I am often asked by subscribers to the ASL DFS Optimizer: What is the best strategy for winning at DFS? If you are looking for the football version, see NFL DFS Strategy.
Every sport has its own nuances, and NBA DFS is very different from NFL DFS. But the basic objective is the same: build a lineup that gives you the best opportunity to outperform the field.
ASL's NBA DFS strategy focuses on several connected ideas: player usage, lineup balance, game environment, player correlation, contest selection and bankroll management.
Before getting into any of them, one thing needs to be clear: no strategy can guarantee a win or a positive return. DFS should be treated as entertainment. Never spend more than you can afford to lose. Play responsibly and keep it fun.
Start With Usage: Who Controls the Basketball?
One of the most important concepts in NBA DFS is usage.
In simple terms, usage measures how much of a team's offense runs through a player while he is on the court. High-usage players tend to take more shots and otherwise finish more possessions. Lower-usage players are more dependent on teammates creating opportunities for them.
That matters because the five players on the floor are sharing a limited number of possessions.
If one player dominates his team's offense, other players cannot simultaneously dominate those same possessions. That creates an important lineup-building principle:
Be careful about pairing same-team players who compete for the same offensive opportunities.
ASL's NBA strategy distinguishes between high-usage players and lower-usage, or "off-ball," players. One practical rule set treats usage above roughly 25% as high usage, while lower-usage thresholds vary by position — for example, less than 24% for point guards, 22% for wings and 17.5% for big men — power forwards and centers.
Those percentages are not magic numbers. The larger idea is what matters: understand which players need the basketball to reach their ceilings and avoid unnecessarily putting several of them from the same team into one lineup.
Using Negative Correlation With Today's Optimizer
This is one area where today's ASL DFS Optimizer can help.
If you believe two same-team positions tend to compete for fantasy opportunities, you can assign that combination a negative stack bonus. The optimizer will then be less likely to pair those positions unless their projections are strong enough to overcome the penalty.
It is an approximation. ASL's current optimizer does not automatically know whether a particular shooting guard is a high-usage star or a low-usage complementary player. You still need to understand the players and adjust your settings accordingly.
There is also one non-intuitive step: these correlation settings are available through Multi-Lineup Mode. If you only want one lineup, use Multi-Lineup Mode and set the number of lineups to 1. You get the advanced correlation controls while still asking the optimizer for only your single strongest lineup.
Don't Overload One Team With Expensive Players
Salary provides another useful signal.
ASL's strategy generally avoids taking several of the most expensive players from the same team. One practical approach is to identify the top salary tier on each team — for example, the top 10% — and limit how many of those premium players appear together.
That does not mean two stars from the same team can never have big fantasy nights together. They certainly can.
The issue is opportunity cost.
If you spend heavily on two or three players from the same team, you are asking all of them to justify premium salaries while sharing the same possessions. In many situations, spreading those salary dollars across stars from different teams gives each player a clearer path to reaching his ceiling.
The question is not simply:
Who projects for the most points?
It is:
How much upside am I buying, and how many players in this lineup are competing for the same opportunities?
Game Environment Matters
NBA DFS is also heavily influenced by the environment surrounding each game.
Two useful indicators are the projected game total and the point spread.
A high projected total suggests a game expected to produce more scoring. A close spread suggests the teams are expected to remain competitive. That combination is attractive because good players may receive their normal workload deep into the fourth quarter.
A carefully constructed lineup can therefore allow more players from teams involved in the strongest scoring environments while being more restrictive with teams from lower-scoring games.
One practical framework is:
- allow as many as four players from teams in the highest group of projected game totals;
- reduce that to three from the middle group;
- and generally limit lower-total teams to two players.
That is the type of disciplined roster construction ASL's NBA strategy uses.
Again, the exact numbers are less important than the principle:
The more heavily you concentrate your lineup around one NBA team, the stronger the game environment should be.
High Usage + Close Game = Opportunity
Now the concepts begin working together.
Suppose a player has very high usage. His team is playing in one of the night's higher-scoring games, and the point spread suggests the game should remain competitive.
That is an attractive combination.
The player already controls a large percentage of his team's offense, the game environment provides plenty of scoring opportunity, and the close spread increases the likelihood that he plays his normal minutes through the end of the game.
ASL's strategy gives additional weight to high-usage players in games with spreads within roughly five points.
The lesson is important:
A projection is the starting point. Strategy asks when the surrounding conditions make you more or less confident in that projection.
What About Blowouts?
Large point spreads create a different problem.
If one team is expected to win easily, there is a greater chance that the game becomes noncompetitive and the stars lose fourth-quarter minutes. In NBA DFS, losing minutes can destroy an otherwise excellent projection.
The obvious reaction is to avoid blowout games altogether.
But tournament strategy sometimes rewards thinking one step further.
If a blowout occurs, inexpensive bench players can receive extra court time. A player who normally has little DFS value can suddenly play enough minutes to outperform a very low salary.
That creates a contrarian opportunity.
