StratPinion Week 2: Roto vs Head to Head

Before I get into the meat of this week's column, I'll explain some slight changes to the StatDance.com empire, and the direction I find myself heading in. I just don't have the time I hoped to make my nearly-daily posts, which is disappointing to me (and, I'm sure, the 300 people who will read this!). However, I have tinkered around and now have nearly-daily updates to my top 200 for 8-cat and 9-cat leagues.

These ranks are sortable, by each category. This gives you the ability to see where each player gets their production, and a way to add valuable players to fit your particular needs. I highly reccomend exporting these rankings to a spreadsheet to add players' values for only the categories you are targeting - that's how I use the rankings myself.

The most important feature, in my opinion, is the per-36 numbers I have posted in the sortable rankings. With this, you can see who has the most potential to break out and become a serious contributor if they are given more minutes, or who is barely hanging on to their "ownable" status with the 42 minutes they play per game.

Also, I got rid of the navigation menu with links I haven't updated in two years, and only have links to the Manifesto and the ranks. A very minor change, but it took me more time than I would like to admit, with this layout I chose....

Roto Scoring vs. Head-to-Head

In rotisserie scoring, you compete against the entire league, for the entire season. Both of these facts make it a very different animal than head-to-head.

Opponents

Competing against the entire league encourages being competitive in all categories - there is a huge difference between being average in a category and being worst. While it is still feasible to punt a category in a roto league, it is certainly not advisable to do unless you have a really good plan. Punting two categories would likely eliminate you from contention in an 8 or 9 category league. Punting two categories, in a 12-team league is the difference between finishing first and fourth, in all categories, in an 8-team league. Mediocrity is strongly rewarded in your non-strength categories.

As you can see from the rankings, the worst players in the percentage categories are tremendously bad. As an example, Andre Drummond is currently not ranked in the top 200 on my rankings; in 9-cat leagues, he is ranked #291 overall. If you gave him a 0 for Free Throw Percentage, he would jump up to #59 overall. He hurts you more than #12, #13, #14, and #15 (in FT%) combined. Basically, your team would have to be really stacked in FT% to be an average team in FT% if you had Drummond rostered. Tony Wroten has nearly the same FT% impact as Drummond (-57.7 for Wroten, -60.1 for Drummond), and would be in the top 10 overall if he hit 75% of his free throws. Instead, he is currently #106 overall for the season. This, of course, is why I highly recommend punting the percentage categories - you can acquire top 10 value for the price of a top 100 player.

Counting stats, on the other hand, can't be very harmful to punt. Getting zero of any countable stat doesn't hurt your team overall, it just doesn't help you. It is very easy to get average points if you never target the category. This is a much-weaker version of punting, but is a very viable strategy in roto, depending on the distribution of stats in your league. If three teams are hoarding all the top blockers, it might be really easy to get a middle-of-the-pack ranking while never focusing on the category, if you have one strong blocker like Anthony Davis.

Weekly vs Season-Long

To start, there is very little difference between the two scoring systems for the counting stats (Points, Rebounds, Blocks, Assists, etc). There will be more variance in a weekly format, due to both player production and games per week and injuries. Serge Ibaka missing two games could easily lose blocks for the week, but won't have a big impact on your season as a whole.

The biggest misconception I have found on this topic is how the length of time affects players' values. The penalty for tanking categories gets confused with the differences between competing on a weekly vs. season-long basis.

The traditional thought process in a weekly format is that it is less important to have high percentages because there is so much variance. Over the course of a season, the variance sorts out and players tend to shoot closer to league-average. But on a weekly basis, players are more likely to shoot really poorly, or really well. This creates a surplus of "Field Goals Made Over Average Percentage", or FGOP (and FTOP), as I explain in the Fantasy Basketball Manifesto. This makes it seem like FG% (and FT%) seem under-valued, since there are "more" of them. However, a high-percentage player is more likely to have a strong week, and a low-percentage player is more likely to have a weak week. While each FGOP is less important, the streaky weeks will have more FGOPs (both positive and negative), so it will have a proportional effect on your matchups. Over the course of the season, it all evens out, of course - the high-percentage players end up with more weeks of strong percentages, and vice versa.

The point is, there is very little difference between weekly, head-to-head leagues and roto leagues, except for punting strategies. This affects your team when you consider players that force you into a punting strategy, like Dwight Howard and Andre Drummond. They aren't as valuable in roto leagues because you need to punt FT% to own them successfully - not because there is a big difference in how important percentages are, but because of how viable tanking strategies are.

Thanks for all the positive feedback regarding the ranks and the column, please feel free to share your opinion, ideas, or constructive criticism here, on reddit (/u/statdance), or on twitter (@statdance).

