just taking your money. All the pros and the sharks, the people who do this for a literal job, coming in and taking your cash. In this one, it's just player projections, so you just look at it and say, more or less. That's all you need to do. It's you against PrizePix, nobody else. So you get between two to six of those individual player projection numbers. Just throw them into your lineup and you can win up to 25 times your money back. Hit six, right? 25 bucks. 25 times back, in fact. 10 bucks into 250. You can do it so easily. They've also got their injury reboot policy that if someone gets injured in the first half and doesn't return in the second, don't think those Celtics players would have counted, but they get rebooted in your lineup. So you have that injury insurance, which no other daily fantasy sports platform provides. Go to prizepix.com slash locked on NBA. Use the code locked on NBA for a first deposit match up to $100. That is prizepix.com slash locked on NBA. The code is locked on NBA and you get a first deposit match up to $100. PrizePix is daily fantasy sports made easy. So the next game was unfortunately another blowout. 62 points, the final margin in this one, as the NBA's Black Eye franchise, the Oklahoma City Thunder, the team that should have been kicked out of the league and relegated to the G League, and all of those disgusting pieces of commentary that so many people, some even employed by the NBA, were putting out there about this team, who obviously have zero understanding of team building and rebuilding and anything like that, and are going to look absolutely, absolutely stupid over the next few years, if they don't already. The Thunder, 139. The Blazers, 77. I'm not here to tell you that the Blazers are dreadful and embarrassed. That's a bad loss, obviously. But we know what the Blazers are doing. We know that they're bad. Signing Jeremy Grant to $170 million over five years doesn't make a ton of sense. We know they're bad. We know they're rebuilding. And this is just a shocking game. No question about it. I think the thing that's been very interesting about Portland is that even though we can criticize Deionder Aiton for some of his output, and I do criticize, mainly the reason I criticize Aiton is like, look who you are. Like, can you take some shots? Can you put some pressure on the rim? Can you get a free throw every once in a while, instead of whatever it is you do out there? But the fact that since he's been out, they just get absolutely rottened. Like, they get killed in almost every game. I would love to see, and I say I'd love to see like it's a hidden thing. I can just go and check it. I would love to see what their EPM numbers are like, and who's like really thriving at the top there. Interesting. Okay, so Aiton, I thought would be bigger. He's a negative 1.5. That is 51st percentile. Brogdon leads, followed by Simons, Reeth, and then Grant. I thought it'd be better. Anyway, carry on. I did figure it out. I did see what happened. So let's talk about it. One thing we do need to look at here though, is that the fact that they're just getting spanked so often that players just don't play. Simons played 20 minutes. He had 14 points. He's 168th over the last two weeks. Big buy low. But those first couple of games when he came back from the thumb injury, if you were celebrating a top 35 season from here on out, yeah, I reckon you might be in real trouble, because these blowouts feel like they might happen a bit more. Jeremy Grant played 25. He had nine points. He had two steals in a block, which is a little bit of a surprise from him. He continues to be frustrating to me. While Shaden Sharp, they pulled him off early with a groin issue again. Now, I'm just going to hope it's because they were losing by 60 points, and that he had that groin issue already, and it's not a re-aggravation. I hate that word. It's not an aggravation of the groin injury, and it was just like, bro, you don't need to be out there. We'll find out tomorrow, won't we? If he doesn't play tomorrow, then yeah, that's not good, because that's another two weeks at least, I would say. He had seven points in 21 minutes, shot 21%, and again, it's time for a real conversation about him. He's not a good fantasy player at this point, and at this point, he's not remotely really even close to being a 12-team must. I think in a lot of spots, you still can hold Shaden Sharp, because we see the tantalizing potential, but we're in week 12 here, guys. If you're struggling, you're in seventh, you're