Yahoo Perfect 5: Victor Wembanyama, Yaxel Lendeborg and De’Anthony Melton lead my Friday lineup

Yahoo Sports is giving fans another way to play fantasy basketball with Perfect 5, a free-to-play game featuring each week’s NBA on Prime doubleheader. The rules are simple: pick five players, stay within a $15 budget and rack up fantasy points through scoring, rebounds, assists, defensive stats and 3s.

Friday’s slate features the Knicks at Pacers (7 p.m. ET) and Warriors at Spurs (9:30 p.m. ET). The big news came Thursday afternoon: Stephen Curry left the Warriors’ 115-108 loss to the Rockets in the first quarter with what turned out to be an oblique tear, and ESPN’s Shams Charania reported he’s expected to miss closer to a month. That knocks out one of the most valuable $5 options on the board and reshuffles the Golden State usage tree, which is exactly where I’m hunting value.

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Using Yahoo projections and the latest injury news, I ran 20,000 simulations of the slate across all 542,277 legal $15 lineups. I’m paying up for Victor Wembanyama and stacking the Warriors’ backcourt vacuum around him. Here’s my lineup:

My Perfect 5 lineup

Player

Team

Salary

Proj. pts

Victor Wembanyama

Spurs

$5

50.31

Yaxel Lendeborg

Warriors

$4

41.14

De’Anthony Melton

Warriors

$3

30.26

Keldon Johnson

Spurs

$2

23.68

Will Richard

Warriors

$1

14.68

Total

$15

160.07

In my sims, this group averaged 160.24 fantasy points and finished in the top 1% of all possible lineups 35.9% of the time, sixth-best of the more than 542,000 builds I tested. It’s 3.07 projected points shy of the max, but it’s roughly seven times less likely to be duplicated by the field.

Victor Wembanyama – C, San Antonio Spurs – ($5, 81% picked)

The chalkiest pick in the pool, but why fight it? He’s putting up absurd numbers on both sides of the ball. Wembanyama leads the slate at 50.31 projected fantasy points, more than 4.5 clear of anyone else, on the back of 30.3 points, 11.7 rebounds and 4.4 blocks per game. The Spurs have won 10 straight and sit at 10-2. Golden State is now without Curry and has an old and uninspiring frontcourt featuring Draymond Green, Al Horford and Charles Bassey. There’s no real size to bother Wemby at the rim.

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The one worry is the spread. San…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/fantasy/article/yahoo-perfect-5-victor-wembanyama-yaxel-lendeborg-and-deanthony-melton-lead-my-friday-lineup-165818631.html

Author : Dan Titus

Publish date : 2026-11-13 16:58:00

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