Hey guys,

Here are the new standings:

NBA ROTO LEAGUE STANDINGS 1/21

I don’t really have much to say about them, except that the Knicks are no longer in last which I feel I have to point out since I usually point out how bad they suck.  So instead I’m going to look at some per 48 minute stats.  In general these aren’t too mindblowing provided you stick with all player (Chris Paul gets the most steals per48, Marcus Camby gets the most blocks per48) but a few are real interesting and you can get some real interesting results if you look by position.  The first one I’d like to look at is fouls because even though it isn’t a roto stat any “expert” will tell you the most important fantasy stat is minutes and fouls have a huge impact on those.  When I limit my search to players that might be owned in fantasy leauges Andray Blatche, Paul Millsap, Mickeal Pietrus, Nazr Mohammed, Joel Pryzbilla, Sean Williams, Shaq, Tyrus Thomas, Eric Dampier, Mikki Moore, Andrea Bargnani, and Luis Scola all average more than 6 fouls per48 which is pretty horrible.  I would avoid these players and even try and trade them away if I had them because they could end up with a bad game even if they’re performing well just because of foul trouble.  It is also interesting to note that if David Harrison was allowed to play a full 48 minutes he would foul out twice.  Turnovers per 48 is another helpful thing to look at the best (ie rarely turn it over) guys with some fantasy relevance are: Peja, Raja Bell, Keith Bogans, Anthony Parker, Shawn Marion, Ben Wallace, Jamario Moon, Mikeal Pietrus, Shane Battier, Antonio McDyess and Tayshaun Prince  I don’t think most fantasy owners appreciate how much not turning it over is worth so you can probably trade for some of these guys for cheaper than you should.  And these guys (who turn it over a lot) you can probably get more value for than they are really worth: Dwayne Wade, Steve Nash, Kidd, Shaq, Tinsley, Deron, Melo, Josh Smith, Yao and Ginobli.  Now each of those guys is a very good fantasy player (except Shaq) but just know that their Turnovers hurts their fantasy value and if you can get somebody who approximates their stats (which for a few of these guys would be impossible) you should certainly think about it.  Now I’m going to start looking for the best players at getting certain stats that are not associated with their position.  The best PF/C at getting assists are Diaw, Matt Barnes, Garnett, Nowitzki, Tim Thomas, Brad Miller, Josh Smith, Duncan, and Camby.  A few of those guys are proabably availible in most leagues and can really help with assists since they don’t won’t be knocking out a player who would also be contributing assits.  For Gaurds the best rebounders are Kidd, Delfino, Mike Miller, Azibuke, Dunleavy, Bryant, Ginobli, Kyle Lowry and Jason Richardson.  None of those guys who’d be on any waiver wires are GREAT options so I’d use this more for guys to target in a trade if you need rebounds for the same reason bigs that get assists help more.

Until Friday,

DL

Come back Monday

Udates on Monday and Friday of next week to make up for today.

Sorry about this (I gotta stop schedualing flights on Fridays),

DL

Hey guys,

Another Friday, another standings:

NBA ROTO League Standings 1/11

The standings still pretty much have the good teams at the top and the bad ones at the bottom (execpt the Pacers and Grizzlies contiue to be hugely overvalued and the Hakws continue to be hugely undervalued, or perhaps their record is only pretty good because they’ve been lucky) Today though I’d like to look at how much it helps to be great at something, even if it’s just one thing, and how much it hurts to suck at something, even if it’s just one thing. Here is a list of teams that are in the top two in at least one category: Jazz, Suns, Mavs, Raptors, Warriors, Magic, Pacers, Sonics, Nuggets, Pistons. Okay, so most of those teams are pretty good with the only exceptions being the Pacers and Sonics who are the top two teams in rebounds which is a stat I’ve learned not to trust since I’ve started this blog as it seems to have no relation to rebound differential. If you insert the top two teams in rebound differential (Celtics and Rockets/76ers in a tie for second) you still have Philly but it looks a lot better. So it appears that every team, except the 76ers, who is among the top two in even one statistic is a serious contender to at least go deep in the playoffs. How about being terrible at something though? Here is a list of every team that is in the bottom two at something: Bulls, Clippers, Bobcats, Heat, Hawks, 76ers, Kings, Knicks, Grizzlies, Blazers, Spurs, Pacers, Sonics. This list looks pretty good (and by good I mean all the teams suck) except for the Blazers and Spurs who are bad in steals and blocks respectively, stats that I decried the importance of last week. However, if we again replace rebounds with rebounding differential we’d have to add in the Suns and Warriors, two very good teams but teams that play at a pace that offsets their rebounding woes. So it also hurts a lot to suck at even one thing, unless it’s steals, blocks or rebound differential for a fast-paced team. Obviously it is more important though to be pretty good at everything (the only teams in the top half of every category are the Suns and Pistons, who I wouldn’t be especially surprised to see in the finals) and it hurts much more to suck at everything (like the Knicks who I wouldn’t be surprised to see get the first pick in the draft).
Until next week,
DL

