Fantasy Basketball Forecaster: March 4th - 10th

Welcome to this week’s Fantasy Basketball Forecaster! In here, you’ll find:

• 3 players who are coming into the week hot
• 3 players who are coming into the week on a cold spell
• 3 waiver wire adds (among all players under 50% owned)
• Each teams schedule ranking, based on opponents’ stats allowed, where the #1 ranked team faces the easiest fantasy schedule this week, while the #30 ranked team faces the hardest

Let’s begin!

3 players who are hot

1. Trae Young (96.8% owned) — All you need to know about Young is that he’s averaging 34.8 points over the past week. He’s on fire and if by whatever absurd chance you play in that 3.2% of ESPN leagues where he’s un-owned, find yourself a new league. That’s the only advice I can give you.
2. James Harden (100% owned) — After a short blip we’re back to James Harden being just freaking filthy at the sport of basketball. 39.5 points per game over the last week. Good lord.
3. Nikola Jokic (100% owned) — 24/10.3/8 per game the last week. Jokic continues to be a fantasy machine, producing in just about every major category you need him to.

3 players who are not

1. Kyrie Irving (100% owned) — Kyrie has been far from great post-All-Star break, averaging only 18.8 points last week—a bit below his 23.4 on the season—despite playing more minutes.
2. Rudy Gobert (99.8% owned) — This pains me to write given that Gobert is an active member of “I Thought We Were Up” but he’s coming off a very poor week. So poor in fact that he has a negative score on ESPN’s player rater despite not missing any games. Awesome.
3. Jayson Tatum (99.4% owned) — The only stat Tatum was above his season averages on this past week was steals and turnovers. Just further evidence of the Celtics’ season spiraling out of control into a giant cesspool of awfulness.

3 players to add off waivers

1. Kelly Olynyk (11.2% owned) — What if I told you that starting is a really good look for Olynyk who is averaging 22.3 points, 6.5 rebounds, 2.8 assists on 34.5 minutes this past week. Oh, and he’s the number three rated player on ESPN over the last seven days.
2. Mitchell Robinson (26.3% owned) — Robinson has been filling in for DeAndre Jordan very well, averaging double digit boards and points this past week.
3. Patrick Beverley (20.8% owned) — PatBev was a must own before he was regularly starting for the Clippers and now it’s become even more true. This past week he averaged 11 points, 2.5 threes, 8.8 rebounds and 5 assists on 32.8 minutes.

Strength of schedule

Big week for all your Clippers players but could be rough going for the young studs in Chicago (really I’m just talking about Zach LaVine and Lauri Markkanen).