in sixth, and you need to be making decisions, one of the decisions might be to move on from him, and the other one might be to move on from his teammate, Sterling Henderson, who has had flashes for sure, but 13-6-2 on 20% shooting, that's 20%. Four of 20 shooting, 20 attempts, that kills you, and then he went 67 from the line. He's obviously been better than this, but this was shocking, and we're in that same spot. Now, I do think that it's going to be a gradual improvement from Scoot. It won't be linear. It won't be every game he gets two percentage points better. He'll have some games where he looks better. He'll have two bad ones, two good ones, two bad ones, two good ones, two bad ones, two good ones, three good ones, one bad one, that sort of stuff, but that might not be enough for you, and again, make the tough calls. If you can't deal with it, don't deal with it. If you want to have him, have him, but you can't be holding like a Sharp and a Henderson, and then I've also got Keontae George here, and I'm dabbling with some Killian Hayes. You can't do any of that stuff. You can't have that combination running together. Well, let's see what Zaire Williams and Vince Williams, like that's just not enough. That's too much uncertainty, too much bullshit in a 12-team league for you to actually have success. You need to be sort of flying with a relatively stable roster where you can go, I can actually deal with Scoot here. I don't have to play him on every day if I don't want to, and see where it goes from there. Dwap Reef had eight and seven in his 24 minutes, a very, very impressive minus 49 in those 24 minutes. They need eight and back. Reef is just a streamer. He is not a must roster player at all. While we got 12 minutes of Ryan Rebair. Yeah, cool. That's awesome. We got some defensive stats from Kamara, two steals and two blocks, but he's just a deeper league stream sort of player for the thunder. They didn't have to play very many minutes, did they? Giddy triple-doubled in 23 minutes. 13, 10, and 12 with three blocks. That's great. What do we take out of this game? Nothing, probably. Oh, actually, there's one thing. Shea, 31 points in 21 minutes. Bro, that is unbelievable. Five rebounds, four assists, one block. He's got to be, it's got to be him and Jokic for MVP at the moment. Lou Dort, he only played 19 minutes, but he had 11 and three, steal a block. That's solid enough to stream. And Chetty Holmgren had 19 and four. But I want to talk about the Bronco, who people get very worked up about, about what Jalen Williams can bring. And this was another, an absolute quiver in your bow of, for a couple of things. This is a quiver in your bow of Jalen Williams is a stud, and he's going to continue to be awesome, and he's going to roll as a top 30 player, because you've got the evidence right here. 21, seven and four, two blocks, 19 minutes. That's an unbelievable performance. This guy's a legend. That's, that's great. So you can use that as evidence. I can also come to you and use it as evidence. And again, I hate to be against Jalen Williams because I like him and I'm not against him at all. But I'm also going to tell you that this is one of the biggest sell highs that you can see this season. If you are trading to the person who believes that this guy is going to continue this level, because he shot 90% from the field. And we highlighted three days ago that he was shooting 69% from the field and 66% from three, and it just got better, right? It is going to fall back down. It might not crash. It might not go to a 30% run, but it will come back to 50 or 51 or 48 or 46. And the usage isn't sky, sky high. I love that he got the two blocks here. He is a really, really good player. I really, I think some of the assist stuff he was doing was also really sky high. If I'm selling high on him at the moment, there's always the narrow, what do I do? Sell high, or do I ride it out? There might be someone out there who goes, well, I saw what he did last season, January onwards, he was top 30, top 25. This is what's happening. They might have that in their head, which is okay. That's what I'd be targeting in a trade. And if you don't get it, oh well, ride it out. Understand that it is going to drop. That is a stone cold absolute lock guarantee. Guaranteed, it will drop. 100% guarantee. 