Welcome to the fourth installment of Weekly Yinteresting Thoughts (WYT). In these posts, I’ll be sharing some of my random thoughts, opinions, and questions about the NBA landscape as it pertains to fantasy basketball. Feel free to drop your comments and questions below! Let’s get started.
For me, typical offseasons in fantasy basketball involve closely following NBA news, trying to predict ADP’s for next year’s sleepers, and a fair bit of theorycrafting. This year, I explored and tried to execute an idea that I’ll call Categorical Invulnerability.
In typical punt strategies, managers are purposefully ignoring one or more categories so that they can stockpile value in other areas and reduce their weekly variance by being really strong in certain categories. You can see this effect for yourself by playing around with the punt rankings on either BasketballMonster or Hashtag Basketball. Watch how certain players’ values rise and fall in accordance to different punt strategies. You’ll see Giannis Antetokounmpo leap a full round in value if you punt FT%. You’ll see Trae Young drop three entire rounds if you punt assists. Punting is a sound strategy that’s important in head-to-head matchups. It’ll be difficult to be dominant in all 9 categories unless you’ve pulled off an immaculate draft, so sensible managers opt to ignore certain things in order to maximize their chances of winning the week.
Categorical invulnerability refers to a specific excess of a category to the point where it’s practically invulnerable and can’t be beaten. Did you leave your draft with a team of Luka Doncic, Dejounte Murray, Jrue Holiday, SGA, and Jalen Brunson? Well, you could say your assists are invulnerable. It’s unlikely any other team will have you beat in that category, and so you won’t have to worry about assists. So my hypothesis was: if I have a team that’s good enough at one category to the point where it’s invulnerable, don’t I technically gain punt assists value from players who typically don’t provide any assists? Last season, Rudy Gobert was ranked 25th overall in 9-cat. He was rank 10 with assists punted. In other words, if you don’t care about assists, the value of Rudy Gobert climbed by over a full round. If you have categorical invulnerability in assists, then couldn’t you gain this extra value from all of your players if you “can’t” lose assists anyway? I hope I’m making sense.
This year I experimented with one of my drafts in a public league to achieve categorical invulnerability in FG%. It’s a punt FT% team and I wanted guys like Antetokounmpo, Gobert, Sabonis, Poeltl, Claxton to ensure my FG% was invulnerable. This was the draft I ended up with:
My thought process was to strengthen my FG% to the point where it’s “invulnerable.” With players like Antetokounmpo, Sabonis, Leonard, Simmons, and Vanderbilt anchoring my field goal, I can also afford to roster guys who are more bricky: Rozier, Anunoby, Vassell, KPJ, and presumably Smith Jr. will all have below average field goal percentage. To counteract this, I want to have invulnerable FG% and be able to gain punt FG% value from all of the bricky guys.
Last season’s 9-cat ranking / punt FG% ranking
Terry Rozier: 30 / 24
O.G. Anunoby: 52 / 41
Devin Vassell: 92 / 81
Kevin Porter Jr.: 172 / 119
As you can see, I played around with trying to gain extra value by having FG% so good that I could effectively punt it for these players.This year, I counted the projected field goal attempts and field goal makes to get a rough idea of what my team will shoot every week. This roster theoretically should shoot a very respectable 48%. Through three weeks, this team is shooting 45% and hasn’t won FG% even once.
Did I not draft enough high FG% players? Did I simply strike out on too many draft picks? I suspected that I was getting a little too deep into the weeds, and I was right. The variance is simply too high in fantasy basketball to be able to accurately and reliably execute this strategy. Perhaps if I had more extremely high FG% players I’d be able to pull this off, but it’s nigh impossible to get the exact guys you want during the draft. It also doesn’t help that Kawhi Leonard is M.I.A. and Ben Simmons only takes 5.4 FGA per game and doesn’t want anything to do with putting the ball in the hoop. Additionally, if one or more of your category “anchors” underperforms or simply isn’t available that night, the strategy falls apart.
This was a fun exercise, and I hope that my reflection here makes sense. I think Categorical Invulnerability itself is fairly intuitive, but not to the extreme levels that I’m taking it here on this particular team. If you have a lot of threes, then it doesn’t hurt as much to roster guys who give you zero threes. Let me know which fun builds you’ve experimented with in category leagues. As a side note, this is why category leagues are so much more fun than points leagues. You get some serious creative liberties. Your wonky strategies can also just work if you get lucky enough. Throw your questions down below, I’ll see y’all next week.
