3 Daily Fantasy Basketball Players to Avoid on 3/30/16

Finding players you want to roster is a lot easier than finding players to avoid. Here are three players based on their price and matchups that could be landmines for your rosters tonight.

You can find a ton of great information and research on guys you might want to include in your DFS NBA lineups tonight, but what about some guys you may want to lessen your exposure to, or even fade altogether?

Avoiding players whose matchups or situations aren't as great as they seem can often be just as important as finding the best targets each night. After all, it takes only one player to sink a lineup.

With a larger slate of NBA games on tonight, searching for the landmines could mean the difference from winning or losing your contests.

Karl-Anthony Towns, C, Minnesota Timberwolves

FanDuel Price: $9,000

If anyone out there is suggesting anyone other than Karl-Anthony Towns for the Rookie of the Year award this season, feel free to give them one swift kick right to the jaw. The fact is Towns locked this award up months ago, and every other rookie is battling for second place. Towns is coming off another masterful performance, both from a fantasy and real-life perspective, dropping 27 points, 10 rebounds and 5 assists against the Suns. This added up to nearly 50 FanDuel points.

However, despite some of his recent successes, Towns has had some trouble with tougher matchups recently, and he has owned the easier ones. Tonight is one of the tough ones, as he faces off against DeAndre Jordan. If you look at Towns’ game log, in his last 10 games he has fallen below value against the Jazz, Grizzlies, Thunder and Spurs, four of the top five teams at defending centers this season. While the Clippers only rank 16th at defending centers this season, Towns has struggled in three career games against Jordan.

In his three matchups against Jordan this season, Towns is averaging only 32.7 FanDuel points per game. His best showing was his most recent game against him where he had 17 points and 12 rebounds, but what is even more concerning tonight is the potential for foul trouble. In those three games, Towns is averaging about 5.4 fouls per-36 minutes, so with the tough matchup thrown in there, too, Towns’ price of $9,000 seems a bit high tonight. Jordan is holding players he has defended to only 44.3 percent from the floor this season and only 53.1 percent from inside six feet, both of which are well above average for the players he has defended.

Luke Babbitt, SF, New Orleans Pelicans

FanDuel Price: $4,700

Luke Babbitt has been forced into action for the Pelicans lately because of all their injuries, and he has been playing well. Unfortunately, that has led to his price tag increasing pretty substantially over the last few games, and now that it is all the way up to $4,700, it makes him more difficult to roster. Combine his price increase with his matchup against the Spurs tonight, and you have a player that I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole.

Reports out of San Antonio say that Kawhi Leonard will be back tonight, so Babbitt is going to see Leonard opposite him. As we have talked about before, that makes him almost an automatic fade. The reigning Defensive Player of the Year is coming off an injury, but not a serious one, which makes him more rested tonight than anything.

Leonard is holding players he defends to an outstanding 39.4 percent from the floor and only 41.4 percent from inside the three-point line. This has the Spurs as the number-one team against small forwards this season in FanDuel points allowed, so while Babbitt has been hot recently, don’t fall into the Babbitt trap tonight.

Ricky Rubio, PG, Minnesota Timberwolves

FanDuel Price: $7,400

While I usually don’t like to include two members of the same team in the landmines, much like his teammate, Towns, Ricky Rubio has a pretty tough matchup tonight. What makes a guy a landmine more than anything is recent success in his game log, which can lead people to avoid looking deeper. Assuming a player is hot and rostering him despite potential price increases and matchups can get you into trouble. Rostering a player because of a current hot streak is more of a daily fantasy baseball strategy than it is a basketball one. While recent hot streaks do come into play in hoops, a player’s matchup is much more important.

Take Rubio’s recent successes. Outside of an outlier game against the Jazz, four of his last five games have come against teams that rank in the bottom half of the league against point guards. Even further, three of those games came against teams that rank 23rd or worse. Now he has to go against Chris Paul and the Clippers, who rank seventh-best against point guards this season, allowing only 0.84 FanDuel points per minute to the position.

If you take a look at Rubio’s recent games against Paul, both this season and last, Paul has gotten the better of Rubio on almost every occasion. If you take away a random triple-double that Rubio had against Paul last season, in five of his last six games against Paul, Rubio is averaging fewer than 25 FanDuel points per game. He does have two games of at least 32 FanDuel points against Paul this season, so while he is not an automatic fade tonight, limiting your exposure to Rubio might be wise.