100% 99.99. I'll leave myself an hour. It's going to drop. How far? I don't know. Is it going to drop to where he was outside the top 100 for about five, six weeks? I really doubt that. But will it push him back to 50s or 60s or 70s for a period of time? Probably, possible, yeah. But this is great to get a big game like this with these big shooting numbers that don't always get noticed. If you are looking to pull off a sell high and you can actually up your price, you can actually up your price. We'll see. We'll see what happens with it. It's going to fall, though. I'm telling you now. The next game was close, so that's great. The Mavs, the Undermanned Mavs, beat the Knicks. 128-125. That's a bad loss for the Knicks. Huge win for the Mavericks with no Donchich and no Derek Lively, no Dante Exum either. So three of their starters. I don't know if you count Exum as a starter, but he's been starting, so I guess so. For the Knicks, Randall was really strong. 37 minutes, 32-6-5 with two steals, while 39 minutes for Jalen Bronson had 30-2 with eight assists. Bronson played 22 of 24 minutes in the first half. Tom, like, come on, my guy. You need to settle down a little bit with this stuff. That's a lot of minutes, man. The Big Red Guru, 30 minutes. Now, his minutes are a bit all over the place. I think he played under 20 last game, but he had 30 here. 19-4-3, two steals and five threes. He continues to be a 12-team league guy, and even in limited minutes, he's like top 60 over the last two weeks. So I would roster him. While Hartenstein was not at his best, but he still had 8-15-3 with a steal. Pretty good, and obviously a must-roster player. The Jedi, Ojeda Nobi, he's had one really big scoring game, but other than that, it's just sort of been mid. 10-6-2 with two blocks. My thought was that I didn't think that a trade to the Knicks would change a huge amount for OG, and I think that's been pretty much right on. Last game, we saw a huge performance from Quentin Grimes. I thought, all right, let's see what happens. 9 points, three threes, 15 minutes. Of course it did. Yeah, we're not holding him. We're also not holding Josh Hart. Get that garbage out of here! 4-4-2 in 23 minutes. DiVincenzo's the guy, not Hart. It will go back and forth a lot, but we're getting more consistency out of DiVincenzo than we are getting out of Josh Hart. For the Mavs, Kyrie was amazing. He is on an absolute cracking run at the moment. Top three over the last two weeks, and by top three, I just mean third. Well, if you say top three, like, he's got to be third. You wouldn't say someone's top three if they're the first-ranked player, would you? Josh, get it together. Kyrie had a career-high 44 points in 40 minutes with six threes, four rebounds, 10 assists, and two steals. Elite efficiency, he's bringing everything at the moment. You might consider this a sell-high, and you should, because they have a two-game week in the playoffs. Kyrie can easily be a top-10 guy, top-12 guy, rest of season. But if I could get any other top-10, top-12 guy, I would, and he is cracking at the moment. Massive game from Hardaway as well, who played 39 in the start. Revenge game, 32-6-4 with two steals and six threes, and we had Derek Jones do not much. Nine points in his 35. He's streamable, but that's about it. Dwighty Powell got smacked in the face as per usual, but he returned. He had four points and nine rebounds, and Josh Green also had an offensive explosion. Didn't expect that one. 18-35, and I'll fully ignore it. Well, we thought Jaden Hardy had an opportunity. Well, in fact, he did. He just didn't have as big a one as we thought, and then he didn't do anything with it. 8-6-4 for Hardy. You can leave him on the wire in most leagues. It was also a better game from Grant Williams, 11-6 in his 27 minutes. And for a game that was close, we got regular rotations. There's not a huge amount to take out of it. Probably the biggest thing we take out of it is like, yeah, DiVincenzo and not Hart. Not really sure what else we do. We know what Tim Hardaway is, like, this is great, but then he won't do anything close to this for three games. He'll have three more games like this. He's up and down. He's like a worse Jordan Clarkson, and he's fine to have, but you wouldn't say that you sit there, him being a must-roster player or anything like that. All right, let's do the final game of the day. Another blowout. What a shock that is. The Suns take care of business against the Lakers, 127-109. The final score here, Bradley Beal was fantastic. He had a huge third quarter, 37-6 with eight triples, 67% shooting. Obviously, hasn't been a great season if you drafted Beal, but that doesn't preclude it from being a good season. He was 138th from