Fantasyopolis

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Mid-Season Review

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Fantasy basketball mid-season review for 2017-18

Fantasy life can be brutal.  No matter how well you construct a team, the way the season plays out can be markedly different.

For my fantasy basketball draft in October, I had set the stage for a pretty darn good fantasy season, and it started out strong.  After the first six weeks of the season, I was sitting at a record of 34-20 (.588) despite having my most expensive player (Kawhi Leonard) still on the shelf with his ongoing injury.  I also had Isaiah Thomas in an IR spot.  With both players waiting in the wings, I had visions of a glorious season that would only get better over time.

The injury bug hit me hard

Around that point in the season, things went from good to not-so-good.  Players started getting injured.  Right after a solidly-performing Dewayne Dedmon went down, his teammate, up-and-coming John Collins, also got injured.  I had both on my roster at the time, but because both of my IR spots were occupied with Thomas and Leonard, I decided to drop Dedmon.  Fortunately, Collins returned to the lineup soon thereafter.  Still, little did I know that my fun ride coming to an end.

Over the next two months, Mike Conley, Evan Fournier, and Myles Turner also went down.  Fournier was out for a couple of weeks in December, but Conley went down in mid-November and has remained out to this day (two-and-a-half months, although his return is imminent).  Turner has been out since early January.  Another player I picked up in late November, Austin Rivers, started to perform incredibly well for a short period of time, only to get hurt in late December (still out).  I had enough and dropped him yesterday.

The reason why these injuries hurt so hard was that my two available IR spots were already filled with players who needed them.  I drafted Thomas for $17, knowing that he was going to be out until around December or January.  Although I got him at a discount, I realized right away that I still paid too much for him.  Not only was the prospect of him fully recovering from his injury up in the air, but I was uncertain how he’d perform in the system on his new Cleveland team.  Could he do what he did in Boston with a new cast of players who were better than him?  Since his return, the answer to this latter question has been no.  His averages have taken a hit compared to last year with decreases in points, assists, and 3-point production.

But my biggest heartache of the season has been Leonard.  He was my top player drafted (and most expensive at $49) and he was supposed to be my studliest player who could seal the deal on my fantasy championship.  I expected him to miss the first week or so of the season, but this expectation turned into a pipe dream when he continued to be sidelined week after week after week.  Finally, in mid-December, he returned to the San Antonio lineup, but he was on a time restriction and didn’t always play on back-to-back days, which meant I was really struggling to get production out of his roster spot.  About a month later he was shut down again and remains on IR.  So far this season, he has played in only nine games, and the question has been floated whether the Spurs should shut him down for the rest of the season.  Good grief.

Lessons learned

The drama surrounding Leonard has taught me three important lessons:

  • Be extremely careful about drafting players who are injured at the beginning of the season.  Do homework and make sure that there is a definite timetable for a return.
  • Remember that players who return from injury may be given serious limits for several weeks after returning.  If a player is great but only plays ever other game, this means that the production from that player’s roster spot is cut in half and that it would have been better to use that spot for a player who was merely good rather than great.
  • Generally avoid players on teams with enigmatic coaches.  Leonard’s situation was complicated by Spurs coach Gregg Popovich‘s lack of explanation/vagueness about the nature of the injury, which meant it was hard to gauge what to do from a fantasy perspective.  Whether Popovich or Bill Belichick, it’s not a good idea to draft players on teams with coaches who are rather unpredictable.

Can my team bounce back?

I am currently sitting in fifth place in the league with a record of 66-60 (.524).  Fortunately, I have been able to ride the wave of my team’s early successes this far.  My draft strategy has also paid dividends as my broadly-talented roster, rather than a talent-concentrated roster, has preserved my team from death due to the injury of a few good players.  Still, injuries are dragging down my team because I have more injured players than I have IR spots to put them in.  Since I can’t exactly drop injured players who can’t be put on IR, I have to put them on the bench, which effectively means I am carrying dead weight.  It’s been like this for a while.

