RADIO
Nicolas Batum is worth considering as a fantasy basketball waiver wire pickup heading into Week 15 of the NBA season.
BALLER MOVE: Add in 14+ Team Leagues
ROSTERED IN: 18% of leagues
ANALYSIS: To be honest, you can make a similar case for adding pretty much every Clipper out there in your WW. Paul George is banged up and out--potentially for the full season--while Kawhi Leonard is just not coming back unless LAC knows PG13 will do so too so both could team up in time for a postseason run. That's opened the door for the likes of Amir Coffey and Nicolas Batum to 1) feature on a bulkier amount of minutes per game and 2) get larger usage rates if only because of a larger pool of opportunities being available.
Batum is nothing new in LA. He was starting games at the start of the season the same as he's doing now, so no change there. He's a known asset and commodity, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to find him available in more than four of each five Yahoo leagues these days. While the wing missed almost a month of play between Nov. 20 and Dec. 17 (only one game played in that span), he seems to be back for good now and that should stay the same ROS barring injury. Batum has played eight games in the 2022 calendar year starting seven of them and logging 27 MPG. Remove the first couple of games due to still-gearing-up-reasons and that figure goes up to nearly 30 MPG in the past six games from Jan. 9 on.
In those six last games played through Friday, Batum is putting up an average 13-6-2-1-1. That's absolutely beastly for a guy with a rostership below 20 percent if you ask me. Batum has hit 6+ points in all of those games and 10+ in four of them. The shooting is good at 49.6% from the field, but Batum is just a long-range shooter taking few and hard/long shots per game (9 FGA) so it's not that we can ask for massively high percentages: he's hitting 2.5 treys a game in the past two weeks and 2.0 on the year! The rebounds are good and all of the other stats are low, but the steals/blocks upside is high enough to get some value from those two cats (1+ SPG and 0.8 BPG on the year).
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