the season before today in per game numbers. He's 87th in two weeks, the last two weeks before today, and I'm just waiting for my rankings to finalize to come across and tell you how he's doing, but I'll do that in a second. Just to show you the progression, Booker had 31-5-5 with three steals. He'd been a little bit slow as well, but nice pick up here, and Durant had 18-5-5, three steals and a block. Good numbers. Nerkic was fine, did his thing. Grayson Allen, not his best game, but I still maintain he's a 12-10 league guy, 5-5-3. Eric Gordon did not much, 5-3, 18% of the volume is fine for Gordo, but I would love for more of those to go in. But we do have to talk a little bit here about Boll, because he played 17 minutes and he had 6.6 rebounds, two steals, and two blocks. That's a really good fantasy line, without any question. I think some of the minutes here from Boll come because Eubanks was out, and that meant that we got some minutes. Boll doesn't really play center. They view him as a wing, apparently. So we got some Azubuike with five minutes and Metsu playing center, but that meant that Metsu doesn't really play at the four. You know me, notorious Boll hater. I'm not adding him in 12s, don't get excited, but 16s? Sure, yeah, go for it. 14s? Maybe. In the last two weeks, in the last two weeks, Boll is the 146th ranked player in 16 minutes, not including a 6-6-2-2-2 game today, Richie Beno. 2-2-2. See, that is worth monitoring. That might even move him into the, huh, this team plays a lot of quality games. Is he streamable in 12s? He probably isn't. I think the Eubanks thing will have an impact, somewhat. But it's at least, it's at least interesting. The Lakers, they just got pantsed. We had 13-5 from Davis in 32 minutes with two blocks. LeBron, one of his worst of the year, 10 points, 27%. Nine assists, still good. And Vanderbilt played 29 minutes in this one for two reasons. Christian Wood was out, and then Cam Reddish lasted eight minutes with an eight trillion before his knee gave in. He's just not good, and he shouldn't be playing minutes, and Max Christie should get all of them. Christie had 14-7-4, 25 minutes. He's moving away from being a bit of a hidden gem into a guy where there's noise going like, why isn't this guy playing? And you are going to see in two years' time, I believe he'll be a top 120 fantasy player at worst. I'm really, really excited to see what he can do long-term. I think he's got something in him. You can look at D'Lo's line here and be a little bit interested. 19-1-6 with two steals. Remember last game he played 16 minutes. Also worth monitoring that he played in the fourth quarter, in garbage time, in a lineup that included Skylar Mayes and Jalen Hood Shafina. So it was part of the garbage time thing. Now we are four weeks away from the trade deadline. I still firmly believe that he is one of the two most likely players to get traded. It's him and DeJonte Murray. Malcolm Brogdon is right up there. Zach Levine, probably less so. There are some other names that you think have big, big chances to move. I am pretty confident D'Lo's getting moved. Will another team want D'Angelo Russell to be their starter and bring him in? Well, I don't think that is the case. But if you do, then it's a clear hold. I think he could move into a 25-minute role on another team. That's possible as well. Look, his numbers, 178th over the last two weeks in 24 minutes a game, that doesn't blow anything. Like, it doesn't do anything good. But today was good and he got the garbage time minutes to help pad some of those numbers up. My numbers have just finalized, by the way. So I'll tell you, Beal is now 56th over the last two weeks into 97th for the season. And Boll, 116th in the last two weeks in 17 minutes. Very interesting. Yeah, D'Lo is still 174th over the last two weeks. I don't know that he's a must hold. I'm a bit on the fence with it. And I guess when I'm on the fence, it's like you can drop if something great comes up, but also you can hold in a lot of circumstances. But I'm not convinced that he moves to a spot that's way better, or even a spot that gives him starters minutes 28. But it is possible. Not much else going on here in this one. Again, pretty easy. Oh, Austin Reeves was better. 