G - Isaiah Canaan - OLY - 8.7 - vs BER
In the last two home games, Isaiah achieved 18.7 PIR, scored 20 and 19 points, respectively, (and OLY won both games!). Against BER, it is just another must-win game for OLY if they still want to be considered playoff material! Williams-Goss is uncertain, so we expect Isaiah to play more than 25 min. and lead his team's efforts to win mainly with his scoring ability. BER's high-tempo game is bread and butter for high-volume shooters like Canaan and for just 8.7 crd you buy a player that can definitely achieve more than 13 PIR!
G - Jerian Grant - PAO - 11.2 - vs EA7
If there was a Most Improved Player Award we would definitely give it to Jerian! But this is mostly for the whole season performance! Against EA7, we expect PAO to recover after the last week's defeat against MTA! Kostas Sloukas and Luca Vildoza are still in the injury list, so we expect Jerian to play again no less than 30 min. (29.7 season avg.) and with his playmaking ability and versatile game (8.9 pts, 2.3 rebs, 3.9 ast, 1.8 stls this season) to lead PAO efforts to win and cheer the Greek fans!
F - Luke Sikma - OLY - 7.7 - vs BER
This is a new entry into our list and somewhat unexpected, given that Luke Sikma has been performing way below his well-known (to all Euroleague Fantasy Fans) standards this season! Nevertheless, we have some very good reasons to believe that against BER (yes, his old team!) Luke can pay back a lot more than his 7.7 crd....and these reasons have a name (Nikola Milutinov, Moustapha Fall and Filip Petrusev) and a position (C)! OLY is left with no players to cover the C position, so we expect Luke Sikma to fill in and play more than his avg (10.4) time. His versatile game encourages us to believe that he can achieve a high PIR. If you are still not convinced, check the stats from his last game (17 PIR against RMB)!
C - Vincent Poirier - RMB - 11.8 - vs MTA
We will stick with the last week's choice (16.5 PIR was not that bad!) and pick Vincent Poirier again! Tavares is still in the pits, so we expect Poirier to play again 25+mins (~29 min in the last game) to face Josh Nebo! We expect RMB to win (ok, that's not very surprising) in a high-tempo game that can end up with several RMB players achieving high, double-digit PIR (and we expect Poirier to be one of those!)
C - Youssoupha Fall - ASV - 11.6 - vs FBB
It has paid back our (ok, might be more common) observation that FBB does not do very well this year in defending the opponent C! On the other hand, Youssoupha Fall comes from a tremendous b2b performance with PIR 30.8 and 25, respectively! No matter the game result, we expect ASV to fight hard against FBB, and we feel that this is a great opportunity to pick a C with just 11.6 crd that can pay back at least 16 PIR!