Dasein posted a good topic for discussion in these dog days of the NBA off-season. Standard (9-cat) h2h was the run-away winner in our preferred settings poll conducted in early April, but let’s open the floor up for a bit more in-depth discussion on the matter of specific league settings and why we feel one way or another about our preferences.
I’m a 9-cat roto guy in terms of preference – always have been and I don’t see that changing. Relatively speaking, I’ve been a more regular participant in h2h leagues in recent seasons than in seasons past. I still have yet to come away with anything outside of mixed feelings, however. While some people find the h2h playoffs – where “anything can happen” – an exciting finish to the hoops season, I find it anti-climactic in that months of diligence are simply discarded and the whims of injuries, playing time, and team schedules in the final weeks help determine the league champion. I liken it to a marathon being stopped with four miles left to go so that the top 20 percent of runners at that stage can then sprint to the finish while navigating an obstacle course. Clearly, the true “best” team in a h2h league has as good of a chance as any to come out on top, but we all know from experience that there’s typically not a lot of rhyme or reason when it actually turns out to be the case.
I prefer roto because every player game used counts towards the final standings – if you get lazy or sloppy at any point it usually ends up costing you, and the final standings are a true measure of what happened over the course of the entire season. One major complaint I hear is that people can lose interest if they fall behind early in a roto league and it affects competitive balance negatively – my retort would be that dead teams are a manager problem and not a settings problem. If you find yourself in eighth place with a month to go and have no shot at the league crown, who or what is stopping you from trying to move up to fourth before things go final? It’s also worth noting that I’ve never found dead teams to only exist in roto. And while I struggle to understand when fantasy players describe the roto game (whether hoops or baseball) as “boring”, I do concede that it’s subjective.
Some good talking points that dasein introduced:
- FG% and FT% are standard, but 3pt% isnt. Why is this? Are u for 3pt% or not?
- Speaking of 3PM, if this cat is included, a made 3 counts towards 3 categories (3PM, Pts, FG%). Does this make 3’s unreasonably valuable? Maybe including 3P% is a way to balance this as it would tend to penalise high volume shooting teams.
- TOs, to use them or not? I feel like its wrong to ignore them but including them isnt much better. I hate them in Roto because you cant make moves to reduce their number. H2H isnt so bad, but I’ve found it often isnt far removed from a coin toss. While I like the idea of Ast/TO ratio, its too highly correlated with Ast, so if you play with both it effectivly doubles the value of assists. A nice compromise might be to use TOs as a tie breaker, but this is only relevant for ‘most cats is a win’ whereas Yahoo uses only ‘every cat is a win’.
- Total rebounds or OR and DR split. I kinda like the latter because you get 2 nice unambiguous cats.
- Ive heard of people using Technical Fouls, but I’m not a fan. Its such an infrequent event (relatively) that I think it would become another coin toss.
- Do you prefer lots of cats, a few cats, or the standard cats so u dont have to crunch your own numbers?
moved the first few responses to dasein here:
So-Tex Spurs:
I think your 3pt% issue is a bit redundant. It works assuming that your player is shooting a high FG% vs 3pt%. But what if your player ONLY shoots 3’s all night and goes 35% for 3pt% – that means he also goes 35% from the floor (FG%), which is punishment enough. Of course the opposite can be true – your player can make 3 of 4 3pt’ers and go 75% from the floor (75% FG% and 75% 3pt%). So if all you player shoots is 3’s, and he shoots lights out, then the scale is tipped way in your favor. So basically, I’d drop 3pt% because I think FG% with work itself out in the end. Besides, players won’t be shooting double digit 3PM’s anytime soon (the NBA record for 3’s in a game is 12 by Kobe).
Your TO question is a matter of preference imo. I’ve only played H2H, and I’ve NEVER played for TO’s – I punt this cat regardless of the player. But it is a valid cat which is trackable, so it’s up to you whether you use it or not. I wouldn’t, but that’s just me.
As far as rebounds, the simpler the better. Both together would be fine. The only reason I would break them up is if you needed an odd number of cats (5-4). That would help break MOST of your ties I would think.
How do you count technicals? A player with the most wins the cat?!? In that case, give me Sheed, Artest, and a couple of other hot-heads and I’ll slam that cat every week! Otherwise, I agree with you – stay away from it.
Standard cats work for me – just dump the 3pt% imo.
Cap.:
Good topic. My league uses FGM, FG%, FTM, FT%, 3PTM, 3PT%, PTS, OREB, DREB, ST, BLK, and A/T.
I don’t think there is much redundancy including 3PTM and 3PT%. Some players are rebounding specialists, some players are 3PT specialists, doesn’t make either one any more valuable than the other. Big men usually shoot higher FG%, and get more blocks. ‘Small’ players usually get higher FT% and 3’s. If a player shoots 30% from behind the arc it’s gonna hurt his FG% in the long run. Likewise, if you’re using both DREB and OREB it makes big men more valuable too, so it’s really a wash. Just look at Jamal Crawford vs. Biedrins for example, they were pretty close in per-game ranking in my league I think.
As for AST and TOs, I only use A/T, not any combination of the two. A player can get 8 assists a game, but if he’s turning it over 3 times a game it takes some of the shine off. Over a whole week, if you can get a +2 or 3 A/T from your whole team, that’s usually good. I think you have to take TOs into account one way or another though, it’s called fantasy, but it should reflect reality somewhat.
I also think OREB and DREB should be separate. A lot of guards can get you 5-6 DREB a game, but there’s only a few players in the league that will average +4 OREB. It adds more depth to the league and rewards more research/knowledge.
I’m done with standard categories, it’s much more challenging to include them all. Just like in baseball, my league uses 22 cats, including OBP%, SLG%, CG, K/BB, etc. Makes things more realistic.
Technicals (or simply fouls) are just stupid.
That’s my two cents.
I think turnovers are stupid and I’ve never heard a good argument for them. Wade, LeBron, Dwight, CP3, Deron all averaged 3+ turnovers a game. If the elite players averaged 1-2 TO a game, and the lesser players averaged 3+ TO’s a game.. Then I’d have no problem with that category. But what’s the point of having a category that has an inverse relationship with the elite players??
And no, I don’t like AST/TO either. Is there a category for TO per possession?