13-1-6 on 57%. Only took seven shots, but still a better performance from old Reevesy. That's the games. Pity that so many of them were turds. But that is what happens sometimes across the NBA. We are going to look at the Stream of the Day recap for today. How did we go? The 10-team Stream of the Day was the big ragu, Dante DiVincenzo. Is that stat line right? It doesn't feel right. What is that line? That is definitely not correct. No, sorry. Don't know what that is, because that's not the correct line. DiVincenzo was the Stream of the Day. He had 19-4-3 with two steals and five dribbles. So yeah, it was a bloody huge win. I'm underselling myself. The 12-team Stream was Lou Dort 11-3-1 with a steal and a block. That actually is all right. The 14-teamer is the artist formerly known as Torian Prince 11-6-2, which is like okay. It's not great, but in the 14-teamer, I reckon you take it. The 16-teamer was Isaac Okoro. Maybe this is why, because I didn't change the Isaac Okoro numbers. 12-4 with a block. That's why the DiVincenzo one didn't work out. Yeah, that's good for 16 teams. Yahoo Points League was Dennis Smith 16-3-3. That's an L. And the ESPN Points was Lou Dort 24. I think most of those worked out pretty well, I would say. Yeah, I'd be pretty happy with those. Let's go and look at the lines of the night. Now, we will start with the monstrous line of the night, the best performance of the day. It went down to two names. One of those names was Donovan Mitchell. The other one of those names was Kyrie Irving, and the winner is Don Mitchell. 45 points, 12 rebounds, 6 assists, big steel numbers, huge game from Don Mitchell over there in Paris. The Waverwire line of the night, the best performance from a player under 50%. Rostered, this one means absolutely nothing. I'm sure this man will cherish it, but it means nothing for us. It's Peyton Pritchard. It was a bullshit game with bench starters at halftime, and Pritchard had 21-4 and 4-4. Not going to mean a single thing as we move forward. The young gun of the night, the best player who is in their first or second season. I believe this guy won it two days ago, pretty sure he did, because he's absolutely on a roll. It is the Bronco, Jalen Williams. 21 points, 7 rebounds, shot 90% from the field, a huge performance. And then lastly, we do look at the dud of the night, the worst performance from a player who is rostered in over 70% of leagues. I don't count guys who got injured, otherwise Max Struess would have been in there. I'm going to count guys who were shit though, and that's Cam Johnson. 3 points, 22 rebounds, 1 assist, bad shooting. I still believe he's a hold, but he stunk. Now, we do the top 6 players for the day. As I've already said, Donovan Mitchell was the number one Category League player. As I just try and find my actual thing, and I can't find it. I don't have the graphic there, but that is okay. I'm just going to read it out because I need to. You know what? It is roasting hot. It's 36 degrees here. I am absolutely dead tired, and I cannot wait to go sit on my couch and do nothing. So, the top 6 players. Donovan Mitchell, Kyrie Irving, Brad Beal, Jarrett Allen, Shea Goodris-Alexander, and Josh Giddey. The top 6 players rostered under 50% of leagues. Peyton Pritchard, Lonnie Walker. We're very much keeping an eye on Walker, and we're keeping an eye on Boll as well for those deeper formats. Trey Mann, that's just a blowout scenario. Grant Williams, don't care. Sam Hauser, he is what he is. He's a threes streamer, and that is it. Your top 6 players in points leagues today. Donovan Mitchell, Kyrie Irving, Josh Giddey, Devin Booker, Brad Beal, and Yanni Antetokounmpo. And lastly, we look at our little checklist. I'm going to be honest with you, some of these are a little bit of a stretch, but we'll talk about it. Dennis Smith, the minutes over Dinwiddie is what's interesting, but that's more for 14-team leagues. Dante DiVincenzo, I think we're adding in 12-team leagues. And Grayson Allen is still available in spots, man. So, I think you just grab him in all 12 and all 10-team leagues, Grayson, if he's available. I'd be okay with dropping Spencer Dinwiddie, and I'm very much okay with dropping Josh Hutt. You don't have to do it. By all means, I'm not forcing you to do it, but that is a move that I think is okay and totally reasonable if you want to clear space. The trends of both of those guys are not particularly strong, so if you are looking to do something, you can move on from both of those players. That will do it for us for today's show. Don't forget to go ahead and hit that subscribe button, hit the notification bell, hit the thumbs up, leave your comments down below. Be a double banger, bang, bang. Guys, we're done here. Wish me luck. Thank you so much for watching, everyone. See ya.