Give Me The Rock
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FantasyBasketblog has an excellent post on bench management at this link. They provide good definitions for the kinds of players you should have on your bench. So, my followup to BV’s post is to tell you how I go about scouting the waiver wire; specifically, I’m scouting the wire in the Dropping Dimes Experts League which is a 9-category 12 team roto league hosted at Yahoo. The details will be different depending on where your league is hosted, so I’ll try to keep it at a fairly strategic level.
So, speaking of strategy, the first place to look for waiver wire pickups (or free agents) is not on the available player page. If you’re in a roto league, look at the expanded standings page. This is where you’ll see how many points you have in each scoring category for your league. Hopefully it’s clear by now that what you’re doing is figuring out what you actually need on your team, i.e., in which categories are you deficient.
Figuring out which categories need a boost is not quite as easy in Head-to-Head, and it takes a little more time. You’ll have to go through your matchups (really only the last 3 or 4) and see if there were any categories that you consistently lost. There will probably be a couple so-called “fluke” losses where you did about average for the week, but your opponent turned in a performance that would have dominated anyone in the league. Feel free to kick those to the curb and only consider categories that you’ve lost consistently. If you’ve lost different categories every week, then you should see how your scores in all the categories compare to those of the other teams in your league. Your focus becomes those categories in which you are below the league average.
So, now, really, the heavy lifting is over. You just have to head over to your available players page, and do a couple of simple manipulations. I like to view players by their stats average usually over the last 7 days, sometimes I’ll expand it to 2 weeks. You don’t really want longer than that because you don’t care what they were playing like any farther back. When you’re looking to fill your bench, you want someone who has the potential to fill in for one of your starters right now.
After getting the right stats up, hopefully you can sort by the categories you’re looking to get a boost in. Another way to do it, is to sort by whatever your system uses for the default “rank” (though, remember, that can be misleading, or not always what you want), and then look for the highest ranked player with the best stats in the category(ies) you’re looking for.
Just a brief example: My DroppingDimes league team is terrible at free throws and TOs, and could use some help in 3s as well as FG%. (That was step 1 right there) So, I looked at the available players by rank, and saw that Brent Barry has a high FG%, FT%, is good at making threes, and doesn’t turn the ball over (it’s hard to do when someone just kicks it to you to shoot a three). He doesn’t shoot a lot of free throws, so that’s not actually going to help me a whole lot, but it’s hard to find free agents that shoot a lot of free throws, regardless of how well they shoot them.
Well, hello there Mr. Barry.
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