Fantasy Basketball Post-Draft Notes

The reason I've been quiet on the blogwaves for the last week is that most of my free time was devoted toward preparing for this year's fantasy basketball draft, which I decided to do as a live draft.

I got the raw data from fantasypros.com, which had everything I needed in the projections (ESPN didn't included turnovers) and also had previous year data including FTA and FGA data. Another big problem this solved was using lookup tables. Previously I'd tried to use Yahoo! information blended with ESPN, and the Numbers program lacks Excel's robustness when trying to do lookups from two different data sources. This single-source approach was classic.

I used what statisticians would call a Z-score: (value - average) / stddev

"value" is the stat being evaluated, like Kevin Durant's points scored.

"average" is the average value of points for the top 156 players (12 teams x 13 players per team).

"stddev" is the standard deviation of points for the top 156 players.

So a Z-score is the number of standard deviations from the average (mean) that Durant's points are. Statistically it's quite rare to have a score greater than 3 or less than -3. When you add up across 9 categories (using a negative value for the turnovers) you end up with a score for comparison. I used conditional highlighting to mark green/red any stats that were more/less than 1 sttdev from the mean.

I tried but failed to come up with a way to weight FG% and FT% numerically. I experimented with using the product of FG% and FGA, but that overweighted the category. Instead I simply had to eyeball the FTA and FGA weights as I went along to see that Brandon Jennings e.g. was way overvalued because his horrific FG% was not properly weighted.

I did four mock drafts where I learned that I tended to be shortchanged on FG%. Because of that I eventually figured out a strategy where I grabbed a high FT% guy early, so that I could stomach a great FG% guy with an awful FT% later on.

I  also had a scoresheet where I tried to make sure I filled each of the eight positive categories somewhat evenly. This was a great tool, and the real draft was my best one yet, getting at least 4 deep in every category.

Most of all I was happy with my discipline, as I was granted the 2nd pick in the draft and strongly tempted to go with Lebron James. But I stuck to my guns and was pleased with what I got.