But regardless, it’s a pointless category in my opinion.
nobody should look at TO all by themselves, because the hit a player takes for TO is absolutely relative to the rest of their contributions. players that offset high turnovers with lots of other good stats are high picks, period. the less complete their line is, the more the hit is. it seems like a pretty simple equation to me, and i still don’t understand why people have a problem with that. if you simply want to reward usage, then drop TO; if you want to reward efficient usage, then use TO
I just don’t understand the point. If you have a really good team, you’re likely to win most of the categories and lose TO’s each week. If you draft guys who have low turnovers, they likely won’t give you as much production as the guys with higher turnovers so you won’t win as many of the other categories.
So whatever, I just don’t see the need for it.
as i said, AST:TO is probably the way to go for h2h. in roto, i like the 9 cats, as-is. the point is the reward efficiency of production – not seeing the need for it is another story. drafting guys with low TO is one thing, drafting guys with *relatively* low TO that do lots of other things is another
“Is there a category for TO per possession?” – there isn’t, but i don’t see how TO as-is is very far off. it measures how many possessions end in a TO, as opposed to a FGM or AST. there aren’t exactly a litany of other ways for a possession to end
i meant individual “touches” rather than team possessions, like if lebron has 60 touches in a game with 3 turnovers while dwight has 20 touches in a game with 3 turnovers (i don’t know how many touches they get, i was just throwing those numbers out there).
i’m not aware of anyone tracking touches for hoops, no
It all just depends on how “realistic” you want your “fantasy” league to be. Without TOs, would you draft Baron Davis or Jose Calderon first? Probably Davis, because of his more all-around game. With TOs though, Calderon’s A/T of 4.64 compared to Davis’ 2.6 is much more attractive, and in real life, Calderon’s probably the PG most GMs would want.
Not using TOs at all to me is like not using FT% or something, might as well make Dwight the #1 overall pick. A/T is definitely a H2H category, but a roto league without TOs is like a football league without INT or FUM, or a baseball league without AVG. You gotta take the bad with the good, otherwise it’s not a true assessment of a player’s value.
yeah well i don’t think it makes too much of a difference.. it definitely boosts s-jax’s value. but i’d still rather have calderon than baron in a non-turnover league.
yeah i didn’t think there were.. but wouldn’t that be the most accurate way to gauge someone’s turnovers? TO/touch ratio.. i’d be fine with that. it’s probably asking for too much from yahoo though.
I’ve heard of college scouts tracking individual possessions before I think, but more for how often they score than pass or turn it over. Perhaps a better stat than A/T would be A+FG/T, since those are really the only three options in a counting stat. At least that wouldn’t favour PGs so much.
They started tracking +/- though I noticed, that would be an interesting category, but that’s just for team points, so it obviously favors the better teams. Still, it would give some added value to players on good teams, which adds a whole new dimension. I wouldn’t go for it though, too predictable.
Top 20 +/-: L.James, L.Odom, K.Bryant, R.Allen, De.West, M.Williams, R.Lewis, P.Gasol, D.Howard, D.Fisher, P.Pierce, H.Turkoglu, R.Rondo, B.Roy, Z.Ilgauskas, L.Aldridge, K.Garnett, M.Yao, A.Varejao, B.Wallace
As for playoffs, my league is pushing them up 1 or 2 weeks so we don’t have to deal with the possibility of resting players the final week.
I think the championship week takes place during week 1 of baseball. So it was easy to convince my league to move the playoffs up a week so we could focus on week 1 of baseball and not have to worry about what no-name role players are going to be getting 30+ minutes the final 3 games of the NBA season.
That has been my dream to move up the playoffs 2 weeks! Do you know how to do that in Yahoo leagues?
it’s not been something offered to this point, but i know it’s been something brought up amongst the product people. maybe we could see it unveiled this season, but certainly no guarantees
I’ve emailed them about this several times over the past few years. That will be totally awesome if they can do it this season.
This doesn’t apply to public leagues, but in my private H2H $$$ league we award the main percentages of the prize pool to the regular season top 3, and then give a bonus to the playoff champ, as follows:
$50 buy in, 12 team league
1st place in regular season receives $300
2nd place in regular season receives $150
3rd place in regular season receives $100
Playoff champ receives $50 bonus
It’s not an ideal system, as it doesn’t reward playoff consolations, but at least the best team over the course of the entire season wins the most money, not the team who streams the most players in the last two weeks.
with so much emphasis on the regular season, why not just play roto?
H2H’s more exciting. More rivalries, more trash talking, more sidebetting.. And it’s easier to shrug off a week and compete the next, so it’s more competitive later in the season.
Money league sounds like a good way to ensure some serious competition. Wouldn’t mind doing it, but the guys I play with tend to be scattered around the world so its in the too hard basket I think.
Paypal.
My friends were scattered around the world (China, Korea, New York, LA, etc.) I had everyone send me a check, and as soon as it arrived, I sent them the league ID/PW. We play $100 for 5 years of keeper league. It’s fun!
are you sure? for some reason i was led to believe that it was already available in private leagues when you’re creating the league settings. like in football leagues.
hopefully it’s available this season.
i’m not a fan of 3PT%, but if you are going to use it, i’d drop 3PTM to avoid over-valuing certain players
i really like the idea of AST:TO replacing AST and TO, particulary in h2h. not sure about roto
you’ve got to be careful of venturing off the beaten path in terms of settings. if you’ve got a really solid group of managers, it can work – if some people really don’t pay attention to clear differences in value that arise when you mix things up, then they are going to get destroyed by the managers that actually do
I see value in including TO for H2H. In any given week, the team w/ more players, or more “elite” players playing that week will most likely win the countable stats. Having TOs as a category at least gives a small consolation to the team w/ less players that week.
So you’d run 8 cats using AST:TO?
3PM seems to be the obvious choice, too. Perimeter shooters are almost always going to give you a lower FG% than their counterparts.
All good comments and suggestions.
I agree with buser’s “efficient usage” comment. It kind of goes hand in hand with my H2H strategy. By punting TO’s, I basically focus on the rest of the overall line. But
Sorry, I got cut off by a software update:
As I was saying, by punting TO’s, I basically focus on the rest of the overall line for a player. If that line isn’t too good, then I’m more inclined to peek over at that cat to see if it hurts as well.
So in a nutshell buser said it best, “players that offset high turnovers with lots of other good stats are high picks, period.”
In my league, everybody has that mentality = punt TOs. Knowing this, I purposely pay a bit more attention to TOs. This gives me an easy win for 1 category every week w/ very little effort.
One other thing that I think should at least be mentioned regarding Yahoo leagues is the idea of public vs private.
I’ve only played public leagues in h2h, and with the exception of this forum, will probably stick to public leagues.
The only reason I bring this up is because in a true, default public league (h2h or roto) these arguments matter – the TO’s mean something, the strategies make sense and that sort of thing.
