Daily Fantasy Basketball Injury News and Updates for FanDuel and DraftKings - 2/20/16

Welcome to the daily updates and injury news article. We'll try and update it right up to line-up locks with as much information as comes across our desks. Let's get to it!

Last night's picks can be found here, so you can wrap your mind around what you need to be looking at before lineups lock tonight.

By the way - we keep our projection system updated with all of the changes as they occur throughout the day right up until lineup lock. Every day. If you want access to that system so you can cut out a lot of the research element, click the button below!

Now let’s look at some news that’s come in throughout the day to see if anything’s changed in our minds or in the NBA landscape. It's a shorter slate and a light news day, but we'll be updating as stuff rolls in. Also throw out some ideas in the comments and we can take it from there.

What We Know

Bosh and Out Wade. Miami Value Everywhere.
I was tempted to put pictures of every single Miami Heat player here but just decided on these three guys. They pulled out the improbable last night playing without their three best players and somehow beating a full-strength Hawks squad. There were a lot of guys who went to the moon last night having to pick up the slack for the injuries. A few notables included:

Luol Deng 30/11
Goran Dragic 17/10/5
Josh McRoberts 19/10/6

And there were others. Basically, none of the Miami guys have prices anywhere close to what they should be if the two highest usage guys on the team are sitting out. All of the starters are in play today even with Whiteside returning. His return could cut into the big man minutes for sure, but the backcourt run should remain relatively untouched.

What We’re Waiting to Know

Gorgui's Dieng's Minutes
Mr. Gorgeous has been playing just a ton of late, going over forty minutes in three of his last four games. That kind of run is directly tied to the Wolves not having Pekovic and Garnett in that time. Both are game-time decisions for tonight against the Knicks. If I were to pick now, I'd say Dieng sees similar run tonight simply because even if both of the bigs came back, it's unrealistic to think either plays any kind of significant minutes. Dieng's been averaging a double-double over the last 6 games or so and the price hasn't creeped totally over the threshold. Power forward is almost always a problem so Dieng moving to that position on FD and DK has helped his value. It should keep up tonight.

The "every lineup" guys

Note - this doesn't mean I'll actually play each of these guys in every lineup, it just means they are the foundational pieces spit out by our optimizer in all of the top 5-10 lineups. Obviously, you'll want to go against the chalk plays in big tournaments.

Al Horford - FD 7200 DK 6600
Opponent - MIL
FD Proj. Pts - 35.42 DK Proj. Pts - 36.03
Oof. He's showing up everywhere. And I don't know about you, but to me this is doesn't feel great. Now our system doesn't weight our feelings into it (for better or worse I suppose). And it's tough to think about Horford as a "game-changer" when it comes to your lineup. But Milwaukee is about league average against centers and Horford has a diverse enough game that his floor is high enough considering his price. As of right now, I'm tempted to take Horford because KAT's price has really jumped and the other centers are in tougher matchups. But I'll admit it doesn't feel great.

Chris Paul - FD 10000 DK 9400
Opponent - GSW
FD Proj. Pts - 46.15 DK Proj. Pts - 48.08
He's showing up everywhere and I like it. He's the cheapest of the three big point guards on FanDuel and just $100 more on DK than Wall. The latter has a tougher matchup against Miami (though admittedly this version of Miami is much different than the rest of the season). GSW and LAC have the highest over/under on the day and it isn't even close. You'll want to have some exposure here without a doubt, but it's tough. Many of the other guys are fairly priced and you'll have to sacrifice to stack the game on the main slate. But Paul is full systems go.

Kristaps Porzingis - FD 6800 DK 7300
Opponent - MIN
FD Proj. Pts - 36.59 DK Proj. Pts - 37.81
He's not "everywhere" but it's close enough. Zinger's seen the minutes level off in the low-to-mid 30's over the short term (read: since Fisher was fired) and that's really all we were waiting on for the guy. He'd get randomly benched for long (and very annoying) stretches early in the season and I had more than one night of furiously watching the bench to see if he was checking back in. Here's to hoping those days are over.

Good luck out there today! If you want access to all of our numbers, get started with a free trial below - on us!