Fantasy Basketball Advice

Nene Hilario led the league in FG% in 2010, but attempted just 40 percent of the shots Kobe Bryant did. Blake Griffin attempted 20 more free throws than Kevin Durant, but made 148 fewer than he did. Also, Dwight Howard’s FT% was just .003 percentage points higher than his FG% – and this was his best free throw-shooting season since he was a rookie. What does any of this mean? According to my cranky grandpa, “Nothing! Now get outta the way of the TV before you make me miss SVU!” According to Nihilists, “Nothing! Or as much as anything else in this existence! Now get outta the way of the TV before I miss the nothingness that is SVU!” According to Kierkegaard, “It means only as much as you let it. Now get outta the way of the TV in case I decide to place importance on watching SVU!” Eesh. When it comes to fantasy basketball percentages, placing accurate importance on them is tricky. Most owners don’t do it. The quickest way to drown yourself out of a league (H2H, Roto – it doesn’t matter) is to estimate inaccurately or ignore it altogether and hope it all works out in the end. It won’t.

The boys over at Give Me the Rock are wiling away the summer months with a batch of solid statistical examinations. They recently calculated Effective Percentages, a clever way of removing the relativity from player shooting percentages and putting every player on a level playing field.

At season’s end, perennial sharpshooter Steve Nash finished third with a .912 free throw shooting percentage last season. Houston’s Kevin Martin finished five spots behind him with an .888 free throw-shooting percentage. Even if you knew that Martin shot more free throws than Nash last season (he did), you might not have paid any attention to how many more he shot (420 more) and even if you knew that Martin shot more than 2.5 times more free throws than Nash, you might still have figured that because most leagues tally FT% not FTA or FTM that Nash is still the better option. What the Effective Percentages illustrate is the weight those additional free throws place on players like Martin. Martin may have shot at a slightly lower percentage of free throws throughout 2010 than Nash, but not so much lower as to negate the fact that he shot so many more. A ton more. Simply put, Martin was a larger influence on his fantasy teams’ final FT% than Nash was to his. And as their season-end free throw percentages were relatively close to begin with, Martin’s Effective Percentage (ePCT) is way higher (1.015) than Nash’s (.895). So while Nash’s ePCT is slightly lower than his actual FT% because he shot slightly fewer free throws each game than the average fantasy player, Martin shot WAY more (the league average was 3.8 FTA, based on the average taken from the top 120 fantasy players of 2010).

GMtR’s comprehensive list of last season’s ePCT’s for free throws, field goals and 3-pointers is here for your own perusal. But if you want to empower yourself, I’ve added the (moderately simple formula below). FAIR WARNING: you’re going to have to remember your Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally rule.

ePCT = Plg + (Ppl-Plg) * (SAp/SAlg) =

Let’s use Steve Nash’s free throw shooting as an example:

Plg = the average FT% among the top 120 fantasy players in 2010. In this case, it was 78.2.
Ppl = the player’s FT%. In Nash’s case, it was 91.2
SAp = the player’s FTA per game. In Nash’s case, it was 3.3 FTA per game.
SAlg = the average FTA among the top 120 fantasy players in 2010. In this case, it was 3.8.

Now, apply that shizz!

ePCT= 78.2 +(91.2-78.2) * (3.3/3.8)

Now, simplify that shizz! (Parenthesis first)

ePCT= 78.2 + 13 * 0.868

Calculate from left to right, then slide the decimal place to wherever you want to!

89.484 = .895 = Steve Nash’s FT ePCT.

Knowing a player’s various ePCTs won’t make you more handsome or more popular (it’ll likely have the opposite affect), but it will paint a clearer picture of what the players you’re targeting on draft day are likely to do to your team’s percentages, which is a particularly valuable weapon to have when you consider how many owners ignore these stats, quantify them poorly or leave them to chance.

