With the all-star break limiting the amount of games to analyze, I thought I’d write about more general strategy as opposed to any player specific analysis. Even with the NBA taking a week off, there’s no reason for us to stop learning and become better players, so let’s take a look at some draft theory.

In most fantasy formats, the name of the game is relative value. For those who play Fantasy Football, the key to being successful is turning lesser resources, whether they are draft capital, FAAB dollars, traded assets or waiver priority, into more production – for instance, you create value by hitting on your 8^th round pick when they produce like a 4^th round one, if you turn your early waiver priority into a productive player or if you trade a strong WR sitting on your bench due to your depth at the position for an RB that replaces a weaker option in your lineup most weeks.

Category formats in Fantasy Basketball provide a different, unique experience to other games when it comes to manufacturing value. While relative value is still important, these formats allow you to create significant value by simply taking a different angle towards team building - by taking a top-down, archetype-driven punt approach to team building rather than a bottom-up, individual value driven one.

Drafting Archetypes in Category Basketball Leagues

Why does this work in basketball?

I am a firm believer that 8-cat and 9-cat basketball leagues are the most skill-rewarding fantasy formats out of all the major sports. There are two main reasons why that’s the case: Reason one is basketball is the only sport where the accumulated stats can break out of a small sample size problem in a week due to a fairly large volume of “scoring events”. It’s significantly harder for a team to break too far away from their projected performance due to the nature of how basketball stats are accumulated and scored. Reason two is because only Basketball can offer a category game in which there is a small enough correlation between the categories to give each player a distinctively unique skillset.

Creating surplus value

Putting it into practice, the late rounds become a surplus value goldmine if you know exactly which archetype you’re in and which categories you need to fortify or supplement. In a competitive league, if you’re simply drafting standard, it’s not really feasible to get more than a round of two of value in the mid to late rounds, as most under the radar and sleeper types will get scooped up by somebody without dropping too much further past their ADP.

If you’re firmly in an archetype by this part of the draft though, that’s where you can artificially create value – by drafting players worth more to your team than any other team in the league due to synergies that only you have. We’ll use some examples to illustrate this:

Robert Covington was being drafted in the 90s at the beginning of last season. While he provided solid across the board production, his ADP was depressed due to his projected sub-40 FG% on medium volume, which was a massive drag on standard teams, almost being able to single handedly lose that category some weeks. In a punt FG% build, Covington finished as the #22 player in Fantasy last season on a per-game basis, returning similar value as early round picks such as Draymond Green, Myles Turner, John Wall and CJ McCollum did in standard, non-punt builds.

2016-2017 Final Stats from www.basketballmonster.com

While Covington did over-perform his projections, even on draft day, you could have reasonably projected him to finish around a 3^rd round pick if you weren’t concerned about his fg%V. If you’re in punt FG% by the mid rounds, even if you grab Covington a round early to ensure you get him, say, in the 80s (Round 7), you’re still generating ~4 rounds of surplus value in the mid rounds, which is a significant boost to your team.

Punt FT% might be the most mainstream punt strategy, and we all know Dwight Howard is valuable in that particular build, but if you moved into round 8 to 9 (~95 ADP) firmly in a FT%/3s double punt build, you would have been sitting even prettier.

2016-2017 Final Stats from www.basketballmonster.com

While you wouldn’t project Howard to finish with first round value, it’s not a stretch to have had him finishing as a top 20 player in that build. Taking into account a more conservative projection and even accounting for a slight reach to ensure you get your guy, you would still have picked up ~5 rounds of surplus value taking him with your 9^th round pick.

Putting it together

Thinking about macro strategies rather than just focusing on sleepers and busts is an easy way to gain an edge in fantasy basketball, and lets you enjoy a unique experience very different from other fantasy sports games. In competitive leagues where every edge matters, finding inefficiencies in players who mean more to you than others is a great way to get a jump on the competition.

More Fantasy Basketball Analysis