But if you’re in a private league, these stats can be skewed in just about any direction so they don’t mean squat. In h2h, for example, I heard of several private league teams who were really loaded with high number producers, and were able to practically sit their players to keep from getting TO’s in order to win a week. It’s a valid strategy, but it’s kind of a downer. It takes away from the “sportsmanship” aspect of the game. And in this case, it would mean a strong argument against using TO’s as a cat.
Now I’m sure most, if not all, of us here on the forum have strong opinions regarding “bad” commissioners. Bottom line, if you’re gonna commish, play by the rules you’ve set up and be fair. Otherwise, stick with public leagues, or play with people you know.
Hopefully, we’ll all remember that going into this season as we start to challenge each other from the forum.
I think I’ve sat players on the last day of the week in order to win TOs about twice in the last couple of years. I dont think its unreasonable, but its infrequently a viable move. It only works when u are winning TOs or its close, and you are so far ahead in 4 (out of 9) cats that you can afford to take a day off. If thats the case good for you- its like sitting your starters for the forth quarter when ur up by 30. I dont see it as unsporting. That said, I still dont like the inconsistency of TOs for H2H.
..and if my vanity ever takes over and I feel the need to race up through the Buser rankings, I’ll start playing the public leagues against those kids who post ‘First!’ and ask questions like ‘shud I trade LeBron for T-Mac and AI?’
Yeah! Vanity rocks!
Go Narcissus!!!
I totally agree, I don’t see anything wrong with that strategy. It’s like in baseball in a H2H league where there’s a minimum IP. If you reach that minimum and have a winning ERA and WHIP, no reason to start Ricky Nolasco when you know he’s gonna ruin your whole season! Sorry, I have some bitter feelings toward him.
And I agree wholeheartedly with you guys! I guess I was trying to aim my comments more towards those who may be coming to busersports with horror stories of “bad” managers who do things like trade all your good players for their bad players and lock you out of making moves during the last week of the playoffs. That’s the same type of guy who would load up his team with high cat players, pound you all week with stats, and then bench players the last couple of days just to win TO’s and beat you 9-0.
Now, I’ve never had it happen to me personally, but the Yahoo posts are filled with guys who have these types of experiences, and one of those which I’m starting to see more and more is this one regarding the TO/benching strategy. Of course, you have to take Yahoo posts with a grain or two…lot’s of whining going on over there, if you ask me.
As a strategy, I do think it can be viable, especially if you’re in a 4-4 week. Whether TO’s are the tied cat or not, I would definitely consider that strategy if I could afford to bench a guy (or two) who tended to turn the ball over more just to keep from accumulating that stat. It could be the difference in a week’s win or loss. I’ve done it before with FG% and FT%, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t work with TO’s.
And dasein brings up another good point – if you’re a newbie to fantasy, PLEASE do your homework and DON’T ask a question like ‘shud I trade LeBron for T-Mac and AI?’
Cause if you do, I have the keys to a brand new ’72 Pinto just waiting for you.
if you are going to play in private leagues, you have to be or know the commish, period. joining a private league that was published in the yahoo boards is playing with fire – i can speak from years of experience in yahoo customer care. if you want to join more competitive private leagues – which i encourage everyone to do until yahoo figures out a way to fix their public league system – then find them through sites like this or fantasy hoops message boards (like the hoops cafe) or the like
I wouldn’t really mess with the 9 categories, i personally like them as they are. what i prefer is h2h with no playoff system (for all fantasy games). That way it gives the every-week enjoyment of h2h (i can only get into roto/points leagues if money is involved) and it does not penalize the top teams by having the playoffs decided by a guy like CJ Miles or the like. i hate being in first place by 20+ games at the end of the regular season, only to lose to the team with all the hot waiver-wire fodder that are playing at the end of the season.
for me the equation is pretty simple: if there is money or a high level of competition involved, i want roto. when it’s a “friendly” league, i’ll play h2h
In our money leagues, we pay the season winner more than the playoff winner. It works out pretty well.
I’ve played in a couple money leagues like that, and that is the only fair way to pay out. i think in ours the winner of the playoffs got slightly more than their entry fee as a prize, while the regular season winners get significantly larger payouts.
i like this idea. a h2h league i was in actually treated the playoffs like the regular season and just kept track of matchups (ignored the playoff setup) so the team with the best W-L record at the end of the season was league champion
Some good discussion here- more of a response then I was expecting to be honest, but a welcome surprise
I think the argument that FG% balances out the 3s by itself and that 3pt% isnt required is probably fair. And while I was hesitant to drop Ast as a stand alone, I’m more comfortable with the idea of Ast:TO for H2H after reading through the comments here. I still like the Reb split, because I just think it creates more value and adds two ‘legitimate’ and ‘fun stats’ in place of one. However, its a good point that you have to be careful who you are playing with when you deviate from the standard, as inexperienced and less-committed players will likely be thrashed.
For my H2H ‘mates league’ next season I think I’ll try FG,FT,Pts,OR,DR,3s,Stl,Blk,Ast:TO. Agree that H2H is more fun with your mates, but I’d like to move more into roto now. Still not sold on TO in roto after my experience last year where I was in the cellar from the start and never managed to get out. You can make moves to increase counting stat production, but you cant reduce accumulated TOs. Still, I won Ast in that league by a mile, which thinking about it, probably has a lot to do with it. Maybe I should suspend judgement for now and have another go…
My 8-team H2H league has some settings intended to reduce but not eliminate the luck factor of fantasy playoffs:
1. We have 2 weeks per playoff round (not sure if this is possible in Yahoo).
2. We have an even number of categories (8), which works in conjunction with…
3. The tiebreaker for each playoff round goes to the team with the better regular season record. This works for 8-cat leagues because 4-4 ties happen often enough to give teams that do well in the regular season a significant but not insurmountable reward.
Also, we don’t allow free agent pickups once the playoffs start.
While I prefer standard 9 cat h2h, I have played in other leagues with different settings (although I never seem to do too well in those). One huge reason that I like having the TO cat is because I really hate the teams that will rotate the 1 or 2 worst players on their roster everyday to get more games in for the week. TO helps offset this as usually they will accumulate a ridiculous number of TOs playing so many players.
Anyway, because of this in all my private leagues we now use a weekly lineup instead of a daily lineup. Personally, I love this setting because it helps offset any injured players you may have and also you have to plan much more carefully against other teams. What do you guys think about using the weekly lineup?
