An interview with FanDuel CPO Nik Bonaddio on new NBA Daily Fantasy features with pro basketball underway.
The 2018-19 NBA season is just a couple of weeks in and already Steph Curry and Klay Thompson are setting three-point records, the LeBron James-led Los Angeles Lakers are trying to figure their early struggles out and the Minnesota Timberwolves are the embodiment of walking dysfunction.
All of these storylines could present themselves when playing daily fantasy basketball, especially with FanDuel, which rolled out two new features for NBA gameplay this season. MetroBet spoke with Nik Bonaddio, the Chief Product Officer of FanDuel, to give us the fastbreak on each new wrinkle.
“The first big one is we introduced a new roster format for regular season contests,” Bonaddio said. “So, you’ll draft the same nine players that you’d always would draft — that part doesn’t change — but we’re dropping the lowest score that you have. So, we’ll only count the top eight of those nine players.”
That gives users the ability to bolster their lineups, making them more efficient.
You can play FanDuel Daily Fantasy right now by clicking here and you can bet on sports at FanDuel Sportsbook if you are in the state of New Jersey by clicking here.
“The reason why we did this, is in the NBA, there’s a major ping point that users have around late scratches,” Bonaddio told MetroBet. “If you imagine a typical night of basketball, you’ve got games that start at 7 p.m. on the East Coast and then games that start 10, 10:30 on the West Coast. What happens in basketball is sometimes when you set your lineup at 7:00, you don’t know if someone’s going to play in the West Coast game. Things happen — people get injured, game-time decisions — so to alleviate some of the ping point around late scratches, we decided to drop your lowest scoring player.”
The new feature can help towards strategizing your lineup, allowing daily fantasy users to perhaps take a risk on a player with upside, knowing that he will get dropped if he’s the lowest-scorer. That, and users could intentionally pick a lower-salary player to purposely spend more on a superstar, knowing the former player will get dropped.
The other new FanDuel feature for daily fantasy NBA?
“We’ve really done a lot of rounds, making sure it’s very, very obvious which players are starting and which players aren’t,” Bonaddio explained. “So, we’ve added visual indicators, we’ve added a lot of content and research information into the site. So, for us it’s really all about making sure that users have the most info possible.”
Both the visual indicators and dropping the ninth-lowest scoring player definitely enhances gameplay for daily fantasy NBA on the site.
