Posts Tagged Chris Douglas-Roberts

Elbows to his face aren't the only high-percentage shots Carl Landry is taking lately. (Getty Images)

Week 9 featured the return of some quality fantasy backups, the emergence and re-emergence of some efficiency experts, and the re-emergence of an inefficiency expert.

Tyrus Thomas, Leandro Barbosa, and Jameer Nelson

All three guys returned this week, and I’m pretty psyched to have all three on one of my squads (Thomas and Barbosa as of two weeks ago).  Thomas made the biggest noise with a 21 and 9 performance vs. the Hornets Saturday night, while Barbosa had a couple solid games and Nelson was a little up-and-down.  Needless to say, all three should be taken in most formats.

Zach Randolph and Carl Landry

Meanwhile, two guys who started off the season with fairly pedestrian numbers have really stepped their games up over the last several weeks.  Don’t look now, but Z-Bo is averaging 23 and 14 in the month of December on 51% shooting from the field and a ridiculous 92% from the stripe.  Meanwhile, Carl “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth” Landry has averaged 17.6 and 5.6 on a whopping 63% from the field and 86% from the stripe (and with a nice 7 attempts per game).

They’re also both relatively cheap trade targets, for different reasons.  Landry, because he’s still relatively unknown, and Randolph, because he’s traditionally known as only a “points and rebounds” guy, which is still mostly true (he’s also at 1.1 spg over the last month), but his efficiency has translated into a #28 ranking by Yahoo averages over the last month.  (Landry is #44.)  Both will likely drop off  some, but if you’re going to target either, you can probably get Landry at a much better value, although you might want to wait for him to stop having 20-point games before making an offer.

(And speaking of efficiency, I also wanted to note another potentially “cheap” guy.  Raymond Felton is ranked a ridiculous #14 over the last month, shooting 53% from the field and 90% from the line.  Again, he likely can’t keep that up, but he looks to have turned a corner with his improved shot selection.)

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