Fantasy Basketball Advice

I was fortunate enough to be invited to Earth’s most classy and famous expert league – the FakeTeams Hoops Tournament.  The league has 14 teams consisting of three FakeTeamers (the hosts of this shindig), two guys from ESPN, one from Canada’s The Basketball Jones, one rep from Give Me the Rock, one from Fox Sports, one from Dime Magazine and fbasketballblog, RotoWorld, Damn Lies and Statistics, Life is Just a Fantasy … Basketball Blog and a partridge in a pear tree (I’m either the partridge or the tree, I’m not sure). You may recognize most of those stellar publications from their permanent presence on the right blogroll, or their ethereal presence everywhere else.

The format is a 14 team, 9 category, H2H, snake draft with the following roster format:  PG/SG/SF/PF/C/G/F/3 UTIL/3 BENCH

I happened to have scheduled another draft 30 minutes before this one, so at one point, I felt like a fancy Wall St. trader scanning from one monitor to another, only I was wearing frog pajamas, which I’m assuming most Wall Street traders don’t do.

Everyone’s strategy is to draft as good of a team as possible. Usually, that manifests in picking three players with similar skill sets in the first five rounds and deciding that THAT is their team’s identity. Me? I wanted a balanced team. From round to round, I wanted the players that filled the most stats cats that I had neglected the round or two before it.

Overall, I think ol’ Razzball has a shot at this thing.  I got one of the most well-rounded point guards in the game (Evans), the number one pick in the draft (Durant) added to a lock for FT% with Martin and the Bumpus Hounds (West and Hibbert) as my deadeye bigs. We also have a few exciting upside guys like Hickson, Hill, Anderson, Udoh and Shumpshump mixed in with glue guys like Odom and Jamison. Running the team’s rosters against my projections, no one’s catching this team in PTS and FT% and I finish top 3 in 3PT, AST (almost everyone on this team tosses out assists) and TOV.  This team might be in trouble with BLKs and FG% (which is lucky, because those two categories are often connected). The draft is the first step and I avoided tripping and cracking a tooth on the pavement, so that’s nice.

David Pincus over at FakeTeams, our league commissioner, did a nice write-up on the draft, which you can read here if you’re into it. He’s also compiling every owner’s thoughts on how they drafted. Check that out over the next week. I mostly babble about going completely neurotic alone in a room lit only with the twinkle of Christmas tree lights. Pulitzer, here I come!

Anyway, let me know what you think of the team …

There are those who are overrated, those who are underrated and those who are rated appropriately. Jim Carrey as the Riddler in 1995? Overrated. DeVito as the Penguin in 1992? Underrated. Christopher Walken, too!  Michelle Pfieffer as Catwoman in 1992? Appropriately rated. Fantasy winners and losers (speaking of Michelle Pfieffer in 1992!) are almost always the ones who avoid them that are overrated, grab the appropriately rated players when it is appropriate to do so and hold off just long enough on the underrated players to still earn value from their draft position. The latter are who we are looking at today: the DeVitos … that’s a direct callback from three sentences ago, not my impression of a Romanian’s favorite corn chip (Cool Ranch DeVitos!). We’re looking at a handful of players that deserve to go a couple rounds sooner than they probably will. And you’re looking to take advantage of that fact.

Anyway, here are some players to target for 2011 fantasy basketball:

John Wall – This makes me feel bad for John Wall that I have to put John Wall on this list. Had Griffin not ruptured his tendon two preseasons ago and missed all of ’09, John Wall would be ranked a round higher than he is after the rookie year he had. But, nope. Griffin blew the doors off the universe and all John Wall got was a name that you have to say as a complete thing. When John Wall learns how to play within a team and take a few smarter shots, John Wall will be a bigger name than ever (JOHN WALL!)

Jrue Holiday – Dude never lags, never slows, never dogs it. He never takes days off, which is ironic considering he’s a Holiday. (Hat tip to Shecky Greene)

Tony Parker – I get it. He’s French and you don’t trust the French. I better not see you slipping Batum into your draft queue then.