As my players are healed, I can potentially mount my comeback.  The best news for my team is that it has a high likelihood of getting better over time just by waiting things out (assuming more players don’t get injured).  If the season were to end today, I would make the playoffs (six team playoff).  Since I am the fifth seed right now, I think it’s safe to assume that I can make it.

Fantasy seasons are like marathons, not races; you weather the periodic storms for a long-term approach rather than short-term gains.  Let’s hope that I cross the finish line stronger than I am performing now.

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I scratched and clawed my way into the fantasy basketball playoffs

Sometimes in fantasy sports, it’s an uphill battle all season long.  That’s what it was like for me in my 12-team, head-to-head Yahoo fantasy basketball league this year.  I had to scratch and claw my way through it, and it paid off in the end.

Disappointment early on

Emerging from the draft with a weak team (according to the given projections), I lost to my opponents in five of the first six weeks of the season.  What went wrong?  Two things come to mind: injury and underperformance of key players.

My draft targeted four top players: James Harden, Klay Thompson, Rudy Gobert, and Nerlens Noel.  Of these four, only Harden played consistently on an elite level; the others played well but were streakier in their production.  At this point in the season, each of these players’ seasonal rankings was worse than their preseason rankings: Harden (pre-season ranking of 3, in-season ranking of 4), Thompson (12, 18), Noel (23, 70), and Gobert (13, 132).

I can certainly accept the performance of Harden as being acceptable, and even Thompson’s performance wasn’t that much lower than his pre-season ranking would indicate.  The real pain on my team came from Gobert and Noel.  I should point out that Gobert was injured for the entire month of December, which caused him to take a hit.  That was a huge blow.  Otherwise, I’m not sure there was much I could have done differently, apart from looking at other projections at the beginning of the season.  My players underperformed, which is a risk for all fantasy players.  It’s just a shame when it occurs for your team and it happens with multiple players.

With that said, I was able to pick up players off waivers during the season who outperformed based on preseason rankings.  These include Marvin Williams (pre-season ranking of 200, in-season ranking of 27), Nikola Jokic (219, 47), Andrew Bogut (119, 72), and Gary Harris (222, 74).  I have had these players on my team for a good part of the season so they have really helped my team and have compensated for the underperformance of my stud players.

Lessons learned

I mentioned earlier that I lost against my opponents in five of the first six weeks of the season.  Around the beginning of December, I was sitting with an ugly record of 18-36 (.333%).  However, things started turning around in week 10; between that week and up to the present day (week 19), I have beaten my opponents in every single week.  With a record of 89-80-2, I was able to make it into the playoffs with the final spot (#6 seed).

What lessons can I learn?  In retrospect, did my drafting philosophy of talent concentration fail?  I don’t think it did.  In fact, it may have been what saved me.  Although my four stud-players didn’t perform up to their pre-season rankings, they did compensate for one another; when one player was performing poorly other players might be performing strongly enough to help me in other areas.

Also, the fact that all four of these players are still on my roster as we approach the end of the season is important.  Almost all of the rest of my roster has been modified since draft day.  Had I used more of my auction dollars on lesser talent instead of the four key players I did use it on, I would probably have ended up dropping the lesser talent and therefore have wasted my auction budget.

Concentrating talent in few roster spots during an auction draft is an important tactic because it is inevitable that talented players will emerge on the waiver wire over the course of the season.  It is also inevitable that some drafted players do so poorly that they need to be dropped.

In my opinion, the best way to craft a winning team is to use the majority of an auction budget on top-tier players and fill in the remaining roster spots with low-priced role players or prospects.  This does not translate into a superb team from the beginning, but requires a manager to monitor the waiver wire, or negotiate with other teams to upgrade on the periphery.  As new talent emerges and is picked up, “dead weight” may be dropped from the team.

As my fantasy basketball season has shown, using a talent concentration strategy is a season-long process.  Injuries occur, and players do not perform up to expectations.  However, it can produce positive results when approached with a discerning eye for new talent and a patient disposition.

