NBA GPP leverage: December 1

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! Now that the group stage of the NBA In-Season tournament is over, it looks like we have a regular roster.

This week I want to discuss the changing pricing dynamics that DraftKings has implemented to start the season. There has been a lot of discussion on this topic in Discord and on Ensure The Show since the start of the season, but one thing we all seem to agree on is that there is definitely a change in player salaries. Players who were seemingly in the low $4,000 price range are now in the high $4,000-$5,000 price range, which affects how the field constructs its lineups. There is no “best” way to handle this per se, and as fellow ETR contributor Jeremy King rightly points out, each listing is its own, and prices/games should be judged by in relation to this individual list.

That said, I wanted to look at players who have seen significant ownership on certain lists recently and see what they looked like last year.

To be clear, basically all of these players are on different teams or in different roles this season – and simple averages don’t mean much in terms of price for any player on any given roster. I excluded all games where these players played less than a few minutes so that we have a better idea of ​​when these guys were true rotation pieces in a given game. I’ll also add that the value column is calculated as the average of each individual game’s values ​​(not just the average score divided by the average salary shown above).

So, generally speaking, the price of some types is higher than last year. Yes, there are a lot more things to consider here, including new teams and roles etc. – but players with similar roles to last year, like David Roddy, Malik Beasley, Patrick Williams, Talen Horton Tucker, Josh Green, Josh Okogie, Robert Covington, Sam Hauser, Ochai Agbajiand others all cost at least $500 more in their “base” roles (i.e. their price is not increased to account for their new role or after big matches).

Before we try to figure out what the answer should be here, do these players deserve this price hike? Let’s look at some data from last season (there’s not a big enough sample size this year, but we’ll come back to that later in the season).