Roto Weights the Categories for You

Categorized as: Author: Nels, Diatribes, DroppingDimes 06, Fantasy Basketball, Fantasy Basketball Strategy
Posted on: February 7th, 2007

or: How I learned to Love Rotisserie Leagues and Also Realize that They’re basically a Points Formula where you don’t have to come up with the Point Weights yourself

RotoPoll didn’t start my thought process with this post, but it’s a good one about how valuable players are in certain categories in terms of rarity. Then, Philthy over at Fantapedia (Your fantasy basketball encyclopedia) has an excellent essay slash dissertation on the value of Turnovers in Roto Leagues. Both of these posts play with something I’ve been thinking about since I was invited to be part of the DroppingDimes Expert’s Leauge. Basically, that thought I’ve been mulling is: Roto is actually pretty great. I’ve written about Roto vs. Head-to-Head before, and if I wanted to look harder, I’m sure I could find something in the archives to show how mean I was to Roto in the past. I’ve always like H2H better before, and I still think it’s probably more fun and better for casual fantasy players (one of the reasons a writer can actually make money writing about Fantasy Football).

Last year, I tried to have (well, actually I was moderately successful in achieving) a points-based Head-to-Head league modeled after John Hollinger’s “Game Rank” system. It’s wasn’t his full system since that uses statistics to standardize players much like Patrick does with his Free Fantasy Basketball Player Rater. This year, though, the points-based league in which I am participating is being run by someone who is not me, and I am not very satisfied with the scoring system. (Those two items are not actually correlated; they just happen to be facts that I placed next to each other in a sentence) Anyway, I realized that the reasons I’m not happy with it are:

1. The commissioner tried to model the statistical “weight” (if you will) of each category so that the number of points is based on relative rarity of the statistic. I.e., steals, assists, etc. are worth more than points. I mean, it only makes sense to do it that way, but it doesn’t work for me unless you have an actual, statistically determined weight. Otherwise, you’re just throwing numbers out there cause they sound like they’ll work.
2. There are 24 teams in the league, which is WAY too many for a points based league. It might actually be more fun for a Roto league with that many people. The problem is that there is no way to pick up a player who is going to help you more than anyone who is already on your team. The only exceptions are when you have an injured player (because some points are better than no points), or when you can pick up someone whose teammate is injured giving them a temporary spike in playing time.

Basically these two reasons have led me to see the light as far as Rotisserie scoring is concerned. Of course, I still think that points-based leagues work well (perhaps better) for weekly Head-to-Head leagues. But if you’re going to have a straight run at the championship starting from Day 1 with every stat from every game counting towards the final outcome, then Rotisserie scoring is clearly the best way to do it. Roto weights the categories for you, so you don’t have to figure out what point values to assign to the available statistics. Roto also makes it possible to pick up a player off the waiver wire who can actually help you. Guys like Daniel Gibson who may or may not get a bunch of fantasy points in a points system can certainly help you pick up a few extra threes if you’re in need of some support in that category. In a roto league, you can trade LeBron for Dwyane if the other guy has a high FT percentage, but needs three pointers. In a points league (assuming rational owners), if LeBron isn’t getting as many points as Dwyane, that trade just isn’t going to happen.

So, that’s my post. But it’s like a FreeDarko thing (without the random pictures) where this isn’t by any means the end of the discussion. Really, it’s just the beginning of what is likely to be an ever-changing fantasy landscape. Feel free to continue the discussion by leaving a comments (IE users should be able to post them again), or you can check out the thread I started in the Give Me The Rock Forums (aka Fora)!

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