I’ve mostly considered weekly as a foil to streaming. I’ve avoided it thus far because I like a more ‘hands on’ game, i.e. the ability to make line-up changes mid week depending on how a match is playing out. Its a preference thing thou. I like being pretty active and I tend to check the results daily. But I think weekly is a good option for leagues that dont want to disadvantage the managers who have less time on their hands
I agree – I’ve got A LOT of time on my hands to pay attention to the daily grind. But for those who do have lives (like I used to have), it makes sense to go weekly.
Another option I’ve seen but never been involved with is limited moves per week. It makes you think twice about adding and dropping guys if you can only do it 2, 3, or 4 times a week. I like the idea, and I wish Yahoo could make it a part of their overall default settings. I feel that limited add/drops per week would certainly change the aspect of “strategy” in the game (at least in public leagues).
dasein:
Props for essentially kick-starting this spicy and tantalizing thread…let the arguments and debates ensue…
3pt% can be reflected in FG%. It gets quite repetitive. 3PM is the perfect to way to gauge and reward players who have range from downtown.
TO’s = get rid of them. Rewarding inactive owners? Massively penalizing the studs of the league who have the ball in their hands a majority of the time? I’m Ron Burgundy? Plus it is not a fun stat as it is negative (should not fantasy be the sole purpose of having fun and the occasional bragging right?) It ticks me off a bit, but the world is not perfect. The aforementioned is the only slight disappointment of Yahoo settings v. ESPN settings. Not a big deal since I was able to gain Winner’s eligibility (hope it is spicy as well). To tell you the truth, only reason I participate in ESPN fantasy is they offer more up-to-date players news v. Yahoo–nice little tidbit there for my fellow busersport followers
From here on out, I will max out my one & only Yahoo account and join just one ESPN league like I did last season.
As for REB, they are one and the same. You just reward managers w/ stacked glass-eating bigs. Ditto for AST/TO—rewards managers w/ stacked PG’s (Calderon anyone?). I say reward versatility and overall ability.
As for H2H, it DOES add real flavor and excitement and allows the savviest of owners to dig deep and find the ones who will catapult you to the gold (shout out to Carney for 1 extra 3PM and Birdman for 1 extra BLK…I was losing that entire last wk and you really stepped up). Roto > H2H any day though.
Also, daily settings > weekly settings. Rewards active owners, like me.
As for overall cat preference, I’m down w/ ESPN standard 8-cat settings:
FG%, FT%, PTS, REB, AST, ST, 3PM, BLK
Cap:
. As for negativities, there are FG%, FT% there. Pretty damn good gauge of efficiency if you ask me.
Way too many cats there bro. I did 12 cats my 1st yr and I went bonkers. But people are different, and variety is the spice of life, so w/e tickles your fancy, go for it—I still respect it as I do everybody
So-Tex Spurs:
True. I deeply despise collusive owners. It leaves a southpaw sucker punch right in the proverbial fantasy gut. I will be commish for the 1st time to see how it is…I will be open to anything though so everyone in my league should have no worries. Only way I participate in private leagues now is if I TRULY trust the other participants OR if I am commish. Other than that, public is the way to go (plus no worrying about finding good competition since there are Winner’s Leagues and this site
Ash(ley):
Amen
PS: Is there anyway to persuade Yahoo to dump TO’s for good in the standard settings? If so, I will be the 1st to lobby.
PSS: Digging the other sports references. I strictly stick to the greatest game ever invented—basketball (quoting Hoosiers), and don’t see myself having a change of heart anytime soon. Oh, and apologies for the lengthy response. Kudos to those who have made it this far—give yourself a pat on the back.
As for “streaming,” I believe it is a legitimate strategy, and I curse those leagues w/ limited moves (not really…it just ticks me off a tad). It yet again challenges the savviness of owners, and allows those unfortunate owners who have lost key studs due to injury or the like (I am talking to you Yao 07-08…Perkins was good enough to get me bronze) to compensate and avoid tanking or being inactive.
As for fouls, enough of the negativity. FG% and FT% are enough. The peripheral classic stats (PTS, REB, AST, ST, BLK), plus 3PM is muy bueno. But of course, gotta give that R.E.S.P.E.C.T. to others
Let’s not refer to it as “streaming” – that just sounds so dirty.
Let’s use the politically correct term: “roster maximization”.
Yeah…it’s true, I swear.
I think I read it in Webster’s somewhere. Or maybe on the back of a Coke can – I can’t remember.
I personally come from the school of thought that says calculated streaming is a good strategy (to a certain extent), so I’m all for daily lineups. I know there’s some avid streamer-haters out there though, so I won’t get into it.
I’ve got a good story about a league I was in with a streamer from a few years back, but I’ll save it for that particular argument when it arises (and you KNOW it’s coming!).
Thanks guys for the input, a lot of really good points made here. I’m pretty active when it comes to managing my fantasy teams so I may have to rethink how I approach things this year.
Yeah, I like to play in leagues with a minimum of 14 teams, all kinds of categories, daily transactions, and very active managers. It makes it more like you’re putting together a real team, where everything matters, not just the 5 basic stats. You might not believe me, but Daequan Cook is a GOLDMINE.
Another easy way to foil streaming (which is okay in small doses, but awful if used throughout the season) is to increase the league and/or roster size. If you like 10-12 teams leagues (my preference), then by adding 2-3 additional roster spots (1 more g, f, and utility) and adding a couple of additional bench spots, the majority of the useful players will end up on people’s rosters and not in the FA pool to be streamed. When i am commish, the rosters are always larger (doesn’t let mgrs get by on just their star players) and there is usually a moves limit. i’ve found that without a bunch of options in FA pool it seems encourage trades, and the mgrs with more knowledge about players and what role players can add to their team tend to do better.
yep, having a deep league is a nice way to get round the streaming. I’m in a 20 team league with something like 15 roster spaces and your more likely to hurt yourself then help if you try dredging the bottom of that barrel for extra player-games. Of course it means you dont get a starting 5 of all stars, so it might not be everyone’s cup of tea.
yes, in deep h2h leagues this makes sense. in deep roto leagues, you want to keep benches short to actually encourage some roster turnover (ie, add/drop activity)
In the private leagues I run (Ultimate Challengers), I prefer to use the following, both H-2-H and Roto:
1. FG%
2. FT%
3. Points Scored
4. 3′s Made
5. Offensive Rebounds
6. Defensive Rebounds
7. Assists
8. Blocks
9. Steals
10. Turnovers
11. Fouls
Of course, I also use 10-man teams, five starting, and it sort of gets compensated by the fact that there are 20 teams involved.