Rodrigue Beaubois – He played poorly in the quarter of a season he was healthy and has since gone completely unnoticed this offseason. My guess is, he won’t even be drafted in most leagues. Fine. Cool. Dandy. Pick him up with your last pick and stash him if you can. Terry and Kidd ain’t getting any younger.

Jared Dudley – I’m convinced Dudley and Jordan Crawford won two of my fantasy basketball leagues last year. I’ll be surprised if one or both of these guys aren’t on my roster this year. I’m loyal like that. I had a crush on my 7th grade gym class square dance partner seven years after we left junior high. Wouldn’t even look at another girl. The only reason I changed was because restraining orders ain’t no joke.

DeMar DeRozan  – DeRozan’s straight outta Compton, fits well (or Fitzwell, if you’re an Irish shoemaker) in Canada and no one is drafting him until around the 80th pick. I have him going about a dozen spots before that. Why? Who else is gonna produce on this team? Ed Davis?

Ed Davis – … Yeah, actually, Alternate Me. I do think Ed Davis will produce. Why do you have to be so ornery? He had a 16 PER in his rookie season and averaged a per36 double-double. If he can earn 32 points per game this season, he’ll likely average a double-double. But you probably haven’t considered that because no one gives a hoot about the Raptors.

Iman Shumpert – Everyone’s looking at Chris Paul and forgetting that Landry Fields collapsed at the finish line to last season and Toney Douglas is going to play a lot of minutes backing up Chauncey Billups’ bag of bones. Swoop in to the starting two-guard spot, Shumpert! Swoop! Swoompert!

Evan Turner – He was the No.2 pick in last year’s draft and Jodie Meeks is the only thing standing in his way for minutes. Does Jodie Meeks seem like the type of player that’s going to stand in anyone’s way? His last name suggests he won’t be difficult to lift and set in a cupboard somewhere.

Marcus Thornton – Rookie year: benched until last half of season then went off. Second year: benched until last half of season, traded, then went off. Third year: locked out, took up broadcasting, will call Sacramento’s first 33 games, will return to the roster, then go off. (I’m, like, into predicting stuff these days.)

Gordon Hayward – Averaged 36 mpg/16/3/3 in the final seven games of the season. It’s a small sample size, but like all small things, I’m making do with it as best I can.

Serge Ibaka – I specifically remember watching last year’s playoffs thinking, “I need to rank this guy higher than his season ttotal stats dictate I should.” Then my cat jumped on my lap and scared me to death. So now I equate my pee-stained couch to the irrational need to draft Ibaka a round earlier than some others.

Joakim Noah – If he stays healthy, he’s one of the few players in the league I wouldn’t scoff at knocking Dwight off his Defensive Player of the Year throne. This is at least partially due to me not knowing exactly how to scoff.

J.J. Hickson –Apparently, my team is gonna be jam-packed with Raptors, Kings and Sixers. Apparently, I’m taking a break from fantasy basketball this year.

You see what I did there in the title? I oversold it, didn’t I? You’re imagining a new statistic that will change fantasy basketball forever, because a state someone would consider awesome would certainly do that. And seeing as how I wasted no time calling this stat awesome, you’d be right to assume it’s revolutionary. It isn’t. So now, before I’ve even explained what bopOSPM is, I’m already apologizing for calling it something it isn’t. If only blogging tools came with delete buttons, I’d start all over.

Earlier this summer, Neil Paine over at Basketball Reference compiled a list of the 20 best offensive players against the league’s top defenses. Also known as, Offensive Basketball-on-Paper Statistical Plus/Minus, bopOSPM struck me as interesting back in July, but nothing that could necessarily be applied to the fantasy game. It’s basically a barometer of who to start and who to sit; basketball’s equivalent of pitcher matchups in baseball. The best 30 pitchers in the league you’ll start against the Red Sox, Yankees, Phillies or whomever. But after that, good fantasy owners tend to play the matchups a little more shrewdly. With the exception of maybe a few players, there really isn’t anyone in the top 20 who you wouldn’t draft within five slots of where they show up on the bopOSPM list.

Then I got to thinkin’ – which you can infer means that I was sitting on the toilet – this stat would be useful in two instances past draft day. The first would be in streaming situations or in deeper daily leagues where game-by-game matchups are important to evaluate. The second would be as a tie breaker between your average start vs. sit decisions that everyone must make at some point.

