NBA Daily Fantasy Helper: Thursday 4/18/19

If you're new to daily fantasy basketball -- maybe you started your DFS journey during the MLB or NFL seasons, or maybe basketball is your sport and this will be your first year giving it a shot -- you're in for a treat. The NBA scene changes hugely on a week-to-week, day-to-day, and -- depending on injury news -- even a minute-to-minute basis, making every slate a unique one that requires an ever-changing approach.

With so much changing so quickly, we're here with plenty of tools to help you out. We have daily projections, a matchup heat map, a lineup optimizer, and a ton of other great resources to help give you an edge.

We'll also be coming at you with this primer every day, breaking down a few of the day's top plays at each price point.

Let's take a look at who you should target on today's main slate.

Best of the Best

Nikola Jokic ($10,700): The center position tends to be fairly straightforward on these short playoff slates. There just aren't enough fives getting significant run to be worth much of a look -- especially when injury news is already priced in, with 20-ish minutes Andrew Bogut not offering any value at $4,500. Looking at our projections tonight, we have Jokic going for the slate's highest fantasy score. That alone is interesting, and he becomes even more appealing when he's also projected as the best point-per-dollar value among today's centers. Typically value like that pops up in the lower end of pricing, so that helps bring light to how thin the position is tonight. He's eclipsed 50 FanDuel points in both of his first two games against the San Antonio Spurs in the first round, playing an average of 37.9 minutes per game. For a guy who ranked sixth in the NBA with 1.50 FanDuel points per minute in the regular season, it's no surprise to see this increased playoff workload creating huge value.