Fantasy Basketball Night In Review: Thursday, December 2

Antonio Losada looks back at yesterday's slate of games (12/02/21) and comments on fantasy basketball risers, fallers and takeaways from the games played.

Welcome to the RotoBaller NBA Recap. In this feature, we will highlight a few key fantasy basketball takeaways from the games played during last night's slate. These viewpoints can be both positive and negative and will hopefully help to provide insight into different roster moves you should consider making based on trends and statistical nuggets from around the Association.

Fantasy basketball has a lot of moving pieces with all the different scoring settings that are possible to play under, so I will always do my best to spotlight where players gain or lose value in certain game types. For the sake of simplicity and consistency, every time I mention Fantasy Points in these articles I will be using DraftKings' scoring system, which goes as follows: 1*PTS, 0.5*3PM, 1.25*RBD, 1.5*AST, 2*STL, 2*BLK, -0.5*TO. On top of that, bonus points are awarded for Double-Doubles (+1.5) and Triple-Doubles (+3), only one per player at a time.

Without further ado, let's get right into the latest slate of games from the 2021 season and try to figure out how to take advantage of what we saw transpire.

Thursday, December 2

Historic night in which Memphis wins by the largest margin ever (73 points) against OKC while Phoenix puts up 18th straight W for a franchise record

First things first: what the hell is wrong with OKC!? The Grizzlies--without Ja Morant, mind you--destroyed the Thunder and were this close to double OKC's scoring tally by dumping 152 points on Oklahoma. It's an absolutely insane game in which the Thunder rested tons of players, but even then it made no sense to watch OKC fall to just five points scored in the 12 minutes of Q4, just to highlight a single statistical nugget from the game. Sheesh.

On to more interesting stuff, Phoenix won its 18th straight game, which is 1) a franchise record and 2) a borderline nonsensical achievement to pull off in the best basketball league in the world. It is not that Detroit was going to make it hard for the Suns to get there on Thursday, but Jerami Grant tried as much as he can finishing as the second-best play of the slate with a 34-6-3-2-1 stuffed line against Phoenix. No Sun finished as a top-10 player with Ayton leading the way at 11th and CP3 clocking in second as the 18th-best. So you get an idea of how smooth things went for the Sunny Suns.

• Budding rivalry between Chicago and New York, the latter boasting the best player of DK's slate yesterday in Julius Randle (30-12-6 with 2 blocks and shooting 66.7% on 21 FGA--though with 7 TOs...) with the former having the no. 4 and no. 5 top players in DeMar DeRozan (34-6-3-1-1) and Zach LaVine (27-7-5-1-1) respectively.
• Jaren Jackson Jr. was an absolute unit with a 27-3-1-2-2 line in his super-low 20 minutes of playing time. Not that he needed much more run, as he was über efficient with an average of 2.14 FP/min hitting 6 treys and shooting 81.8% on 11 FGA with only 1 TO as his lone blemish on the day of the Thunder Trouncing.
• Shout-out Dejounte Murray (15-7-13-2) because if he's not in consideration for the MIP of the season then I don't even know. The Spurs are going to stink more often than not, of course, but Dejounte can't be doing more to help San Antonio stay up and fight nightly.

• No wonder the four most-valuable players in terms of ROI were part of the Grizz Squad. Santi Aldama, John Konchar, Xavier Tillman, and Jarrett Culver all came off the pine, and while playing for fewer than 30 minutes each all finished with 11+ points, 3+ rebounds, 3+ dimes, and 1+ steal. Aldama was the best of the fourth with an 18-10-3-1-1 packed dub-dub and a rather bulky 16 FGA on the night the Thunder got vanished from planet earth.
• Cam Night for Phoenix as both Cameron Johnson and Cameron Payne finished with 19 pops, 6 boards, and 1 block each as Johnson also got 2 dimes and Payne logged 3 on the day. Fantastic outings for the two Suns in their winning effort against the lowly Pistons and their eight straight Ls.
• Isaiah Stewart, believe it or not, keeps flying under the radar and is both widely available in re-draft leagues and cheap in DFS contests. Shouldn't be the case for long, though, as he's playing a ton of minutes (36 last night) as a starter and putting up lines such as Thursday's 12-14-2-0-1 dub-dubbing one with a sky-high 85.7% shooting on 7 FGA without a single TO.

• As much as the Grizz Bench Mob excelled, the starters/better players all kinda sucked. Bad games for Dillon Brooks and Desmond Bane, for example, who didn't even reach 20 minutes on the night. That said, the true stinking play of the day was probably that of Jusuf Nurkic, who logged 24 minutes yet all he could do was contribute a low 10-7-1 line in Portland's loss to SAS without Dame around.
• Not entirely bad because he played a ridiculous 43 minutes, but Alec Burks' 0.77 FP/min average was rather disappointing and way below league-average levels after he put up a 16-7-3-2 line against Chicago shooting a putrid 30% on 10 FGA and committing one turnover. At least the 9-for-10 on freebies saved his day a bit, I guess.
• Jaylen Brown has been ruled out for tonight's game (first half of a back-to-back)... Giannis' absence yesterday was because of that, too, so nothing to worry about... Taj Gibson got ejected three minutes into the Knicks game... Anfernee Simons started for Portland but had to leave early without ever returning to the court... Nicolas Claxton could be active and playing for the Nets tonight after missing ample time with a non-COVID illness... Royce O'Neal is in for the Jazz against Boston on Friday... Payton and Lee are back for GSW... Paul George is expected to play against the Lakers this Friday after coming off resting.

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