Hey guys,

I hope you had a good holiday season. I’m back with fresh new NBA Roto League standings for the new year:

NBA ROTO LEAGUE STANDINGS 1/4

Right now 12 of the top 13 teams in these standings are set to make the playoffs with the top team (Phoenix) having the best record in the west.  However, after that it goes kind of screwy so I’d like to look at the teams that this overvalues and undervalues and why.  I’d assume that as most of these categories are offensive, and the only defensive categories (steals and blocks) don’t really give a good picture of how good a defense is, that it would overvalue good offensive teams and undervalue good defensive teams.  With overvalued teams this seems the case with the Warriors, Pacers, Nuggets and Sonics being among the teams I’d consider most overvalued.  However, the Rockets are also among the most overvalued being the first team in these standings that is not currently set to make the playoffs.  The categories that the Rockets are best in are 3’s, Rebounds, Steals and Blocks, outside of 3’s these are basically the defensive categories so this seems to be a case where a good defensive team is measured fairly accurately, or even overvalued, by roto scoring.  I think the three most undervalued teams in these standings are the Celtics, Spurs and Hawks.  Two of those teams are clearly among the best defensive teams in the league (Boston and San Antonio) yet when you look at San Antonio it becomes clear that the defensive stats do not measure defense very well as the Spurs getting less than 5 points in each of the defensive categories: rebounds, blocks and steals. Also, the Spurs are doing very well in all of the offensive categories except points.  I however do not think of the Hawks as a dominate defensive team and they are actually doing pretty well in both blocks and steals.  Their weak categories are 3’s, points and assists and what they are very good at is not turning the ball over and getting turnovers, which actually basically makes them a good defensive team, go figure.  Also, a couple of funny notes to anyone who isn’t a Knicks fan: the Knicks are actually getting worse in these standings and they are 42 blocks behind the Spurs who are the second worst in the league.  To put that in perspective if the Spurs had 42 more blocks they would get 16 points in that category instead of 2.

Thanks for reading,

DL

Papers and Christmas

Hey guys,

Dreadfully sorry but I haven’t actually finished my two 15 page papers that are due today and tommorow I leave for christmas break so I won’t be updating this week or next.  Check back in the new year though for new standings.

Again, sorry,

Dan

Hey guys,

So lets start off with the standings:

NBA ROTO LEAGUE STANDINGS 12-14

As you can see right off the bat Phoenix is still dominating in the roto league standings but Denver has fallen off the blistering pace that they were on last week. After my comment last week about Denver having more rebound than any other team despite being out-rebounded in their games made me wonder how the leaders of other categories are doing compared to their direct in-game competition. This should show even clearer which teams play style that suit Roto scoring. First, let’s look at three pointer made: Do the Magic, Warriors and Suns draw teams into shoot-outs? Well, if so their opponets aren’t hitting their shots because those teams are right in the middle of the pack for three point defense behind the truly bad like Washington, Toronto and Seattle.

Points would seem to make more sense as the amount of points one team scores directly effects the amount of possesions the other team gets and this proves to be somewhat true Phoenix, Golden State and Utah are near the top in both points scored and points allowed (though they are all behind the Sonics in points allowed). Rebounds would be another stat that would seem to be highly influnced by the type of game being played. Surely enough, the Sonics, who are the top rebounding team this week, are being out rebounded (with a rebounding rate of .495 which means they get slightly under 50% of rebounds) The Nuggets, Magic and Warriors are also all in the top 10 rebounding teams despite having rebounding rates below .500. Meanwhile, Boston, who looks like they can’t rebound at all from the roto standings, has the league’s best rebounding rate at .530. Boston even stays in the middle of the pack for rebounds per game but holds their opponets to the fewest rebounds of any team because so many fewer shots are missed in each Celtics game (Utah and Philly also do impressive jobs keeping opponets off the glass).