I do like the split of rebounds because they are critical to the play of the game. I also like fouls because they can affect the game in some fashion. I see that some reporting services use a plus/minus points differential thing as a snapshot of how well a team plays with a certain player in the line-up vs. when that player is not in the line-up. I’m thinking that whatever service we use to conduct fantasy activity should give us this option as well.
Just looking for some quick opinions from the group. I am in a keeper league where I am taking over a bad team, it is terrible. I have the #1, 2, and 4 picks for next year, any thoughts on who they should be:
1) B Griffin
2) J Harden
4) Rubio / Thabeet
Or am I off base? My expertise is limited to yahoo and this site, so any advice is appreciated.
I also apparently have the manager option to trade the #4 pick for R. Sessions if I want, thanks again.
Blake Griffin is a STUD. He will be a solid KEEPER. Also, Sessions has insane potential w/ playing time. Go for it man!
Yea but just remember he is a clipper. They are the blackhole of the NBA
So you’re only drafting rookies? Forgive me if I’m not understanding because I’ve never played in a keeper league, but don’t you have access to other players who aren’t being held by the other managers?
More details please.
if it’s a dynasty league (different then a keeper) then they only do a rookie draft every year after the initial start up draft. A keeper draft you’d be able to draft all players not being kept along with rookies
other players not kept in a dynasty league are just out there on the wire
Got it – sounds like eacott4′s in a dynasty league then. If that’s the case, I’d stick with Griffin, Harden, and Thabeet – I haven’t heard anymore news on the Rubio front, but methinks he’ll not be making the trip to Minn-ee-soooo-ta, don’ cha know.
if the draft is only for rooks, Id pull the trigger on Sessions rather than burn your 4th pick on Thabeet. Not sure about Harden either to be honest. he’ll get time but dont know about usage. Flynn might be a better bet, he’ll likely be the starting point so will have the ball in his hands a lot, which isnt necessarily a good thing of course. Its a roll of the dice either way.
Yes, the draft is for rookies only. The waiver wire is very shallow, and no pickups can be made until a few weeks before the season is about to start.
It appears as if the consensus is to take Griffin, then Harden or Flynn (maybe, but leaning towards Harden) and make the deal for the Sessions rather than picking at #4?
i’d consider taking Blair with the number 4. he could put up monster numbers this season
what about steph curry as opposed to rubio or thabeet? he is in a better position to help fantasy teams next year than rubio (will he even play?) or thabeet (most likely will struggle and only offer some help in reb and blks). i think curry could probably be a decent 5-6 category contributor (3pm, pts, ft%, asst, TO), though am not really sure…
I use FG% FT% 3PTM PTS REB AST STL BLK TO in a roto league. We have 21 player rosters with 15 players (3 pg, 3 sg, 3 sf, 3 pf, 3 c) in at any one time. These large teams are to encourage trades and to mitigate the effect of superstars.
This is a discussion of how I am planning on picking players this year.
Now, I always enjoy statistics, which is how I got into fantasy basketball and then the NBA. The Yahoo overall rankings, though, don’t seem to correlate too well with how my league picks teams, so I created a ranking system that makes more sense for my league.
Here’s my methodology:
I take the top 3 teams (9 team league) for each category and come up with an ideal per game stat – I total the top three teams’ pts, asts, whatever and then divide them by total games played by the top three teams in that category. This gives me a per game stat of an “ideal” player. This “ideal” player isn’t going to necessarily be the best at each category, but provides a great above-average benchmark by which to compare other players. I normalized the ideal player to having a total value of 7 (8 positive categories – TOs). I then normalized the top 230 players’s statistics to this “ideal” player and then to the overall value of 7. This puts LeBron as the best player in my league with a value of 10.072.
The spreadsheet took me about 20 minutes to do and doesn’t correlate perfectly with Yahoo rankings. Additionally, I know my biggest mistake is using ft% and fg% because FTA and FGA are not weighted properly. In other words, Ariza’s FT% will not counter Dwight Howard’s. However, given that people in my league view the Yahoo rankings as somehow transcendentally perfect, they draft very closely to those rankings. This is where my chart comes in handy. Yahoo’s Season Average has Baron Davis at 121st overall. That’s Average, not total. However, my chart puts him as the 17th most valuable player (again, we’re working with season averages here, so his injuries and missed games don’t matter too much for this). But, this discrepancy means that I can likely hold off on picking B-Diddy until late in the draft and expect value for the pick. Josh Smith has a smaller but similar differential between Yahoo Season Avg rank and value rank according to my formula.
I know my formula is flawed in that it doesn’t accurately weight FGM/FGA and FTM/FTA and I’m not sure how to incorporate those stats into my player values, but the spreadsheet gives me an easy way to value players even if I choose to punt certain categories.
What do you guys think – aside from it being absolute nerdity?
When are you launching your next shuttle mission?
Just messing with you – Man, you have A LOT of time on your hands! Quite honestly, if you’ve put that much work into it, I’d use it as a check and balance to Yahoo. I’ve always felt that Yahoo is pretty accurate, but they always manage to prove me wrong one way or another.
Just think of it in these terms: if you’ve used your formula and it’s been successful, use it (“If it ain’t broke…”). If you haven’t had much success with it, keep working at it – if you haven’t used it very long, keep working with it until you see some results, then let us know how it fared.
I used some simple math formulas dealing with Yahoo’s rankings to submit my draft lists to the forum (h2h and roto), so don’t think yours is “absolute nerdity”.
“Partial nerdity” to “nerdity” should suffice.
If you think thats nerdy, you aint seen nothing. Here’s dasein’s time to shine
I’ve made a spreadsheet that essentially mimics Basketball Monster’s results. Where mine is better is that I can select the number of players that are used to generate the averages. From playing around with my settings I found that Basketball Monster actually uses a fairly shallow player pool; something like 150-180 from memory. This is fine for smaller leagues, but the deeper your league, the ‘less right’ BM becomes.
I’d have to see how your numbers play out to know whether your method works or not, but on face value it seems to have an unnecessarily high degree of arbitrariness. Why the top 3 teams? Why not the top 2 or top 4?
I’ll tell you how I do it, which is more or less the same way that the main websites do it from what I can tell. Basically you compare each players contribution in a cat to the average across that cat for your player pool. Note that this is why the number of players that you draw your average from is important, e.g. the average PPG is very different depending on whether your league uses 120 players or 220.