Let’s start with the second instance just to be confusing. Fantasy hoopsters (<- my term that I tell everyone my grandmother came up with) are constantly hitting the waiver wire trying to tap into secondary players suddenly in the position of getting big minutes and doing something with them. If you were trying to decide whether to pick up Paul George or Jared Dudley, bopOSPM could be useful. George collapsed against good defenses (-4.47), while Dudley led the NBA in positive differential between the best 15 defenses in the league and the worst. What that means is that Dudley could be played against good teams and George couldn’t, something that would be helpful to know when deciding who to start, who to sit or who to pick up and stream.

That kickass segue brings us to the aforementioned first instance, in which bopOSPM gives certain players in certain matchups a certain edge. The Chicago Bulls had either the best or second-best defense in the league last season (depending on your metric of choice). Derrick Rose came out on top of Paine’s bopOSPM list. One of the reasons, undoubtedly is that he didn’t have to play against the Bulls. That’s at least two fewer games he didn’t have to play against the league’s top defense. There’s a lot to be said for owning a player in a weak division who plays well against top defenses. Players like Rose not only thrive against the heavy hitters, but being on a heavy hitting team, he doesn’t need to prove it as much as, say, Kevin Love will. Because when Rose isn’t thriving against top defenses, he’s facing weak ones … and thriving.

It’s just another tool to evaluate players on a game-to-game basis or from player-to-player when otherwise in a toss-up.

_________________________

Now, chew on this for a couple days. I’m leaving town to get married and will not likely be thinking much about bopOSPM. At least not that I’m willing to admit to anyone.

I’ll be back and posting far more regularly once the nuptials are behind me next week. Promise.

Wish me luck, gang!

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.

In his mammoth tome, The Book of Basketball, a work I begrudgingly call both comprehensive and wholly entertaining, Bill Simmons shares the theory that 24 is the pivotal age for athletic shooting guards. He uses Jordan, Bryant, McGrady, Wade, a 25-year-old Iverson (lost five months as a high school senior sitting in a jail cell) and David Thompson as examples. It wasn’t really a theory so much as a limited observation. Simmons admitted he wasn’t sure why 24 offered peak seasons for some of the league’s best all-time shooting guards, it just did. I’d go one better, or maybe just one broader, and say that a player’s third or fourth year in the league allows for the same type of gauge. I’d also extend the rule across all positions, because I’m nothing if not all-inclusive. Think of Kyle Lowry in 2010 or Rudy Gay, Wesley Matthews. Whether a player jumps to the pros at 19 or at 22, few enter the NBA as ready-made contributors. It takes dozens of late-night Red Lobster runs fetching Gerald Wallace his Cheddar Bay Biscuits, or Grant Hill foot rubs, or thrown games of Words With Friends against Reggie Evans (who is neither friendly nor particularly wordy when it comes to that game – or any game probably) before a youngster can acclimate to the league. And if the youngsters aren’t pre-loading the newest Sade joint onto Udonis Haslem‘s Zune, they’re learning the team’s system, packing on muscle, slowing the game down, working on timing. They’re baby deer learning to walk. If they’re just fawns, they won’t be surefooted. If they’re still shaky as 3-year-old bucks, the thing might be lame and you should look to trade it and throw Michael Redd in for good measure.

Below are the players with fewer than five seasons and turning 24 next year most likely to ignite their young careers:

NOTE: I ordered these guys by last season’s PER rating, taking into account playing time and years in the league; giving more credit to players with less experience under the prediction that they are more likely to make a larger qualitative leap than the more experienced player. I wouldn’t necessarily draft these guys in this order … but, with the exception of Chandler being too low because of injury and misuse on Denver, this isn’t a ridiculous prediction of how good the incoming 24-years-olds are going to be.

It’s also worth noting that Andrew Bynum turns 24 next season. He’s played at least 35 games in six seasons and didn’t quite qualify for this list. Although if Iverson qualifies at 25 in Simmons’ list after wasting precious months of his life in a holding cell pattern, Bynum should probably qualify too. Whatever. I’m still miffed at the classless way he ended his season and the crap-full way he’s going to start his next one.