Fantasy Basketball Opinions: Playing the Game
Since this is the inaugural column in what I hope will be a season-long series, I wanted to start with some basics.
You are reading this column, I assume, because you are currently managing a fantasy basketball team and are looking for keen insight and analysis that will help you pilot your team to victory.
Well, I can't guarantee either so instead I'll try to provide in this column a few basics to help you become a regular miner of keen insights yourself.
In my years of fantasy experience, the biggest mistake I see owners make is forgetting that they are playing a game. That is, they begin to make decisions based on factors other than those which directly relate to winning and losing the game of fantasy basketball.
The first of factors is: hype versus numbers. Fantasy basketball, and all other types of fantasy or rotisserie competition, is determined based solely on the numbers alone. There are no points for style, no subtractions for felony convictions, or additions for acrobatic or crucial plays. A flying Vince Carter dunk is the same as a Jamie Feick putback. A last-second jumper from the corner equals the garbage time layup in the cold calculus of your scoring system.
Forget the personalities, team loyalties, and media-created reputations, to you, the fantasy basketball purist, Latrell Sprewell is not a coach-choking, lawsuit-filing thug, he's simply a super producer across a plethora of categories.
The second factor is the rules of the game itself. How is the players' value helped or hurt by your particular scoring system? Shaq's a monster in standard systems counting points, rebounds and all the other categories but he takes a hit if you include free throw percentage. Not to say dump him but understand that you've got to find a mason to make up all of Shaq's free throw bricks.
Another facet of this factor is simply knowing how and when to make transactions. If you wake up this morning and see that well my investment in Robert Horry isn't exactly panning out, don't expect to go to the well and find Ruben Patterson available. Somebody else in your league has already ditched a bum they drafted and latched on to Patterson. Values change quickly, sometimes from day to day and you need to know how quickly you can move.
Speaking of values, I'd like to impart some advise on the crucial topic of reading the box scores. I don't know about you, but I have a life. I do not have time nor the patience to sift through every single number in agate type to dig out relevant information. So, I've devised the following system to help me dredge out important clues about player's relative values and the direction they are heading.
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