MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference

Well, fantasy basketball season is over, so I guess this isn't too relevant. But nonetheless, I have not posted in a while and that's because I've been doing fantasy research. A friend of mine, Paul Raff, and I entered this year's research paper contest at MIT Sloan's Sports Analytics Contest. We were extremely excited when our paper was selected as one of 4 finalists in the contest and we were invited to present the paper at the conference. Below is the abstract of the paper and you can find a link for the paper in its entirety here. Presenting at and attending the conference were great experiences and I am already looking forward to next year's conference and thinking about a new entry for the 2nd annual research paper contest.

In head-to-head fantasy sports leagues, it is common belief that managers try to do their best in all statistics categories. In this paper, we work to turn this notion on its head and investigate the strategy of effectively forfeiting certain categories while focusing on a certain subset of all categories. Through millions of draft and match-up simulations based on 2008-2009 NBA statistics, we found that approximately one-quarter of all possible subsets yielded strategies that defeated the "all statistics" strategy in a head-to-head match-up, and that the "all statistics" strategy is not the overall best one.