Finally I would like to note that there is an 9% difference between FT% against Denver (who somehow holds opponets to 69%) and Washington (who’s competitors sink 78% of their free throws). What is the deal with this? Are Washingtonians horrible at waving those white things behind the basket? Can Carmelo make free thows miss with his mind? Those are the only two rational solutions I could come up with.

Until Next Week,
Dan

The Second Standings

Hey guys, Here are the second standings for if 9 category roto-league scoring was applied to the NBA:

NBA ROTO League Standings 12/7 

First thing that I notice after looking at them is how much these standing resemble the actual NBA standings and John Hollinger’s new Playoff Odds tool.  The top 16 teams in the Roto standings are 15 of the 16 teams that Hollinger’s tool thinks will get into the playoffs and the team that  has the best chances of making it that isn’t in right now.  Also, the Hawks are the eight best team in the east in the roto standings .   So it is looking pretty good for roto scoring as being a trustworthy predictor of how good a team is.  However, I would also like to see how this might apply to actual fantasy basketball.  One of the best ways to do this is to look at specialist categories that your team is struggling in and see which NBA teams are dominating them because that will probably continue, and certain stats like threes and steals are born of coaching style.   The Nuggets, Jazz, Warriors, Lakers and Celtics are the teams most likely to go for steals but the Nuggets, who lead the league, have an insane 7 players averaging at least 1 steal a game including Anthony Carter, Kenyon Martin, J.R. Smith and Eduardo Najera (at least 3 of which have to be available on your waiver wire).  For threes the best teams are The Magic, Warriors, Raptors, Suns, and Grizzles.  Of those teams Golden State is spreading it around the most with six guys averaging a three a game including Matt Barnes, Kelenna Azubuike and Mickael Pietrus (though he is hurt for the moment) , whereas the other teams in the top five get most of their threes from a couple of guys averaging 2-3 a game who  already owned in most fantasy leagues.  Another quick thing I’d like to point out:  Even though the Nuggets are doing great in this league and have a ridiculous four categories won when no other team has more than one they are actually getting out rebounded despite leading the league in rebounds and give up the most steals and points in addition to getting the most of them (thought they are beating their opponets in those categories).  Just goes to show you how much of an advantage teams that played 20 games over the teams they’ve played 2-4 more games than teams like the Celtics and Bulls.

Thanks for reading,

Dan

How about H2H?

Standings will be up later today but I thought I’d look and see how well fantasy stats predicted last nights games since that would replicate Head to Head league’s smaller sample size and one on one matchups .  At first, it seems to me like the much smaller sample size would make it less reliable but then again the fact that all the stats were made with a single basketball takes out things like the issue of pace.  Last night’s first game was 90-89 Atlanta over theT’Wolves but in fantasy stats the Wolves won 5-4 with (it was a 4-4 tie in leagues that don’t count turnovers). However, even though it predicted the outcome wrong it did guess that it would be a very close game and if Atlanta had hit one more free thow or the Wolves one less (the final score was 78.6 to 78.4) or Joe Johnson’s buzzer beater rimmed out it would have been correct.  The other two games were not nearly as close as the Nuggets easily beat the Mavs and the Blazers dispatched the Heat and in those games the fantasy score came down 6-3 in favor of the winner, though the Blazers did lose turnovers so it becomes 4-3 in 8-cat leagues.  So this extremely small sample size seems to indicate that fantasy stats are a pretty good way to see how good a team is since it predicted two of three games correctly and predicted the third would be very close, which it was, even if it chose a different victor.  Quickly though I thought I’d see how many “fantasy worthy” performances each team had to see if the winning team had more contributers or was carried by a stud more often.  I’m calling any performance “fantasy worthy” that has at least one of these things: 10+ points, 6+ rebounds, 4+ assists, 2+ threes,  2+ steals or 2+ blocks.  The T’wovles had 6, though Telfair snuck by with exactly 4 assists, and the Hawks had nobody outside of their starting five contribute in any meaningful way.  In the Nuggets-Mavs game Denver had 7 “fantasy worthy” performances, with Anthony Carter squeaking out 4 assists, and the Mavs had 6.  In the Portland-Miami game the story was the same with the winning Blazers having 7 and the Heat losing with 6.  As you can see in every instance the team with more “fantasy worthy” performances won the fantasy game, though this was not the case in terms of the actual basketball games which means it’s proably better have good contributions from everybody on your team rather than one player who just went off though that may not be as true in reality, I mean look at the Cleveland LeBrons.  See you later today with the standings.

