In a team nine-category league, the winning team will probably score at least 85 points, if not more. If you're starting the season by accepting just one point in a category, then you need to average It's not impossible, but it is very, very difficult. You could write books going into the nuances of categorical scarcity, and the topic is a primary focus of our Numbers Game column. That said, here are the key basics.
Blocks and assists are the scarcest categories, and the two hardest to find after the draft. Most of the leagues' assists come from the top point guards, with a few notable exceptions — Nikola Jokic , LeBron James , Draymond Green , and a few others.
All of the non-point-guard assists leaders are going to get drafted, and most of them will go in the first couple of rounds. When a point guard becomes worthy of acquisition off the waiver wire, they rarely are high-impact passers.
Similarly, there will be some shot-blocking big men who emerge off waivers as the season rolls along, but, as with assists, those players rarely block enough shots to make a major impact. As with assists, most of the best shot-blockers will all get drafted in the first couple of rounds. Rebounds and three-pointers are on the opposite end of the spectrum, especially as the league continues to attempt more and more threes each season.
While the top 10 or so rebounders stays pretty steady from year to year, there are always several big men who emerge early in the season as reliable sources of boards. Furthermore, as big men get hurt, their backups usually step in and provide a decent facsimile of the starter's rebounding load.
Threes are a slightly different story, but the results are the same. As the total number of threes has increased, finding quality three-point shooters later in drafts has become easier and easier. Every year, a few players emerge as semi-surprising additions to the threes-per-game leaderboard.
Perhaps more importantly, due to the streaky nature of long-range shooting, managers who remain active on the waiver wire can usually find a few players going through a hot streak and averaging several made threes per game.
While the near-constant presence of these waiver-wire pickups are helpful, there is still a lot of value in drafting potential league-leaders like Bradley Beal or Buddy Hield. Rather, the depth of the category should impact your decisions later in drafts. Points are tricky. On the one hand, all the best scorers are going to get drafted early. Unless you are deliberately punting the category, you'll probably need to draft at least one plus-point scorer early to stay competitive.
On the other hand, points are often overvalued by fantasy managers. Low scorers like Brook Lopez and Larry Nance always get drafted much later than they should — they finished last season ranked 31 and 55, respectively, but currently have average draft positions ADP of 83 and High scorers get picked up off waivers much quicker, even if they provide little value in the other categories.
Furthermore, as NBA offenses have changed, there are more high scorers available in the later rounds of drafts than ever before. Points do become available on waivers throughout the season, but most of the time, it's only players who score between 13 and 18 points. Those guys can help, but, here too, waivers are unlikely to bail you out if you missed on this category on draft day.
Steals are always available on waivers. The problem? Most of those thieves don't provide enough help in the other categories to be worth rostering.
That means that managers in daily lineups leagues can provide meaningful help off of waivers, especially late in the week in a close H2H matchup, but that managers in weekly lineups leagues will have a harder time using the waiver wire to bolster their rosters.
The best way to stay competitive in steals is to try to draft players who average close to a steal per game. For every player you expect to average 0. If you can do that, you should be in the top-half of your league in the category. The shooting efficiency categories are the most commonly punted categories, and with good reason. There are many very good fantasy picks who immediately escalate to "great picks" if you can ignore their weakness in one category or the other.
For that reason, managers should remain careful when trying to build strength in these two categories. One last note — there are also some well-founded strategic arguments against punting either shooting efficiency category.
Foremost among them, is that it is likely another manager in your league may attempt the same build, and that a punt-percentages team suffers more than other roster builds when their team has fewer games than their opponent in a given week. If you've played in points leagues before, and this is your first time playing in a category-based league, make sure to compare last season's final ranks in points leagues to last season's final ranks in category leagues.
This should help you get a good sense of which players take some pretty big rises like the aforementioned Lopez , and which fall Andrew Wiggins jumps to mind. Remember that category scarcity is now much more important that positional scarcity. Positions still matter, but they matter a lot less. Lastly, and this applies to points leagues as well as category leagues: remember that your last few picks are probably going to be dropped a few weeks later anyway.
Take a few risks on upside, or focus on players who might fill some specific categorical weakness — there is no such thing as "reaching" at the end of a draft. When you're entering a fantasy draft for any sport, being adequately prepared is key. For novice and experienced fantasy players alike, familiarizing yourself with your league's settings is a crucial step in that process.
