We are about 30 games into the NBA season, enough for me to start drawing some meaningful conclusions from player data and assign dynasty directions for individuals. For this dynasty check-in, I’m diving in deep on six risers and six fallers from my latest dynasty rankings, providing insights on what I’m seeing from these players. This should give you an idea of how we should best analyze players’ games in order to determine their future. Let’s get right into it!

Risers

Karl-Anthony Towns

Sometimes, an increase in fantasy output is as simple as a role change. That is the case with Towns flourishing in New York, which is not entirely unexpected with a larger proportion of minutes as the lone center. With this gain has come more rebounding opportunities and more chances to contest shots at the rim. For his rebounding, a quick look at BasketballReference clearly shows how large Towns’ rebounding responsibilities are with the team. His DRB% (defensive rebounding percentage) is approaching 35%! That is by far leading the league, well ahead of other names like Domantas Sabonis or Ivica Zubac. In addition, his TRB% (total rebounding percentage) sits right above 23%, again leading the league quite comfortably.

It’s not simply the boards that have risen to new heights. Towns is also tasked with protecting the rim more frequently without Rudy Gobert lurking behind him. In New York, Towns is defending about 6.5 shots at the rim per-game per NBA.com. In his previous two seasons with Rudy Gobert, that number was just under 4.0 per-game. I’ll let others debate if Towns is an adequate rim protector (for the record, I think he is below-average). For fantasy though, more rim contests typically yield more blocks. You can reference either Towns’ higher block percentage (up to nearly 3% from 1.7% the past two seasons) or his actual increased blocks (up to 1.0 per-game from 0.6 per-game the past two seasons) to see the benefit for fantasy. With the enormous totals of boards and enough blocks to chip in there, Towns’ dynasty value has risen correspondingly.

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