Firstly, I use per game averages. For the counting stats, the formula is pretty simple; (‘players stat’-'mean stat’)/’stddev’. You possibly dont need to include the standard deviation, but I feel that it gives better numbers for the rare cats like Blks, and its easy to do so why not! With this method, an average contribution to a cat gives you a score of 0 and a positive or negative number denotes how much above or below average a player is. Last year the best positive contribution was CP3′s steals at around 4.5. Worst was- you guessed it- Dwights FT% at around -6!
The %s are a little trickier but still doable. Basically what you wanna do is first calculate an ‘effective %’. Here is my formula for ‘EfFG%’(do exactly the same for FT%): MFG% + (PFG% – MFG%)*PFGA/MFGA
where M denotes mean and P denotes player. I then do the same operation as for the counting stats using the mean and std dev from the calculated ‘effective %s’. Note that its possible an effective % is greater than 1, but thats ok.
Ast:TO ratio is trickier still, but I wont go into that now.
I use the numbers provide at Doug’s stats: http://www.dougstats.com/
Doug is a good man who does a great service to humanity. With excel you can work it so that you can import his stats from a txt file with the clic of a button. I’ve also set my spreadsheet up with macros so again you just click a button and it recalculates the rankings in seconds. This all took a little longer than 20mins, but Im confidant in the output. And to be honest, the value of what you learn in building a model is often just as great as using it.
Can I get a ‘Yeah! Nerdy Rocks!’?
Yeah, yeah, YEEEEAH!!! Nerdy Rocks!!!!
Go Lewis and Gilbert!!!
Holy spreadsheet, Batman! I’m still beside myself with you two!
Seriously d, have you ever considered putting that thing on disc and selling that puppy? I’m a graphic designer by trade, and I could set you up with all your packaging and stuff.
Between that and “The Wrath of the Emoticons” movie, we could make a killing! $-)
Yeah, that’s some serious number crunching! I think a good fantasy manager doesn’t rely on overall rankings TOO much. Just watch a lot of ball, follow the boxscores (esp. minutes), and notice the trends. As for the draft, sometimes drafting for position or a specific stat is necessary, even when higher ranked players are still available. I’ll still support your company though, as long as you give 10% of the profits to busersports.
I agree. Rankings are a blunt instrument, and its annoying as hell trying to make trades with people that take them as gospel. They’re useful for putting players into tiers, but who you take within the tier will depend on things like positional or statistical need, your assessment of injury risk, expectations about future improvement or decline, and the occasional man-crush
And no, I hadnt thought of trying to flog off my spreadsheet. I was indignant that yahoo wanted us to pay to see live scoring last year, so kinda assumed fantasy players are mostly cheap-asses like me. Also, most people seem (a little too) content with the freely available online versions so I’d be surprised if there is much of a market. Would be interested to hear if anyone thinks there is though.
It’s all in the marketing, baby, all in the marketing!
Yeah! Nerdy Rocks!
I’ve only ever made an excel spreadsheet for comparing my team to other teams in the league and find my strengths and weaknesses. Never felt like making a ranking list because, well, there are quite a few of those online and quite frankly, I am pretty confident in my drafting ability. Nerd on my man.
Yeah! Nerdy Rocks!
I admit there’s arbitrariness in it, but I was aiming for a benchmark by which to compare players across all (or selected) categories.
I disagree with your fg% formula, though – unless my understanding of how Yahoo! calculates team fg% is incorrect. Dwight’s FT% is significantly below average, but, the amount he gets to the line factors into your team’s average. For example, if you have a 2 person team and one guy shoots 50% at the line and the other shoots 90%, but Mr. 50% gets to the line twice as much as Mr. 90%, your team’s average FT% will be 63%. (Unless Yahoo simply averages 90% and 50%).
How would you go about including this weighting? Here’s where I’m stumped when it comes to adding it together for my overall player value calculation. I like your EFG% idea, though!
Do you want to participate in a statistics only league where we follow our own calculations to a “t” and make no trades or movements just to see how our formulas hold up? We could each submit a couple of teams based on different formulas to the league.
I have an Excel spreadsheet too.. I had to take a Business Information class last semester about Access/Excel and I learned a lot of Excel formulas and tricks. The class was so boring so I worked on a spreadsheet for my keeper league when I had time.
It’s nothing special, it just has each teams keepers averaged together so I could see who my top competition will be in certain categories and what my teams’ strengths/weakenesses are. Hopefully it helps me in the draft.
beaukemon to qualify %’s try this for your formula:
((player’s FG% – group FG%)/ group FG% stdevp) * (player FGA / group average FGA)
the “weight” being the player’s FGA versus the group’s average FGA – it’s not perfect but does have the desired affect. same deal for FT%, and even baseball ratio stats like ERA and WHIP (use player/group IP as the qualifier)
by the way i can tell you without any doubt that yahoo and BBM are very similar in “how” they rank players – yahoo is doing a good job these days. let’s just say some of the details aren’t exactly the same, so that’s why you’ll find some differences up/down
Not sure how you can disagree with my FG% formula and like my EFG% idea- they are one and the same. Its the ‘PFGA/MFGA’ part that accounts for relative shot volume. The version Matt gave is slightly different to mine, but basically the same idea. I’d be surprised if there is much difference between the results.
To be honest, I’m not sure there is much value in a draft and sit league. I certainly wouldnt stand behind my draft rankings as being a good predictor of the end result. I view the pre-draft ranking as doing the best with the information available at the time, but the ranking will certainly change as new information becomes available throughout the year.
If you were really interested in this idea, its simple enough to generate X number of teams based on your rankings, put them aside for the season, then work out who would have won at the end. I just dont see what you’ll learn from this excercise. I’m pretty sure it would come done to who lucked out and got Nene in round 10, or Dunleavy in round 5. Sorry to rain on you’re parade. I’d be more than happy to compete with you in a regular league though. Us nerds gotta stick together
…ok, so I had to go find empirical evidence for my claim. I just compared my FG% method to Buser’s and they give identical rankings. The numerical values are different though, so you just need to be careful your methodology is consistent so it doesnt screw with the overall rankings.
wasn’t really disagreeing, just noticed that you were doing it a bit differently. talking another look at your formula i can see how it would return the same result, but just kinda missed it the first time around – thanks for looking into that
Jeez…you guys make me feel like Ogre!
“NERRRRRRRDS!”
I like the EFG% idea, but not for my league or for the purposes of the stat sheets.
I’ll get back on here a little later. I actually have work to do today.
And I thought I was hardcore. I am not worthy (bows). But ya, seems like you’ve got a lot of time on your hands.