StratPinion Week 1

This week, I introduced my rankings on the site. You can visit them on the main navigation bar above. Right now, it is manually updated and not dynamic - it is only explicitly updated for 8-category and 9-category leagues. I think the majority of people play in these leagues; half of my leagues are standard-category leagues. In this week's edition of StratPinion, I'll talk about how to use these ranks and how your league might be different from the standard (Points, Rebounds, Assists, Three-Pointers Made, Field Goal Percentage, Free Throw Percentage, Steals, and Blocks - with Turnovers as the 9th category, standard in Yahoo leagues) league settings.

First of all, a basic explanation of the ranks. The players are listed by rank with a name and a numerical score. The rank and player name are obvious, and included in all ranks. The number following the rank is what makes MRiS ranks easier to use. The idea isn't complicated, but it might not be obvious - the team with the most FPE (that's the number following the player's name!) has the best chance to win each week. This gives an easy way to compare value in trades.

If Player A is giving up the #10 player, who averages 100 FPE/game, and is getting the #20 and #23 players in return, who average 75 and 70 FPE each, he wins the trade (from an average production standpoint) if the player he has to drop averages less than 45 FPE. Obviously, I'm not recommending using my rankings in exclusion of everything else, but it is a great tool to use when looking at players for trade or for waiver-wire pickups.

One big thing that will affect the relative value of players is your league's depth. The first thing that changes is the relative value of a waiver-wire pickup. If only 100 players are rostered in your league, that means the 101st best player (the guy you are picking up) is your "zero" for value. The deeper your league, the slimmer the pickings become on the waivers.

This makes the most-valuable players even more valuable. This is intuitive, since the deeper your league is, the worse the "available" players become. However, this also makes the middle-of-the-road players more valuable. This is less intuitive, and is the dominant factor in the changing relative values when league sizes increase. To demonstrate, I'll use the current 9-cat ranks:

1. 162.5 FPE
50. 63.4 FPE
100. 47.3 FPE
150. 34.6 FPE

In a 50-player league, the top player is worth 100 FPE compared to an available player. Basically, he is worth 256% of the next available player. But in a 150 player league, he is worth 470% of the next available player - double the value! While this might make you think top players are more valuable in deeper leagues, remember I'm making this point to show that this is not so clearly the case as you might think.

The #50 player, in this league, is now worth 183% of the first available player - almost as much as the #1 player was in the first shallow-league example! In a 150-player league, there are 20 players more valuable than the #1 player is in a 50 player league. (feel free to read that three times, I can't think of a better way to write that!). Here are some numbers from my draft-value calculator, which doesn't have actual statistics, but uses the best projections I could find on the internet:

Shallow League: 8 teams, 13 players per team, $200 budget
* 1 Anthony Davis $65
* 9 Damian Lillard $41
* 30 Kenneth Faried $18
* 60 Markieff Morris $9
* 101 Danny Green $1
Anthony Davis + Danny Green for Lillard + Faried: $66 for $59

Normal League: 10 teams, 13 players per team, $200 budget
* 1 Anthony Davis $64
* 9 Damian Lillard $43
* 30 Kenneth Faried $21
* 60 Markieff Morris $13
* 101 Danny Green $5
Anthony Davis + Danny Green for Lillard + Faried: $69 for $63

Deep league: 14 teams, 13 players per team, $200 budget
* 1 Anthony Davis $61
* 9 Damian Lillard $43
* 30 Kenneth Faried $25
* 60 Markieff Morris $18
* 101 Danny Green $11
Anthony Davis + Danny Green for Lillard + Faried: $72 for $68

 (Note: These values were calculated using Rotowire's preseason projections and my MRiS ranking system)

The message is pretty muddled in the numbers here. The basic points are that as a league gets deeper:
1) The most valuable players get even more valuable.
2) The solid contributing players add even more value than the top players.
3) While the relative values change, a lot of trades (like the one I used as an example) will still be relatively balanced.
4) If you use my numbers, you'll never make a bad trade in fantasy basketball.

OK, point 4 isn't entirely true. But, using a ranking system like MRiS will help you out! Thanks for all the feedback so far this season, please don't be shy in leaving your comments, suggestions, constructive criticism, and ideas here, emailing me, on twitter (@statdance), or on reddit (/u/statdance).

Thanks for reading, be sure to stop by for new rankings features, hopefully coming soon!

MRiS Fantasy Basketball Ranks

I will now be posting my MRiS (Modified Rarity Index Scoring) ranks for both standard 8-cat and standard 9-cat leagues.

Enjoy!

The ranks are in the top menu bar on the website.