22/23 Fast Starts Guides – Part 1
If you are short on time this draft season, this is the guide for you. Below are 60 five-man combinations that will send you into the sixth round in good shape. I wouldn’t recommend taking this approach, but you could simply copy one of the below starts and finish your draft in a very good spot. The five-man combinations are broken down by first-round pick and punting build. This guide provides combinations for teams led by Nikola Jokic, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Steph Curry, Joel Embiid, Kevin Durant, and Karl-Anthony Towns. Part 2 of this guide will focus on building teams around the rest of the first-round options. When putting together these teams, I wasn’t trying to make the team as strong as possible after round five. That wouldn’t make sense. Our drafts are not five rounds long. I put these teams together with the goal of helping you finish the 13th round with the strongest team possible. That means that in most cases, I focused heavily on category scarcity. You’ll notice that a bunch of these combinations are a little light on bigs. That’s intentional since the guard categories dry up much quicker than the big man categories. We can make a comeback late in blocks and FG%, but we can’t make a comeback late in assists and FT%. I tried to be as realistic as possible when coming up with these recommendations. I tried to avoid making too many reaches. That means that you may be able to do better than a lot of these combinations. If you play on ESPN, that is likely to be the case, and if you play in a salary cap league, that is definitely the case. If you play on ESPN or in salary cap leagues, use these combinations as starting points. Study them and then see if you can tweak them to make them even better.
Giannis Antetokounmpo (Pick 2-4)
Punt FT%:
Antetokounmpo/VanVleet/Morant/Rozier/Poeltl – Close to perfect on a per-game basis. Punt FT% teams tend to struggle with points and assists and this team is excellent in both. Threes are a touch low but will be at least average if you take a guard in six. FG% is only average so keep an eye on it. A guard in five and Poeltl in six would be even better, but it’s not a lock that Yak will be there with so few quality bigs available in the middle rounds this year.
2022-2023 Fast Starts Guide – Part 1
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