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Hanging on to second place: fantasy hockey mid-season review

helmet-30491_1280The NHL All Star game came and went last week so I thought I’d take a moment to assess the fantasy hockey season to date.

I didn’t do a draft review at the beginning of the season for my 12-team, H2H snake draft league, so  I won’t go through my whole team.  For context, though, I will say that my draft philosophy was to shore up at least some talent at positions where talent is more scarce (D, G) before filling out my positions for which talent is more plentiful (C, RW, LW).  My first three picks were Erik Karlsson (#11 overall), Braden Holtby (#14), and Sergei Bobrovsky (#35).

My team is currently sitting in second place with a record of 81-59-10, and I am well within striking distance of the first-place team which has a record of 81-57-12.  I had to overcome a slow start to the season in which I went 12-16-2 after the first three weeks, and this was done in part through several moves I made early in the season.

Best waiver wire pickups

I think the clear winner here was picking up Dylan Larkin in October.  The rookie has produced consistently over the season and is enjoying a very productive year with the Red Wings (18G/20A/+26).  Around the same time I picked up Larkin I also picked up another rookie, Nikolaj Ehlers.  They both produced good results early in the season, but I ended up dropping the latter in November after he hit a cold streak.  Fortunately, the move paid off, as Ehlers is producing pedestrian numbers through February (12G/12A/+1).

Another October pickup that has produced much fruit has been Petr Mrazek.  I took a chance on the Detroit goaltender when the job was still up for grabs between Mrazek and Jimmy Howard, and fortunately it went to Mrazek.  He’s currently producing great results (20W/1.97GAA/.933SV%) and is currently the third-best goalie in the league behind Corey Crawford and Cory Schneider.  If there’s a lesson to be learned, it’s that taking advantage of unclear goalie situations with good teams can pay off dividends in the long run.

My third-best pickup was Aleksander Barkov.  I eyed him on waivers early in the season but never got around to pulling the trigger, so I was practically kicking myself when I saw he was snatched up by another team.  In response, I picked up another Florida forward in Jaromir Jagr, who has put up solid numbers in his own right.  Anyway, Barkov was eventually dropped by the other team when he was injured not too long after the other team picked him up, so at that time I got him and have enjoyed fairly good results (19G/16A/+13).

The last pickup I’ll mention is Leon Draisaitl (14G/26A/+3).  I picked him up in November after he already caught on fire so I didn’t benefit from his early-season production, but he has still been producing admirably for my team since.

Best drops

I call these “best drops” because I took a chance on dropping players typically when I wanted to pick up someone else who looked more tempting.  Looking back, it’s a good thing I did since they haven’t done much since.  The first player is Ryan Strome of the New York Islanders.  Having only scored 20 points to date (6G/14A/-5), dropping him back in October meant that I was able to rid my roster of months worth of non-production.  Another player I’m glad I dropped was Radim Vrbata.  The decision to drop him was a bit difficult because of his potential and because of his high SOG, but doing so saved me in points and plus/minus.  Vrbata is currently at 22 points (11G/11A/-23).

Worst drop

My worst drop was the player I had to let go of in order to pick up Larkin.  That player was Bobby Ryan.  The Ottawa winger had not enjoyed as much success in past years as he had at Anaheim in 2010-2011 when he scored 71 points, so I didn’t expect him to produce his best season in five years.  So far this year he has 45 points (19G/26A/-2), and this makes me wish I would have kept him and dropped someone else for Larkin.

Thoughts going forward

My goalie situation is solid with Braden Holtby, Mrazek, Craig Anderson, and Sergei Bobrovsky, so I will not be looking to fill needs there anytime soon.  However, but I am in need of upgrading my forwards at some point and players I will consider dropping over the next few weeks include Jaromir Jagr, Bryan Little, and Ondrej Palat.  If I simply cannot make up my mind as to which one to drop, and if I see some other tantalizing forward on waivers, I may simply drop a defenseman instead and play with a man short.