Fantasy Basketball Week 5 Preview | Streaming, Injuries, & More

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Josh Lloyd (0:43)

Let's take a look at week five in the NBA, the schedule. How does it look? How do we stream? What's a good plan? What do we do in weekly leagues? It's all coming up. Michael Bolton. Remember that I was the one who put you onto scarves?

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Thanks, Josh. It's Michael Bolton here. And it's time for another episode of the Locked On Fantasy Basketball Podcast. Let's get to it.

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Let's get to it. Indeed.

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You are Locked On Fantasy, your Daily NBA Fantasy Podcast, part of the Locked On Podcast Network, your team every day.

Josh Lloyd (1:18)

Hello and welcome to the Locked On Fantasy Basketball Podcast brought to you by Basketball Monster. My name is Josh Lloyd and I must get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini and I'll do that all thanks to FanDuel. Get in on all the NFL action all season along with FanDuel. Get started at fanduel.com. It is week five in the NBA. So let's take a look at how the week plays out, where the games are, what's on the schedule, what makes sense for streaming, what makes sense for manipulating the schedule to our grubby little hands advantages. That's what we're talking about. So we'll get in and have a crack because it is the fifth week in the season. So we are closing in on about 15% of the way through the entirety of the NBA year. And we'll just start things off by just taking a look at what the schedule has for us heading into the week.

It's a week where we've got streaming most days. It's a pretty well balanced week, apart from one day. We've got eight games on Monday, pretty good, five on Tuesday, twelve on Wednesday. That's a bit too much and we're going to, for the sake of this show and how we're approaching streaming and all that sort of stuff, looking at Wednesday as a non-streamable day. Thursday has four, Friday has nine, Saturday has, in fact, I'll say it this way, the weekend's got six, seven. Six on Saturday, seven on Sunday.

So we are streaming basically every day. We don't have any silly two game days either. We just got that big boy in the middle, the 12 game Wednesday. So when we talk about things like streamable and using back to backs and threes in fours and fours in sixes, we want teams that don't play on that Wednesday to get that advantage. That's what we want to look for. We want to make sure we can avoid or get the advantage on other players or other ads off the works. It's very easy to have a surface level look at a schedule and go four games, three games. All right, that's a very easy to do. But some four-game weeks and some three-game weeks are made different. Some teams with three games are the equivalent of some teams with four games in terms of usability off the waiver.

Some teams with four games are looking much better than some of the other teams with four games. So that will bring me to tell you about who actually does play the four games. This is a moderate sized week. What do I mean by that? There are only 13 teams that play four games. There are 16 teams that play three games and there is one that plays two games. So the four game teams this week, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Golden State, Memphis, Minnesota, the Pelicans, the Knicks, the Magic, the Blazers, the Jazz and the Wizards. And of those teams, the Knicks, the Wolves and the Blazers have the best schedule out of that group. They play all four of their games avoiding Wednesday. Now out of the 13 teams, there's only three of them, meaning the other 10 all play four, but one of them is on a 12 game day. So again, that's a significant advantage.

Being those only teams that give you actual four usable games versus adding another player for a four game week. And again, this is for daily changes leagues, for weekly, I say again, I haven't mentioned it at all. First, I'm mentioning it. For daily changes leagues, that's important. For weekly changes, it does not matter. You just want the four games. It doesn't matter what day the games are on because your lineup is already locked. So it doesn't make a difference. But daily changes leagues, when making those decisions, the Minnesota Timberwolves, the Portland Trail Blazers, the New York Knicks have got the advantage. They've got the best schedules this week. The bulk of the teams play three games. Atlanta, Brooklyn, Cleveland, Dallas, Houston, Indiana, the Clippers, the Lakers, the Heat, the Bucks, the Thunder, the Sixes, the Suns, the Kings, the Spurs, and the Raptors. Two of those teams, the Spurs and the Clippers, stand above everybody else because they play three games, avoiding Wednesday.