Stewart's Minutes Are Up. New York Is Ready to Feast.

Two games tonight, first tip at 7:00 PM ET, and honestly that's all you need. A small slate is a focused slate — fewer hiding spots for bad decisions, cleaner correlation opportunities, and one matchup that the model is pointing at with both hands.

NY hosts DAL in the nightcap's defining game, and then WSH squares off with POR in a second contest that's doing a lot of quiet work on the value board. Forty-six players across the pool, and the model has done its job: it's telling you where the minutes are, where the pace and defensive context tilt things, and where tonight's injury news has reshuffled the deck in ways that create real opportunity. The Liberty rotation has been altered by injury, and that single fact rewrites how you think about the top of your lineup. We'll get into it. Let's go.

The top of tonight's board is not subtle. Three of the six stud projections live in New York's lineup, and an injury has bumped their minutes — meaning the model is working with an expanded floor for each of them, not a projection built on hope.

Breanna Stewart is the model's highest projection on the slate at 44.8 points with a ceiling of 57.3, and she's doing it at a value of 4.07 points per $1,000 — which, at an $11,000 salary, is genuinely unusual. When an injury bumps minutes up to 36 for a player of her caliber, you don't ask a lot of questions. You put her in lineups.

Jonquel Jones is the same story, almost beat for beat: 36 projected minutes, 41.5 points, a floor of 31.2 that tells you there's a real basement here even on her bad night. She's a tick cheaper at $10,400 and slightly below Stewart on value, but both of them belong in the conversation as the foundational piece of your build. The fact that they're teammates matters for game-stacking logic, which we'll get to.

Paige Bueckers is the DAL anchor at 38.4 points projected and the highest salary on the board at $11,500. Her value number (3.34) is the lowest of the studs, but her floor of 27.8 says she's not going to completely vanish, and her ceiling of 49.9 keeps her relevant in tournaments. She's the natural way to get exposure to the DAL side of the NY/DAL stack without overpaying for Jessica Shepard's wider volatility — Shepard's floor of 19.0 is the thing worth watching. The ceiling is there (53.2), but that's a wide range.

Over in the WSH/POR game, Shakira Austin projects at 33.0 with a tighter range (21.9 floor, 44.1 ceiling) and is the cleanest way to diversify off the Liberty stack if your salary forces you that direction. Sabrina Ionescu, also minutes-bumped, sits at 35.4 projected with a ceiling of 54.3 — and at $9,600 she's the best salary-adjusted stud on the board, which we'll cover properly in the next section.

On a two-game slate, value isn't filler — it's the mechanism that lets you afford your studs. Tonight's value board has a clear tier structure: two players at $3,000 leading the pack on points per $1,000, and then a mid-tier play that ties the NY stack together beautifully.

Luisa Geiselsoder is the best value number on the entire slate at 4.8 points per $1,000. She's a POR player going against WSH, projecting 14.4 points in 19.6 minutes — and an injury has bumped her minutes. At $3,000, the ceiling of 23.5 is the kind of GPP outcome that can swing a tournament finish. The floor of 5.6 is real, and you should know it, but at minimum salary the downside is already priced in.

Marine Johannes is the piece that makes the Liberty stack click. She's projecting 21.2 points at $5,100 — that's 4.16 per $1,000 — and her minutes were bumped by injury, which is the same tailwind powering Stewart and Jones. Her ceiling of 29.8 isn't the tournament-winning number, but her floor of 10.3 and the correlation to NY's top producers make her the right mid-tier bridge. If Stewart and Jones are going off, Johannes is likely eating, too.

Stewart and Jones appear in the value table on pure math — both over 3.99 per $1,000 — which is worth naming. It's rare for a stud-salaried player to clear 4.0 in value. When it happens because of a minutes bump, the model is telling you something fairly direct.

Haley Jones ($3,000, DAL) and Sug Sutton ($3,000, DAL) round out the minimum-salary options on the Dallas side. Haley Jones projects 13.4 with a ceiling of 28.9 — that's the GPP appeal. Sutton is the lowest-floor play on the value board at 1.3, which is a number you respect. Both are viable as single-slot salary savers if you've built the rest of your lineup correctly; neither is a set-and-forget.