In the world of fantasy basketball, almost all leagues operate under either a Points or Categorical format. These formats share some overlap, but whereas in categorical leagues the goal is to win — or finish highly within — as many stat categories as possible, points leagues present a different challenge. Unlike category leagues, Points leagues disregard altogether how players go about accruing fantasy stats.
Like with most fantasy football leagues, each statistical category is assigned a point value, and each player's points — regardless of how they're earned — are simply added up to produce a final score over a given period — typically one week. Those may be the default numbers, but most host sites will allow you to tailor the values to your league's specific preferences. For instance, if you'd like to increase the impact of blocked shots, you could raise that point value accordingly.
In the same vein, you can add or subtract categories, which will have ripple effects in terms of which player archetypes lose or gain value. If you were to add, say, Made Three-Pointers as another category alongside Points, stars like Stephen Curry and James Harden would become even more sought-after, while lesser-known three-point specialists like Joe Harris or J. Redick would also pick up some value. In categorical leagues, it's difficult to manage each category — usually, there are eight or nine — and ensure your roster doesn't have any major deficiencies.
A well-rounded team is a near-requirement for title contention, but that's not necessarily the case in points leagues. One of the benefits to points formats is not having to worry about being dragged down in a single category. If a player is an elite rebounder or shot-blocker but struggles at the free throw line, that deficiency is masked in a way that it would not be in a category league.
As such, players like Andre Drummond , Hassan Whiteside , Russell Westbrook and Ben Simmons typically become more valuable in points formats, as their elite counting stats translate directly to "fantasy points," as opposed to only affecting certain categories.
Consider the following example: Let's say on a given night, Andre Drummond scores 0 points, going 0-for from the field and 0-for at the free throw line. However, he grabs 20 rebounds and blocks five shots. If you were in a categorial league, the rebounds and blocks would be nice, but Drummond's lack of scoring would add nothing to your Points category, and his poor shooting would negatively impact both your Field Goal Percentage and Free Throw Percentage categories.
Conversely, in a points league, you'd only be concerned about Drummond's total fantasy output. Sure, it'd be nice if he scored some points to add to his bottom line, but the 20 rebounds and five blocks alone would be worth 39 fantasy points under the aforementioned standard scoring system. With that in mind, it's important to consider the type of players who gain or lose value in points formats. Counting-stat monsters like the four mentioned above tend to rise in rankings, while players valued for their efficiency — think Malcolm Brogdon or Stephen Curry — lose some value.
Meanwhile, points leagues depreciate the value of players who produce above-average numbers in only one or two categories. Unless those categories are heavily weighted — for example, if your league awards 4 points for each steal — a bench player who averages 1.
Similarly, single-category specialists — and especially score-first players — tend to have diminished value in points formats. Someone like Terrence Ross would aid a categorical owner in Points and Threes, but his relative lack of rebounds, assists and defensive numbers mean he's really only helping points-league owners build value through one source, and scoring is far and away the easiest stat to find — therefore, it tends to carry the lowest point value.
When it comes to preparing for a points league draft, the bottom line is you're looking for the best overall fantasy players.
Using projections you trust is especially valuable in points leagues, as you can simply plug in your league's scoring values to generate a list of players ranked by their expected total fantasy output. In a sense, that should make building a roster easier, as long you make sure to account for filling each required position.
Speaking of which, be sure to familiarize yourself with your league's roster settings, in addition to its scoring values. Most leagues won't require you to jump through hoops, but it's important to know ahead of time if you should be targeting certain positions. A league that requires two starting centers, for example, makes the position more valuable and raises the importance of locking down productive options at both starting spots.
In short, you don't want to be the owner who waits too long and is forced to start Dwight Powell and Serge Ibaka each week while more productive options at other positions waste away on your bench.
Regardless of format, roster balance is key. Among the other factors to consider in points leagues — or any leagues, for that matter — is the weekly schedule breakdown. Every team plays 82 games, but not all weeks are created equally, and there will certainly be times when it makes sense to bench an elite player for an inferior option. If the Wizards play only two games in a given week, while the Rockets play five, benching Brad Beal for Eric Gordon is the logical play, even though Beal is the vastly superior player.
Here's a breakdown of the calculation using last season's averages rounded to the nearest whole number and standard points league values:. You play to win the game. It doesn't matter what the final score is, or how your get there. In head-to-head fantasy leagues, a win is just as good as or The core concept of punting categories is based on that basic premise.
