Wonderful Knowledge

Categorized as: Author: Nels, Fantasy Basketball, Fantasy Basketball Strategy, Injuries, Milwaukee Bucks, NBA Teams, Player News
Posted on: January 10th, 2007

or: How post titles can be sarcastic but also serious at the same time

Sarcastic

If you’re looking for well cooked, tersical advice, Suite 101 has the top 10 players of the season as well as a whopping 5 fantasy surprises of the season. I’m not sure if it’s written by Mark Barnes of Suite 101 or Phil Partington at Fantapedia.net. I’m also not sure that it matters. If you’re looking for the good stuff, skip the Suite 101 and hit Fantapedia.

Serious

Fantasy Basketblog checks in with their Milwaukee Bucks analysis. Patrick had a little bit of Milwaukee Buck Wild action going yesterday. Of course, with the Bucks, you need all the help you can get. I haven’t got it figured out yet.

And finally, like Mariano Rivera, radar from TheFantasySportsRadar drops some injury related knowledge that I could have used in my post yesterday.
Among other things:

Keep in all league formats
Lewis, Redd, Billups, Pierce, Paul, Smith, Wallace, Ming.

Keep in most league formats according to the situation
Knight, West, Brown, Richardson (who is due back any day).

Drop in most league formats but not dynasty
Stojakovic, O’Neal, Krstic, Francis, Villaneuva.

Serious Cont’d…

So, my real advice for dealing with injuries (now that I’ve actually thought about it, gotten that whining out of my system, and received some advice from other sources):

First: Decide how much your injured players are worth if they come back at their early target date and their later target date (i.e., 4-6 weeks with 4 weeks as the early date and 6 weeks as the later date) [Obviously if a player is out for the season and you're not in a keeper league, they should already be on the cutting room floor] E.g., if you think Jason Richardson will average 20 points a game (who knows with Don Nelson) when he gets back in 7 more weeks, you’d estimate 23 games * 20 points = 460 points. If you think he’ll be back in 5 weeks, add another 4-5 games to the estimate.

Second: Target the owners at the top of your league since they will probably be more likely to trade for an injured player. They probably have some cushion to fall back on while waiting for the injured player to come back, if the potential reward of having that player is great enough. If you’re in Roto or H2H look for owners who are winning or have been winning certain categories by a substantial margin. Trying to trade for players in the categories that they are winning easily will probably make them more likely to accept any offers you propose.

Third: Figure out how much players on target teams are worth for the remainder of the season and compare that to the value you calculated for your injured players above. I just picked Deron Williams at random for an example. He’s got 47 games left; at 17 PPG, that’s 799 points. Obviously, you’re probably not going to get Williams for Jason Richardson unless the Williams owner has a significant lead in points (and assists as well). Let’s try again… this time with Luther Head. Head also has 47 games left, so that’s 47 * 10.9 = 512. That’s probably close enough to the J-Rich estimate to seem fair, and their other stats are pretty comparable.

Yes, unfortunately, these are the kind of sacrifices you’re going to have to make. Especially if you’re closer to the bottom of your league and you can’t afford to wait for someone to come back from injury.

If I’m wrong, so help me, Patrick and mabeuf will be on this shortly to straighten my strategy out.

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