This is the part of the model worth understanding, because it's where live news becomes lineup construction in real time. When a player is unavailable, their minutes don't evaporate — they redistribute to teammates. The model captures that redistribution and re-weights the projections accordingly. Six players tonight are marked as minutes-bumped.

Three of them are Liberty players — Stewart, Jones, and Ionescu — which tells you the injury news in New York is meaningful. All three are now projected at 36 minutes, and the model's confidence in those numbers is reflected in their floors: Stewart at 32.9, Jones at 31.2, Ionescu at 20.9. Ionescu's wider floor-to-ceiling spread (20.9 to 54.3) relative to the other two is actually the interesting DFS story. She's the boom-or-bust version of the Liberty stack — at $9,600, she's the cheapest of the three, and if she hits her ceiling, she's probably your lineup's difference-maker.

On the POR side, three players absorbed minutes: Carla Leite ($8,700, 29.0 projected), Emily Engstler ($9,100, 28.4 projected), and Bridget Carleton ($8,500, 28.2 projected). Carleton stands out slightly here — 34.7 projected minutes is a real workload, and at $8,500 she's priced below where her new role suggests she should be. Her ceiling of 38.7 is the quiet tournament case in the WSH/POR game. Leite's wide range (12.3 floor, 43.5 ceiling) makes her the boom-or-bust version on that side, if you want to differentiate.

The honest framing: the injury edge is an information advantage, not a certainty. The model is reading the same publicly available news and redistributing minutes based on what it knows. What it does that's useful is translate that news into projection terms before most lineups get set.

On a two-game slate, game-stacking is less a strategy than it is a necessity. There aren't enough options to completely ignore correlation, and tonight the model is pointing you toward the NY side of the NY/DAL matchup hard enough that you'd need a real reason to fade it.

The foundational build starts with Breanna Stewart and Jonquel Jones as your dual anchors. Yes, they're expensive. Yes, they're on the same team. On a slate where three Liberty players have had their minutes bumped and both of your anchors are projecting 4.0+ in value, stacking the same team isn't reckless — it's coherent. Drop Marine Johannes in as the mid-tier bridge and you've got a Liberty three-stack with real correlation: when NY puts up a big number, all three are likely contributors.

From there, the question is how you want to handle the rest of the salary. Sabrina Ionescu at $9,600 is the GPP differentiator within the same stack — her ceiling of 54.3 is the highest of the injury-edge plays, and her value at 3.69 is legitimate. Adding her makes it a four-stack, which is aggressive, but on a two-game slate that kind of concentration can be exactly right when the signal is this clean.

To balance salary after the Liberty anchors, you're likely looking at minimum-salary exposure on the DAL or POR side. Luisa Geiselsoder at $3,000 is the cleanest choice — best value on the slate, minutes-bumped, WSH/POR game provides the cross-game diversification. Haley Jones at $3,000 gives you DAL exposure to hedge against the NY stack underperforming.

For cash-game construction — head-to-heads and 50/50s — lean on the higher-floor players: Stewart, Jones, and Carleton. The floor numbers on those three are the most reliable on the slate, and in formats where you're trying not to lose rather than trying to win big, floors matter more than ceilings.

For GPP and tournament entry, Ionescu's ceiling of 54.3 and Shepard's ceiling of 53.2 are the two plays worth taking a shot on at differentiated rates. Shepard's floor of 19.0 means she can hurt you, but that's what tournament construction accepts.

Tonight is a New York story. An injury has redistributed meaningful minutes across the Liberty's rotation, and Stewart, Jones, and Ionescu are all sitting at 36 projected minutes with value numbers that would be notable even without the minutes bump. The model is walk-forward validated — it beats the naive baselines out of sample with a MAE of 7.03 — which means these projections are earning their credibility, not just claiming it. Floor and ceiling figures reflect each individual player's own historical volatility, so when Stewart's floor is 32.9 and her ceiling is 57.3, that's her range, not a generic confidence interval. The POR injury situation quietly opens three mid-tier options worth monitoring, and Geiselsoder at minimum salary is the most efficient dollar on the board. Two games is a focused slate. The model has a clear lean. Build accordingly, know your floors, and let the ceilings sort themselves out.