ASL's strategy reserves a small percentage of lineups for this type of scenario: inexpensive players from games with very large spreads, combined with stronger players from high-scoring environments. One version specifically looks for players below roughly $4,000 on DraftKings on teams involved in games with spreads above 10.5 points.
This should remain a small part of the strategy, not the foundation. The underlying approach dedicates roughly 93% of lineup construction to the balanced core and about 7% to this contrarian blowout idea.
That ratio captures the philosophy nicely:
Build primarily around what you believe is most likely to happen, while leaving a little room for something the field may be underestimating.
Build Around a Balanced Core
Put everything together and the basic NBA DFS strategy becomes much easier to understand.
A strong lineup should generally:
- avoid unnecessary concentration among players competing for the same offensive role;
- avoid loading several premium-salary players from the same team;
- favor stronger scoring environments when using multiple players from one team;
- give extra consideration to high-usage players in games expected to remain competitive;
- and recognize that occasional contrarian opportunities can exist in games the field may be avoiding.
You do not need to memorize every usage threshold or game-total percentile to benefit from those ideas.
The objective is to architect the lineup rather than simply accept the eight highest projected players who fit under the salary cap.
Snipe the Shotgun
Building a strong lineup is only half of DFS strategy. Where you enter that lineup matters too.
Large-field DFS contests often allow players to enter dozens or even 150 different lineups. Those players are effectively firing a shotgun — spreading their entries across many different possible game outcomes in the hope that one of them hits exceptionally well.
ASL takes a different approach: Snipe the Shotgun.
Rather than trying to cover the entire possibility space, concentrate on your single best lineup — or perhaps your best lineup from each projection provider — and enter that carefully constructed lineup into the large field.
The shotgun player is intentionally creating diversity. His objective is not to rank 150 lineups from best to worst. He is building a portfolio designed to cover many different outcomes, deliberately reducing correlation among his lineups. Ideally, some may even be negatively correlated: one lineup might depend on a particular game becoming a shootout while another benefits from the opposite game script.
That diversification is valuable to the portfolio, because it increases the chance that at least one lineup matches what actually happens. But mathematically, all of those competing scenarios cannot occur at once. Most of the individual shotgun pellets must miss.
The sniper makes the opposite tradeoff. Instead of sacrificing individual hit rate to cover more possibilities, he concentrates on the lineup he believes has the best standalone chance of succeeding.
That is the opportunity behind Snipe the Shotgun. Large-field contests contain enormous numbers of entries built for portfolio coverage rather than maximum standalone hit rate. Over a large sample of contests, your carefully constructed best lineup should therefore have a higher hit rate than the average individual lineup in that field.
Snipe the Shotgun is not about maximizing the chance of finishing first in any one contest. It is about maximizing the quality and hit rate of each lineup you enter, with the goal of producing more consistent winning results over time.
Bankroll Management
Snipe the Shotgun does not determine how much money you risk. Your choice of contests and entry amounts does. You could enter 150 lineups in ten-cent contests for $15 total, or put a single lineup into a $25 contest. Decide how much of your bankroll to risk first, then decide where your best lineup gives you the most attractive opportunity.
Your lineup strategy determines how you play. Your bankroll strategy determines how long you get to keep playing.
I generally recommend risking no more than about 25% of the money you have deposited for DFS at any one time. If you win and your bankroll grows, your stakes can grow with it. If you lose, the amount you put at risk naturally declines.
That creates a simple form of self-correction. A losing streak reduces your exposure before it can do too much damage, while sustained success gradually gives you more money to work with.
There is nothing magical about 25%, and more conservative players may want to use considerably less. The important principle is to avoid risking so much of your bankroll at once that a bad night significantly limits your ability to keep playing.
DFS should be entertainment. Never risk money you cannot afford to lose.
Where ASL Is Going Next
Everything described above can be applied today.
Today's DFS Optimizer can already help with projections, salary management, player locks and excludes, and same-team correlation settings. The more advanced NBA concepts — usage groups, game-environment rules, strategy mixes and contrarian scenarios — still require some manual thought from the user.
That is one of the areas we plan to make much easier in ASL's Next Generation DFS Optimizer.
Our goal is to let the software understand much more of the strategy itself rather than forcing users to manually reproduce every rule. And as I have discussed previously, our intention is to make the optimizer dramatically more powerful without turning it into an expensive product available only to professional DFS players.
You can read more about that direction in ASL's Next Generation DFS Optimizer.
But you do not need to wait for Next Gen to apply the strategy.
Strategy Still Comes First
No optimizer can tell you exactly what is going to happen in an NBA game.
Players get injured. Rotations change. Coaches change their minds. Games expected to stay close become blowouts, while supposed mismatches unexpectedly go down to the final possession.
The objective is not to eliminate uncertainty.
It is to build lineups that make intelligent use of it.
Understand who controls the offense. Understand which players compete for the same opportunities. Understand the game environment. Build primarily around the most likely scenario, while leaving room for the occasional scenario the rest of the field may be overlooking.
Then take your best shot.
That's NBA DFS strategy.