On a completely different note, are there any Buserites interested in starting up a football league? Seems like a lot of you know what you’re talking about here which would make it pretty competitive I think. It would just be for fun (and bragging rights), and I’m open to suggestions for settings. Any takers? Go Bears!
Hey Cap, I would be interested, I’ve played last years fantasy football and it would be great to play with some “Buserites”
I’m interested too. If it’s 10 teams, I like 2 QB’s and a WR/RB flex.
I HATE fantasy football!!!
Where do I sign up?
i guess i shoulda been the one to come up with this idea eh. i’m in
Alright, well I don’t have much commissioner experience, but I’ll go with whatever the mob wants. For now I set it up as:
14 teams, H2H
QB, WR, WR, WR, RB, RB, TE, RB/WR/TE (flex), K, D
Standard categories, but we can adjust later.
Personaly, I love IDP, and I’m happy to see specific positions added in Yahoo this year instead of just DL and DB, that will make things really interesting and more realistic, but I’m already in an IDP league so I’ll get my fill, and I’m not sure everyone else likes it, so we’ll leave defense to overall teams I think. First come first serve I guess.
League ID#: 270087
Password: bringyouragame
Should be fun!
Is that the right info? Because it’s saying this..
There was a problem
This league is not registered in this game. (Error #272)
Nevermind.. I was at Football Plus
I’m in as well. I noticed you have a live draft set, which is cool – I’ve never participated in a live draft before.
But in case I can’t make it in, I’m open to any suggestions on a good custom draft list, or is the Yahoo default pretty much on target?
Don’t get me wrong, though – I plan on doing my homework ahead of time and being there for the draft. Just want some input is all.
As for the draft, a live draft is the best way to go I think. The date is not set in stone, so I’ll take a vote to make sure everyone can show up.
If you do happen to miss it, I think Yahoo’s rankings are pretty solid right now, but sometimes there can be an injury in the preseason or something and Yahoo doesn’t adjust it accordingly, so it’s possible that if you do miss the draft, and you don’t pre-rank yourself, you’ll end up with a team full of injured players noone wanted.
ok, I’m in. one question, CEST is NY time???
Yeah, Eastern Standard Time.
ok thanks. would be very problematic to make the draft at 3pm or 4pm CEST??
Im in as well. I havent been posting very often but saw this and im ready to go! I hate doing public leagues because i always run into people who stop paying attention.
Thanks for setting up Cap; I’m in.
Sounds like what I was seeing – just wanted to make sure.
Looking forward to it!
Sounds like fun. I love fantasy football (although not as much as basketball), too bad my track record is so up and down. I usually place near the top or near the bottom, never middle of the pack. It’s sad really.
thanks for setting this up Cap
i’d try to join, but am currently over-saturated in all fantasy game types (bball, fball, baseball) relative to the non-work time i have, and my performance in leagues has already started to suffer (only in 1st in 2 of 3 baseball leagues, the other i am in danger of missing the playoffs altogether). good luck to all you.
Full already? Sigh.
Is there any way Yahoo! can bring back the Injured List (IL) for Fantasy Basketball?
no, because it doesn’t exist in real life. you could argue that they could use the inactive lists and/or make “judgement” calls, but that’s asking for more trouble than it’s worth. the inactive lists change daily (hourly?) and the info is not all that readily available. whenever you make a “judgement” call on anything as a provider, you are going to end up offending people and you leave it open for human error
How come some players receive little red “IL”s next to their names anyway? Is that the inactive list?
if i recall correctly, players either got an “INJ” designation and/or a small red cross? i know there was a correlation with their editorial profile being ‘tagged’ with injury news – ie, it saying “Injured as of Nov 20 (Broken Finger)” at the top of their profile. so if STATS tagged the player as injured, then they got the designation in-game. again, not every injury was treated as such and not every update was up-to-the-minute, so to go by who STATS designates as such would not be an agreeable solution, either
I see… Is there maybe a way that Yahoo! can make it possible for the league to decide on their own (whether by commissioner or league votes) to designate a players as injured? It probably wouldn’t work too well for public leagues, but it would be awesome to have as an option for custom leagues.
maybe, not sure how difficult that would be from a back-end perspective. i’ve seen instances where leagues simulate the IL by allowing managers to designate a player as on the IL and drop him, then nobody else can pick him up until he’s no longer injured (and you’ve made a decision one way or another to pick him back up or “release” him)
I see.. I guess that’s the “manual” way to do it. Thanks for the ideas!
Amen, brother. I’ve had Brand for the last 2 years in a keeper league.
I’m really surprised noone has mentioned Points over Categories yet. I love 9 cat Roto, but H2H points is absolutely the only way to go in my opinion. Could go on forever about how to skew the point values. . . if you get it right it makes a weekly win or loss much less arbitrary.
i was meaning to bring up the subject. i’ve mentioned the h2h pts league i’m in here before (not in this post, obviously). it’s a long-time league with other industry folks and is an absolute blast. we do weekly lineups and i definitely agree that it seems less arbitrary than category matchups
here’s scoring for my league. not perfect but i think it does a good job in terms of valuation:
3PT – Three Pointers Made .08 points
AST – Assists .17 points
BK – Blocks .25 points
FG – Field Goals Made .25 points
FGA – Field Goals Attempted -.08 points
FT – Free Throws Made .25 points
FTA – Free Throws Attempted -.17 points
PTS – Points .08 points
ST – Steals .17 points
TO – Turnovers -.17 points
TRB – Total Rebounds .10 points
I meant to ask you before Matt, what exactly you like about the points format? The first year I played fantasy ball I had a go at all three main formats, and kinda had points down the bottom mostly because of the difficulty in making trades. Everyone knows exactly what a player is worth so you can really only get a trade for positional need (usually not an issue) or out of differing expectations of future performance. Just seemed like there was less room for strategy than with cat scoring.
I’m not Matt, but I’ll give you my take on it.
You are probably right, a points league is more about player evaluation than strategy. Trades are pretty simply about betting on future performance. I am in a very active league with trades happening all the time, but I have no idea if these same managers would be making more trades under category scoring rules, maybe they would. But it is nice you don’t have to scramble around trying to get blocks or steals or increase your fg%.
it’s probably correct that the the draft and shrewd add/drops are what make or break the season and maybe that’s what i like about it, i’m not sure. perhaps a bit less room for in-season strategy, but also a bit less in-season arbitrariness
I’m not the commish of the league I’m in (he’s a producer for the four letter network and the league is a near 50% mixture of guys who work in sports related industries like him and guys who use sports to get away from work related industries like me) These are our values from last season.