The idea is that by deliberately ceding some categories, managers will be better able to win the majority of what is left. The basic idea of punting may seem straightforward, but there are several advantages to punting, and understanding all of them makes it easier for managers take full advantage of the strategy. The most obvious advantage to punting is that it limits the field of competition each week.
When two non-punting teams face-off, they are beginning a fight on nine distinct battlefields, most of which have uncertain outcomes. Management of the battle is complex, and the large number of separate conquests means there are a large number of areas that could yield unexpected outcomes.
A team that punts, however, is competing on fewer battlefields, as the team is likely elite in some categories and dreadful in others. A punting team may enter each week almost certain of at least a record, and only have to compete in the remaining six categories. Furthermore, the punting team has been built specifically to fight in those six each week, adding further advantage.
Another important advantage of punting is that managers are not wasting production on categories that they do not need to stay competitive. This is most relevant on draft day, but it is also relevant for managers assessing trades and waiver acquisitions.
The flip side of not overpaying for wasted production is that punting makes some players more valuable to the punting team than to the rest of the league. A final note: Always remember that the point of punting categories isn't to be bad.
The point of punting categories is that by ignoring some categories, you're better set up for success in others. The most important key to winning in fantasy sports — not just basketball — is making sure you know your league's settings. Punting can be a great strategy in some leagues, but it is also an actively bad strategy in other formats. First, punting is only possible in category-based leagues. Categories do not have independent values in points leagues, making punting impossible.
Punting is usually a bad idea in roto leagues. In most roto leagues, the harm done by punting is too significant to come back from. Some analysts will go farther than we do here, arguing that punting is never a good idea in roto leagues. We won't go quite that far, but it is very hard to do well, and it requires planning. Punting is easier in smaller roto leagues, since the deficit lost in the punted category is smaller in team leagues the first place team gets only 10 points, compared to 14 points in a team league.
We agree with a majority of analysts on this point: it is effectively impossible to win a roto league while punting more than one category. Punting is easier to do in an auction draft than a snake draft. The most common categories to punt are free throw percentage and blocks. In an auction draft, a manager can also simply avoid spending on any player whose value is boosted by his shot-blocking abilities, allowing other teams to spend their resources — both their auction budget and their roster spaces — on blocks while the blocks-punter hoards for more useful assets.
Successful punting requires planning, and this is especially true of an auction draft. As the fantasy sports world grows larger by the day, many new reporters, blogs, media sites, and content providers will enter this space and compete for your attention. This is great news for you the player always looking to get the best information.
A good indicator of a story's veracity especially on stories you are unsure of is when multiple outlets report on it. There is a lot of data out there and many pundits with similar tips or advice likely have a better chance of being of being correct.
Not everyone can devote as much time as they would like to researching fantasy sports, but getting an edge over your opponents can sometimes be as simple as opening your eyes and ears to news around topics that concern your teams.
By staying informed and acting swifter than your competitors on the waiver wire, or by tinkering with tools such as RotoWire's lineup optimizer , you can often come out on top at the end of a contest. Moderators: floppymoose , Curtis Lemansky.
Post 1 » by nghedman » Wed Nov 5, pm. Post 2 » by Godmoney » Wed Nov 5, pm. Return to Fantasy Basketball. Menu NBA. He quietly improved nonetheless and turned into one of the most overlooked playmakers in the NBA. Evan Mobley seems to be what Cleveland has been looking for, a player who with his abundant and adaptable skills, casts the play of everyone around him in a rosier light.
Scottie Pippen didn't get exactly what he wanted a long time ago, and has let those minor slights govern the entire back half of his life. He wears his disappointments about as heavily as any retired athlete in recent memory. In this piece, I identify some of the key management strategies for season-long fantasy basketball we can employ throughout the NBA marathon. To perform a successful draft, you need to keep this information in mind as well as a few other important tips:.
Unlike previous versions of the game where the system only enforced a game starts limit, this year the system enforces a maximum number of acquisitions allowed per head-to-head matchup. Yes, you can drop someone but cannot pick someone up. Yeah, this. It is a player acquisition limit, not a roster moves limit.
Fantasy basketball is a fantasy sport for basketball that was popularized during the s after the advent of the Internet.
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