NBA DFS Picks and Strategy: Core Plays (2/12/26)

Today is the last day before the NBA All-Star break. Unless you are enough of a sicko to play All-Star Game DFS, we’re about to enter a very boring week. Hoops will be back a week from today, and we’ll see how teams treat the final few months of the season.

In the meantime, we’ve got a 3-gamer on tap for tonight. All of the games have some degree of blowout risk, and game-stacking is obviously viable on a slate this small. We’ve also got plenty of injury news, the Jazz, and plenty of value, so it’ll be a weird one, no doubt.

I’ll give my building blocks for both sites as well as some general lineup-specific strategy #takes.

DraftKings Core Plays	FanDuel Core Plays
LeBron James	LeBron James
Naji Marshall	Isaiah Collier
Ousmane Dieng	Kenrich Williams

Lineup Rules & Player Groups

Setting lineup rules is a big part of finding an edge in this sport. Lots of people will simply run their optimizers and play whatever the calculator spits out. This may be a good way to get across the cash line, but you’re unlikely to separate yourself from the field that way. Rules should generally be less stringent on a 3-gamer than they are on a 13-gamer, of course.

Here are some player groups and rules I’ll be implementing in my tournament lineups tonight. I don’t think these are absolute musts, but I generally like to take a pretty aggressive approach in an attempt to get lineups that look different from much of the field.

Bucks

Max-2 Turner/Kuzma/Sims (if Kuzma plays)
Max-1 Rollins/KPJ (if Rollins plays)
Max-3 Overall

Thunder

Max-1 Wallace/Dort
Max-1 Caruso/Wiggins
Max-1 Joe/McCain
Max-3 Overall

Blazers

Max-2 Grant/Camara/Cissoko
Max-4 Overall

Jazz

Utah is the primary source of value tonight because they’re tanking. Projections for this team are generally fragile, especially with so many new players now in the mix. These rules are also pretty aggressive, and they’re subject to change as a result, depending on what we hear about this team ahead of time. I’ll update these if necessary, but as of now I’m leaning toward rolling with them: