Fantasy Basketball Night In Review: Thursday, March 11

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, March 11

Kyrie Irving cooks a masterful 40-piece as Brooklyn hosts Boston while waiting for Blake Griffin to make his debut for the franchise

The NBA saw its second slate of games after the AS break took place yesterday, and those two days is all it took for us fans to watch the first 40-pop performance of the second half of the season, courtesy of Kyrie Irving. With Kevin Durant still out, Irving put on some work to drop 40 points on his former Celtics team (5 treys included) which he was able to pair with 8 boards, 3 dimes, a steal, and a block. That's Kyrie these days, a scorer first and foremost with James Harden (22-10-8) handing the all more than him at the point.

Even with such a ridiculous game, Kyrie couldn't top the fantasy leaderboard. That award went Jimmy Butler's way, who after getting snubbed from the AS event put up a stuffed 27-8-11-3-1 game in which he was truly efficient averaging 1.74 FP for every minute (36 of them) he was on the court.

• While Kyrie was a beast, that is always going to be the case. On a way more unexpected outing, Chris Boucher became the player of the day in fantasy contests thanks to his off-the-pine 52 PF game. Bouch played 30 minutes and that's all he needed to close a 29-9-2-2-2 line shooting 67% on 15 FGA. The only thing limiting his upside a bit was his 5 PF. Other than that, sublime night for one of the 6MOY candidates.
• If Boucher surprised us, what about Jaylen Nowell!? The sophomore has played all of 38 games as a pro, and yesterday's marked his best outing ever: 28-5-6-1-1 with 6 treys in just 28 minutes coming off the bench for a white-flag-waving Wolves. Nowell has played 20+ minutes in all last six games, so keep an eye of him and add his body to your roster (1% rostership in Yahoo) if you're part of a super deep league. Not the worst of fliers to take these days.

• Kevin Porter Jr. finally debuted for the Houston Rockets after spending time honing his game in the G League, which is now over. Couldn't have gotten much better for KPJ, who was the best Rocket out there and dropped a sound 13-5-10-3-1 line hitting a couple of freebies and reaching 42 FP against Sacto. Must-add in deep fantasy leagues as Oladipo might get moved, opening more minutes for the youngin'.
• Another G League product now in an NBA roster doing interesting things: Aleksej Pokusevski. Poku had not played since Feb. 1 but he is back with the Thunder now and had a nice game yesterday starting at PF, putting up a 14-8-3 line with 2 boards on top of that. Oklahoma might move Al Horford before the deadline, which would boost Poku's usage and minutes out there.  Keep an eye on him and if you have room to spare consider adding him in deeper formats.

• Kemba Walker put up a dud even though he played 35 minutes yesterday. All he could do was dropping 11 points, grab 3 boards, and contrib a 2-1-1 rest-of-line. Not bad, but definitely not great considering the high expectations. Today is not the best day to sell him high, for sure, but if he is able to log a couple of explosions soon enough you might want to trade him away for someone more solid than he's been.
• Another similarly bouncy guy worth trading away in some leagues: Terry Rozier. The man is a walking show, that's for sure, and he did it once more yesterday dropping 12 of the Hornets' 15 final points to beat the Pistons. That being said, his fantasy results are all across the spectrum and too wild to trust daily. Depending on the offers you get, definitely think about moving him to another team in exchange for a less-variable asset.

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