Quality is a relative term. One man’s trash is another man’s trash that he treasures (or whatever). Your Member’s Only windbreaker and matching L.A. Gears were the bees knees two decades ago, but bury those things in a time capsule, dig them up today and hand them to a hobo, and there’s no WAY you’d be able to refrain from snickering at the guy. Did you put that stuff in a time capsule just to make fun of a homeless guy two decades later?  That’s a little cold, bro. Just give the bum your outdated clothes and leave him alone – who cares if he likes them? Besides, are we sure the flashing lights at the heel of those L.A. Gears aren’t making a comeback? Really? Are you super sure? Why do you seem so positive about this? /sigh Anyway, as far as returning for a second go-round as strong as the first, there’s one keeper to hang on tighter to than your multi-colored windbreaker: Greg Monroe. Scroll down (with your eyes, not with your mouse) to read why Monroe’s a top-notch fantasy basketball keeper in 2011.

Let’s start at the beginning, when Mama Monroe and Papa Monroe met, fell in love and got busy … actually, let’s just skip ahead 20 years to the end of Monroe’s rookie season with Detroit. He ended up averaging 9/8/1, with 1.8 stl+blk in 28 mpg. Not bad, but he should be able to improve on those averages. Why do I think that? Because he already did! Whoa! Brain, blown. In 25 post-All-Star Break games (or 31 percent of his season, if you’re a percentagist), Monroe averaged 14/10/2, with 2.5 stl+blk in 33 mpg. Now, have I got your attention? That’s Joakim Noah territory, only without the flyaways and injury-riddled past. There are only six active centers who averaged at least 9/8 in their rookie season (seven if Shaq had waited a week to announce that he was no longer an active member of the NBA). For what it’s worth, if you isolate Monroe’s January-April stats (13/10), the number of active centers with THAT line in their rookie year drops to just one: Emeka Okafor’s 15/11. Cynics will point out that Monroe’s stats increased from month-to-month right along with his minutes per game. But the cynics bum me out, man. They also listen to far too much Morrissey. His free throw percentage ain’t great, (Monroe’s, not Morrissey’s – Morrissey never shot below 86 percent. I cannot verify that, just trust me), but it improved steadily over the course of the season, which is doubley good when you consider that Monroe (or MAHN-row, if you’re a blues musician over the age of 75)  slowly figured out how to get to the line over the course of the season (he shot an average of 1.6 free throws in November, 2.7 in December, 3.7 in January, 2.4 in February, 3.7 in March, and 4.4 in April), while keeping opponents off the line (he averaged one foul every 10.9 minutes in the first 55 games of the season. In the next 25, he only fouled once every 12.1 minutes). Almost across the board, Monroe improved his game. He’ll be a year older, smarter and clearly at the front of Detroit’s terrible depth chart. If you had him last year, keep him next year. “Just Do It,” as Nike would say because Monroe will be “Unstoppable” as L.A. Gear Akeem would say.

Future Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal called it quits over Twitter (and eventually a proper press conference later today) after deciding his nearly 39-year-old body couldn’t withstand an achilles surgery and nine months of rehab. When Boston signed O’Neal a year ago, the strategy was that he’d play sparingly throughout the year and empty the tank on Dwight Howard in the spring if Kendrick Perkins didn’t return to 100 percent. Seeing as the Diesel couldn’t drive past 75 in any of his last five seasons, it’s not surprising that it didn’t work out for the Celtics. It was never going to happen. Hindsight is 20/20, but also 20? The percentage of possible minutes in which Shaq appeared in 2010. Fudge hindsight, man. Boston should have seen this coming. He’s never been one to play a full season’s worth of games (81 is his career-best, and he reached that in each of his first two seasons). Shaq averaged 61 GPs in his final 17 seasons and 53 in his last five. Signing a 37-year-old behemoth coming off a 53-game, 12/7 season with all sorts of joint problems to be the insurance backup for Perkins, in hopes of stopping the most athletic starting center perhaps the game has ever seen is like buying matches to protect your house made of pine. It’s a tale as old as time: old legend can’t call it quits, sticks around several seasons too long, forces bloggers to do away with prepositions. The old Shaq will be missed, but Old Shaq shoulda left the game anywhere between 2-4 seasons ago.