Points (PTS) 0.2
Blocks (BLK) 2.5
Steals (STL) 2
Assists (AST) 2
Rebounds (REB) 1.5
Turnovers (TO) -1.5
Field Goals Made (FGM) 2.5
Field Goals Attempted (FGA) -0.5
Free Throws Made (FTM) 2
Free Throws Attempted (FTA) -1
Three Pointers Made (3PM) 3.5
Minutes (MIN) 0.1
I thought we slanted a little toward point guard type players last year, but all in all I was pretty happy with the system, though I’m lobbying to reduce the value for 3PM. When your guy hit a 3 it gave you 3.5 for the 3, 2 for the FG (minus attempt), and .6 for the points. So you got 5.6 total and blocks (the next highest scoring event) were only worth 2.5. . . .
there’s a noticeable disparity for 3pt to blk in my league as well – 0.49 for a 3pt, 0.25 for a blk
Maybe it’s not as big a deal as I thought. . . I just scoured the rankings from last season to try to come up with some glaring example of the overvaluation of the 3 pointer and came up pretty empty.
Still, the big difference between your league and mine is,
3ptm = .49 2ptm = .33 1.48:1
3ptm = 5.6 2ptm = 2.4 5.6/2.4 2.33:1
Maybe it’s not the 3pt that’s overvalued for me, maybe it’s that the 2pt and ftm are undervalued. Maybe we could solve that by making points worth a little more and 3pm worth a little less. . .
I’ll have to do some thinking.
the best place to start is by adding up league total stats to see how often the stats themselves happen. the ratios change once you “qualify” the amount of players, but in general something should only be worth a lot more than another thing if there are a lot fewer instances of it
for instance, when you consider that there were substantially more 3PTM (16,897) than BLK (12,211) last season, it probably doesn’t make sense to make 3PTM twice as valuable for fantasy purposes
http://www.basketball-reference.com/leagues/NBA_2009.html
you can go nuts with BBM’s points per stat rankings as well to see what looks good or bad
http://basketballmonster.com/playerrankings.aspx
Thanks for the resources buser.
Good point about the frequency of blocks and other fanatasy stats, I’ll certainly use that if I do decide to push to get our settings changed. Another question I’ve been thinking about today though, by coming up with fantasy values for stats are we trying to somehow represent the stats’ actual value to the game?
If so, then consider that the best possible real value of a block would be preventing 2 points (or infrequently, 3 points) by stopping a shot that would have gone in, and perhaps starting a fast break on offense; other times a block isn’t really worth that much as the offensive team may retain possesion and get another attempt.
3ptm on the other hand is worth 3 real points every time. So, is a 3ptm twice as valuable as a block, maybe not, but in that context maybe it makes sense to make it more valuable.
I also wanted to know why Yahoo does not differentiate between which leagues are roto and H2H in a fantasy profile. I believe at least SOME form of merit should be taken into consideration (I’m talking to you Dwight Howard!). Is this homtomfoolery or am I correct?
I think it should at least be noted, yeah.
Amen. What I’m trying to say is some players have a more positive or negative impact on certain settings than others, like Dwight Howard. In roto, you HAVE to surround Dwight w/ high volume, high percentage makers from the charity stripe to stay competitive or maybe even win a league. In H2H, I believe he can be a no-brainer 1st-round pick simply b/c stats are thrown away at the end of the wk, as opposed to accumulating for the entire season. It is MUCH easier to win. Josh Smith and Andrew Bogut killed it for me, and it was quite challenging to make up for the deficit, as I only achieved 3rd place led by LBJ, Joe Johnson, Kidd in one of my roto leagues.
i suppose it would be interesting to note but i’m not aware of plans to do that. what i REALLY want to happen – we’ve discussed it here previously – is somehow qualify performance ratings relative to the level of your competition (ie, everyone in your league’s experience/performance ratings). that would be SWEET
also, the h2h/roto split was around 3:1 last time i saw the numbers
Amen.
Is it safe to say that Thabeet is looking like a bust?
it’s safe to say he’s looking pretty poor after 3 summer games – 74 min, 22 pts, 11 reb, 1 ast, 8 to, 2 blk, 13 pf
will thabeet be the new Kwame Brown?? it seems possible
Kwame is not 7’3″. He has small, brick hands, and seems to play w/ no passion (did Smush thrive in LA?). Thabeet a bust, maybe. His length can clog the lane and, if not pull monster REB and swat countless BLK as a good role player, at least make the opposing team think twice before waltzing down the lane. But only time will tell. He is still ranked in my top 100 fantasy players as of now…
what there is to like about him is that all indications are that he’s a hard worker and is coachable. whether or not that will make up for how raw he still is – and how long it will actually take if it does – is another story. i see a substantial gasol injury as the only possible way he can make an impact in year one
The settings we’ve used over the past few seasons have been FT%, FG%, 3PM, PTS, OREB, REB, AST, STL, BLK, TO, TECH. The argument our commish makes is this: FT%, 3PM, PTS, AST, STL are all cats that benefit smalls, with FG%, OREB, REB, BLK, TO helping bigs.
TECH’s were included as the 11th cat for tiebreakers and because it helps simulate a “real team” where you want good character guys on the club. That last aspect always annoyed me, mainly because techs are like holds, a cat that takes very little to win and usually comes down to luck. Maybe a little luck isn’t bad.
True. Good take. A bit more realistic, a bit tedious, but interesting nonetheless. But gotta go w/ the semi-classic 8-cat (FG%,FT%,PTS,REB,AST,ST,3PM,BLK)
His counter would be that your system overrates guards. Running those 8-cats in BBM would show only 4 true C’s in the top 25 and 7 in the top 50. Add in TO’s and it rises to 5 and 10, respectively.
Maybe it was just a bad year for bigs. Let’s go back a season and try this again. 8 cats will put just 3 C’s in the top 25 for 07-08, but 9 in the top 50. 9 cats are more even, with 5 top 25 again and 9 in the top 50. Further, you say?
06-07: 4/5 to 4/6
05-06: 2/6 to 3/8
I don’t care much for our 11-cat game, other than the fact I know it devalues guards something fierce and no one else is figuring it out. Just seems that playing without TO’s is too much of an advantage.
Point taken. But playing WITH TO’s? Rewarding players who touch the ball as opposed to those who do not? Allowing THREE negative stats? Aaah, I guess I can live w/ it, but usu. not my cup of tea. Everyone is different…
I think of it as a balance issue. If adjusted fg% divided by net free throws times twos made properly valued players, I’d include that as well.