Fantasy Basketball: The Devil's Playground

Japanese word of the day: 紛らわしい (magirawashii) = confusing. Fantasy basketball stat categories are confusing. In a standard 9-category league, you have all these categories that are different from each other: some are positive stats, some are negative stats, some are counting stats, some are percentage stats. It’s like counting apples to oranges.

Fantasy football has the easiest point system to understand. If someone (or a group of someones) does something, he gets a certain amount of points. Easily quantifiable. The only thing that matters are the points; there’s one category. Fantasy hockey I am totally lost; I still am befuddled as to what Goals-against-average is and why Penalty minutes count as a fantasy category. Fantasy baseball is a little harder to grasp because there are counting and percentage categories. However, ERA and WHIP are not terribly difficult to grasp and usually go hand in hand with each other, while batting average is pretty much tied to number of hits. Good hitters get hits, good pitchers have good ERA and WHIPs, etc. Basketball is a completely different ballgame and very magirawashii. A good player can be really good in 8 categories but be HORRIBLE on turnovers…..it’s difficult to account for how badly those turnovers hurt you. Can you just punt that category? FG & and FT% are like ERA and WHIP but more complex because one player can have a WAY larger impact on that category than another. Kevin Durant, for example, shoots like 10 free throws a game, while Shawn Marion shoots 1.3. Baseball pitchers generally throw similar amount of innings, nothing like a 10-to-1 ratio.

So it’s hard to gauge a player’s value. Yahoo! Fantasy sports I think has done a good job of creating the formula for assessing player value by taking all the aforementioned factors into account (that’d be interesting to see how their statisticans crunched the numbers, especially given that some players have injuries. It’s gotta cause some headaches). The undisputed No. 1 player and who has been for 3 years now is Kevin Durant. He usually leads the league in scoring, contributes 1.5 stls, 1.0 blks, 5 assists, 8.3 rebounds, 2.0 three’s, and perhaps his biggest contribution, 88% free throws but takes 10 a game. Depending on what kind of team you have, he can take half of a fantasy team’s free throws and basically win you that category himself. Huge. But he does have one fatal flaw: 3.1 turnovers. That’s a concern that someone who doesn’t turn it over as much might exploit to become a fantasy No. 1. After Durant it becomes so much harder to see who’s better than who, and it really takes a lot of experience to understand player values, which is why I feel that fantasy basketball is actually the most exciting strategical, number-crunching game of all the fantasy sports: you have to gauge which categories to go for, which players to get to fill those categories, etc. Fun stuff.

Here’s some fantasy players you wouldn’t expect to have great values and some observations to be gleaned from that:

1.) Anthony Davis, aka the Brow has emerged after a lot of (justified) preseason hype as the No. 2 fantasy player in fantasyland and could possibly at one time be No. 1 because of his AMAZING 3.2 blocks. Blocks are scarce anyway, but to own that category like that and only turn it over 1.5 times might make him one day better than Durant.

2.) LeBron James, the undisputed best player in the world today, is actually sixth in fantasy, kind of a down year for him. Never a great FT shooter, his 75% actually hurts most teams in that category, as does the 3.4 TO’s and a disappointing 0.3 blocks (down from previous seasons).

3.) Most surprising Top 10 player: Damian Lillard. You don’t usually see shoot-first point guards who don’t put up defensive numbers (0.8 stl’s) get into the Top 10, but his astounding 3.3 three’s a game lead the league and the 89.8% FT puts a Durant-like over that category.

4.) Al Horford is one of the most consistent fantasy players and a guaranteed Top-20 option every year because he’s solid in every category ( except 3’s of course, he doesn’t take those), especially %’s which are huge.  *** In the early rounds of every fantasy draft I look for guys who have solid %’s because specialists in all the counting categories can be had later on; there are just no “FT% specialists” or “FG% specialists” out there, so you need to establish a solid core in the first few rounds. Unfortunately Horford and Brook Lopez are both out for the season, zannen nagara (regrettable) for the fantasy community all around.

5.) Ryan Anderson is a “no-strings-attached” player………..No bad stats, all good stats, so you’re basically on a free roll. These guys aren’t sexy (applies to Ryan Anderson’s physical appearance as well) but the no-negative stats definitely has underappreciated value. Especially the 0.9 turnovers. Serge I-blocka falls into this category as well and dominates a scarce category.

6.) Josh Smith is the opposite of Ryan Anderson. A very sexy nightly 5x5 threat (5 points, 5 rebs, 5 assists, 5 stls, 5 blocks), he hurts in all 3 negative categories ( .400 FG, .608FT, 2.5 TO’s) Ranked 98^th by Yahoo! Sports, drafted way too high by me this year with like the 26^th pick in the draft. I don’t think I’ll ever draft Josh Smith again.

7.) Point guards are often guilty of the same “negative stats curse” as J-Smoove, the key deterrents being TO’s (inherently a lot) and FG% because they’re usually chuckers, or in the case of Ricky Rubio, just can’t shoot (miserable 34.8% FG).

8.) Btw, for a standard ESPN league team (10 starters, 4 bench players, 12 teams), the “average” stats a team should have is about 45% FG, 78% FT. Good to know when picking up guys to see if you’re hurting or helping you.

9.) Incredible bargains at the 76er mart: Spencer Hawes is No. 21 on Yahoo’s player rater, Thaddeus Young No. 18, Michael Carter-Willaims at 31. Only the Heat have 3 guys in the Top 30 fantasy as well named Lebron, Wade, and Bosh. Actually, check that, the true fantasy powerhouse team are the Blazers, with LaMarcus Aldridge, Lillard, Nicholas Batum, and Wesley Mathews all currently in the Top 30 (I say currently because I can’t picture Mathews staying there all year).

10.) Does anyone know who leads the league in rebounding this year? It’s not Kevin Love, it’s not Dwight Howard, it’s not Demarcus Cousins, it’s DEANDRE (frickin’) Jordan. He has Blake Griffin on his team too! Wow shocked. He’s also 40% FT and shoots 4 of them a game (kind of high). 

Fantasize on, 

Robert Yan