Here are s’more doings this week in fantasy basketball:

Amir Johnson – Had ankle surgery on Friday … seven weeks after his season ended. Ed Davis convinced him that Victoria Day just ain’t the same if your foot is in a cast.

Ricky Rubio – Coming to the T-Wolves, which puts Jonny Flynn in about the same position as the “h” in his name: left out.

Kwame Brown – Paul Silas said “Kwame is going to be unbelievable [in 2011] because we’re going to have a chance to work on some of his deficiencies.” Translation, “We’re preparing ourselves to be in disbelief at some of Kwame’s deficiencies.” Dude averaged 9/8 in 50 games last season. What can Brown do for you in 2011? Probably no more than 10/10, with 1.5 blocks per game.

Stephen Jackson – In other Bobcat news, Jackson dropped 20 pounds and the 2012 Bobcat compact tractor will come equipped with XM Radio for the more long-day farmer.

J.R. Smith – Cited for operating a scooter without a license. All-in-all, it could be worse. Worse than this. Worse than this, even. Probably not much worse than this though.

If there were a sixth man in the NBA who appeared in every one of the season’s 82 games, but was only on the floor about half the time throughout those contests despite averaging 13/5, with .541/.707 and more than a steal every time out, the first thing you’d say is, “Adam, why all the secrecy? We all know from the title these are Thaddeus Young‘s stats.” And before I could recover, you’d follow up with, “Oh yeah, and why is he only playing 26 minutes a contest?” There we go. That’s more like it. I figured you’d lead with the minutes per game thing. Then you’d ask, “Is ‘Thaddeus’ a family name passed down from generation to generation? Because it really seems like an old-timey name – kinda sad, really. Or thad, if you have a speech impediment.” Then I’d dumbfoundedly blink at you like I just got mule kicked by a … well, a mule, I guess. By now I’ve gotten the duct tape out, applied it to your mouth and have prepared to tell you why Young should be a huge fantasy basketball sleeper in 2011.

Of the more than 450 active basketball players in the league, there are exactly two players who, in a single season, have played more than 2,000 minutes, started fewer than five games, ended with a PER greater than 18.4 and were younger than 23 when they did it. Young is the first. A dozen years ago, a 19-year-old Kobe Bryant was the other. That’s it. No one else. Before we go any further, no, I’m not claiming Young is or will ever be Bryant. The next year, when Bryant turned 20, he started every game and averaged 20/5/4 in the lockout-shortened season. Young won’t average those numbers. The caveat in these stats isn’t the exceptional PER of both players, or the age, or the minutes. There were 70 other players who fit that triplet of criteria. It’s the games started. Bryant was in his sophomore year at 19. Young just finished up his fourth year at 22. This alone suggests we’re comparing apples to slightly bruised plums here, but still … Young was in serious contention (statistically) for this year’s Sixth Man Award and might have been a bigger part of the conversation had he appeared more often than 13 minutes a half. He was versatile all season, playing 2/3 of his time at the four and the other third as Philly’s swingman and it’s that versatility likely to earn Young more minutes in 2011 (this could easily happen in the following two ways: 1) Philly drops Iguodala’s 37 mpg from last year in hopes of keeping him healthy, 2) Brand plays more center, leaving fewer minutes for Spencer Hawes, who couldn’t score a bucket if he walked into a KFC and threw a fifty on the counter). I don’t think Young plays a ton more minutes per game, probably about six. But even if his 2010 per minute averages remain locked in next year, Young would still jump from 13/5/1, with a steal to 16/6/1, with an extra steal every four games. Add in his .508/.716 career averages with almost certain upside to produce better than that, and you’ve got yourself a 10th round pick that a lot of people won’t be looking at until after the 12th.