Dan

I’ve been linked!

Hey guys, sorry I have missed 2 of my first 3 updates but thankgiving got in the way one week and last week I had 3 papers due. However, I promise to update tommorow so if you enjoy that first post below this one then show up tommorow for another. Also, HUGE shoutout to nels at givemetherock.com which is really a daily must visit for anyone serious about fantasy basketball.

Dan Lester

The First Standings

A thought occurred to me as I was going over my rotisserie league statistics a few days ago, if the NBA were scored the same as a roto league which teams would be the best? Since the statistics used to score fantasy teams do matter in NBA games it would stand to reason that the best NBA teams would also be the best roto teams. I decided to see if that was true and compiled some the data from the season so far and scored it with some interesting results, but first some caveats.

1) I have no idea where this will lead or what it will be useful for. For now it is just a random curiosity but it could be interesting to show which teams have the best fantasy players in general, which teams without a obvious studs might be rich with sleepers, which teams provided the best environment for roto stats and of course it might just tell us something about being a good NBA team as well.

2) As of now very few games have been played and there is a great disparity between the statistics that can be accumulated in 9 games and those that can be accumulated in 6 or 7 games so the rankings might be even more ridiculous towards the beginning of the year than they will be all year long.

Now in honor of David Berri a chart.

NBA Roto League Standings 11/16/07

As you can see the first place team is Phoenix with 220 points or about 67 rotowins per season in overly simple the (Roto Points/Possible Roto Points)*82 formula I just came up with. Second is San Antonito with 210.5 or 63 rotowins. As you can see from the chart Phoenix is in the top 10 in every category except turnovers and San Antonio is in the top ten in every category, so both of these teams, traditionally thought of as being two of the best three teams in basketball for the past few years, are good roto teams too (as is Dallas who is in 5th right now) which is not surprising. The teams in last are not all that surprising either. Both New York and Chicago have been thought of as being dysfunctional this season and it shows in the roto standings. New York outright horrible with just 22 rotowins and are only above average in Field goal % and Turnovers (in which they are helped a lot by having played only 7 games to teams like Houston’s 9). Chicago is just as bad with 23 rotowins. Perhaps most troubling, for the real NBA, is that they are last in Field Goal % and in the bottom 10 in rebounding, not a formula for success.

So if the best and worst teams in this league don’t surprise then who does? The best and worst teams in the NBA: the Celtics have absolutely blown the doors off of everyone they’ve faced except for Toronto and make it look like no Boston team except the Bruins will lose for the rest of the calendar year but in roto they are sitting at 13th with 48 rotowins, not bad but in every other statistical measure this team is going bonkers. All I can say is that they too have played just 7 games and that their extraordinary field goal % and steal rates might be keeping them at 5th worst in the league in rebounding. The other surprise is Seattle who despite going 1-8 have racked up 52 rotowins, obviously they have played as many games as anybody in the league, and more than most teams, but the real key here is the pace that they play at. Anyone who has watched the Sonics knows that they are like the anti-Suns, they force you to play at a pace so fast that they have no chance of beating you (unless you are the Heat who simply couldn’t manage to score enough), this causes them to get more points, free throw attempts, 3’s, rebounds, steals, blocks and turnovers (which the Sonics are dead last in). So, we have already found that the Sonics, not known for their big fantasy studs (except Durant who, being a rookie, isn’t your typical stud) is a prime environment for roto points. If you have a chance trade for a player of about equal skill who plays for Seattle you should probably do it and if you are debating which guy to start one night always go with the guy on Seattle or who plays Seattle if possible.

Thanks for reading-
Dan

Hopefully I will be able to do this every Friday for the rest of the season so check here on Fridays. In the future I hope to explore a lot of other interesting stuff involving specific categories and teams so let me know if you’re interested in any particular facet of the data.