Debate - Part 3 (draft strategy)

What lessons can we take from the debate and apply to draft strategy? Well, when examing a player's field goal and free throw percentages, you must also take the attempts per game into account. If you just rank players based on the 2 percentages categories and the 7 other "bulk" categories, your rankings are not accurate.

Yahoo more or less ranks players based on the 9 categories without taking the attempts/game into account. So their rankings are also not accurate. For example, a couple years ago Kyle Korver was ranked in the top 15 by yahoo for the current season. Korver had great percentages, tons of three pointers, and low turnovers. He was a good fantasy player that year, but not even close to the top 15. Yahoo was over-valuing him b/c they didn't take into account that his high percentages had very little weight. On the opposide side of the spectrum, some big men with horrible FT%'s get very awful yahoo rankings even though they may take very few FT attempts. These players can end up ranked worse than 200 and usually go unnoticed when people comb the free agent market sorted with the best ranks first.

So, how can you best prepare for your draft? Well, you're in luck! I updated the google document I posted a few days ago (see the post "2009 NBA Projected Statistics") to now include columns for the 2008 FT and FG attempts per game.

How should you use these columns and rank the players? Well, let's save that for another post.

Debate - Part 2

Despite Bob's superiority to Al in 5 of 9 categories, it seems many of my friends would prefer to have Al on their rosters. Since Al and Bob both take few field goal and free throw attempts per game, their percentages will not have much influence on a fantasy team's overall field goal and free throw percentages. However, a difference of 1 three pointer is very significant (The average player makes approximately one three pointer every 2 games). I think this is pretty much the right answer.

However, if your opponent has only players like Al, then a team full of Bob's would be better off adding another Bob rather than an Al to have the best chance to beat the Al's.