Give Me The Rock

Full Court Press Fantasy Basketball provides a way to plan for your draft on a pick-by-pick basis. They started with the 2nd pick, since you’ll have much harder decisions to make this season if you’re sitting at number 2. Now, in many leagues, you won’t actually know which pick will be yours until 10-30 minutes before the draft, but if you’re truly hard core (and apparently the guys at FCP are) then you will plan a strategy for every pick (or every player you could pick) in the first round. Will it be time consuming? Oh, you can bet on that. Will you be more prepared than everyone else in your league? Almost certainly.

Last year GMTR was hosting the big Carnival party. This year, GMTR is forgetting to submit posts to the big Carnival party. Unlike Patrick, I was carefully trimming my public hair.

Since we messed that up pretty bad, and we have to have something to celebrate on our Blogiversary, here is (drumroll please) a photo of the Give Me The Rock bloggers united (at last). I’m not sure if Patrick cares if I identify who is who, but let me just say that both of these hotties are taken. Sorry, ladies. Also, neither of the bloggers pictured below live in their mother’s (or anyone else’s for that matter) basement.

And with that, I have to say, as far I know, GMTR is the longest running, currently active Fantasy Basketball Weblog in the Universe. Tehanximu over on planet Goswalangow may disagree. He/she can kiss it.

Up a little late, but what the hell. Carnival #58, the brainchild of J.E. Skeets, is live over at Yahoo’s Ball Don’t Lie. And hey look, GMTR is nowhere to be found because we forgot to submit something… anything. It’s not like being linked by Yahoo is important or drives any traffic. I must care been too busy carefully trimming my pubic hair.

If you’re looking for some classic Will Ferrell quotes, or just want to expand your circle of trust, check out Carnival #58. Sixty percent of the time, it works every time.

Whether it be stocks, basketball players, or boy bands, we’re all looking for the next hot thing (don’t lie to yourself, my money is on Los Primeros). Despite the fact that the next big thing usually comes out of nowhere, we all think we can somehow discover it before anyone else and in the process look incredibly smart make a little scratch from our superior intelligence along the way.

So, it’s no surprise that one of the go to topics for any fantasy basketball pundit is the sleeper list, which is usually a list of relatively unknown/less successful players (almost always young) that is vomited onto a page using words like upside, opportunity, youth…

There is a problem with this approach. Like a stock, the minute everyone starts talking about a player and how he’s going to break out this year, he’s likely overvalued. For example, everyone was getting all lathered up about Lamarcus Aldridge last summer – and for good reason. Here was a 22-year old, second-year player who was both athletic and talented and happened to finish the last month of his rookie season on an absolute tear. You could have replaced the word “sleeper” with “Aldridge” before last season and no one would have blinked. The hysteria built to a point that Dr. A of Rotoworld selected Aldridge in the THIRD round of the Dropping Dimes Experts League draft. The third round, in case you just missed that. Like a house in Southern California in 2006, the bidding war for Aldridge was on and in this case, Dr. A “won.”

Aldridge finished last season ranked #69 on the GMTR player rater, a very respectable showing for a second year player still learning how to play the league. Still, his showing was a far cry from being a third round pick and, even if you got him in the fifth round, you ended up with a right valued player, not a sleeper.

So, here’s my tip. Get the word “sleeper” out of your mind. When you go into a draft with the mindset that Aldridge is a sleeper and you need to get him, you’re likely to do silly things like draft him in the third round. Drafts are fluid, things change, the asshole drafting in front of you steals one of your picks and then you start to panic. That guy who was supposed to be a third round pick and is still available in the sixth round of your draft – guess what - your draft just promoted him to sleeper status. And it didn’t care what all the expert sleeper lists had to say on the subject.

So, make sure you have a full cheatsheet listing every player, don’t just have a list of the players you like or a list of sleepers. Every player has a value or spot where it makes sense to draft them, whether you like them personally or not. It’s important to know what those spots are, in case a few unexpected things happen during your draft (which is usually the case).

…Or maybe you really thought Aldridge was going to be a top-25 player last year, which you can probably blame on the sleeper lists as well. Notice that these lists often don’t tell you where you should draft a guy, just that he’s a “sleeper,” like it’s a secret code word and once you run it through your Little Orphan Annie Secret Society decoder pin, you should know what to do with that information. Sleeper is an easy word to throw around (I’m guiltily of it as well). It gets a point across without having to be specific or give any real predictions. But that same vagueness makes it a pretty useless term when you actually want to learn something about a player and it’s especially useless when prepping for a draft.

So, I promise, you won’t be hearing any more sleeper talk from me.

Now that things have calmed down (a little), Patrick and I have gone through and updated our rankings for the GMTR Big Board.

In case you aren’t sure where that first link goes, here’s one that makes it real simple:
Link to GMTR Big Board (2008-09)

And if you’ve played in a league that uses percentages as a category, you probably know that already. I know it, your little brother knows it, hell your little grandma with the one good hand probably knows it. But – as I’ve experienced – there’s a difference between “knowing” and “knowing during a draft with 15 seconds on the clock and you’re scrambling to make a pick.”

But let me start at the beginning. If you want to win the free throw and field goal shooting percentages, especially in roto leagues, there are two things to watch and they’re about equally important. The first obviously is a player’s actual shooting percentage. The second is the number of shots they take. Since percentages are averaged across an entire fantasy team, players who take more shots on your team are going to have more sway on your team’s percentages.

But, as always, the question is by how much? Here are the top 20 free throw shooters in the league last year, with their actual free throw percentage first , followed by the number of attempts averaged per game, and then their Effective Free Throw” percentage, which is the weighted percentage compared to someone who takes the league average number of free throws per game.

The Best Fantasy FT Shooters in 07/08

If the table above shows anything, it’s that the number of free throws taken has a great effect on a player’s EFT, which you can think of as the percentage of shots he’d have to hit if he averaged the same amount of shots/game as everyone else. Kevin Martin was the league’s most effective free throw shooter last year despite the fact that he “only” shot 87% from the line. The fact that he took 9.5 free throws a game was the reason. Likewise, Kobe at 9 attempts a game and 84% is a better buy for FT% than Ben Gordon, Ray Allen, and Steve Nash, who all averaged around 91% but shot less FTs.

Depending on the cutoff you want to use, either Brent Barry (95%) or Peja Stojakovic (92.9%) had the best actual FT% last year. But neither of these guys cracks the top-20 FT shooters because Barry only averaged 0.6 free throws a game and Peja 1.8. So, if you’re thinking about drafting Peja this year and one of the reasons is because he’s a good FT shooter, I’d recommend writing him a letter first to call him out as a weak European man-child whose cries like the baby his is when he gets hit on the court because it might ruin his new manicure.

Anyway, the Yang to Kevin Martin’s Ying has to be Dwight Howard, who is quietly taking the Shaquille O’Neal approach to fantasy basketball. His 59% from the line isn’t the worst in the league, it’s the fact that he’s doing while averaging close to 11 shots a game. His 32.6% EFT% is a good 12 points worse than Shaq’s, who’s falling apart so fast that it makes the US economy look stable. Howard is still usable in H2H leagues, but he’s quickly becoming such a category killer in roto leagues that I’ll probably avoid him in every league this year.

The Worst Fantasy FT Shooters in 07/08

It’s not exactly a murder’s row of superstars like in the first table, although Lebron James should really do something about his 71% FT percentage. Maybe it’s just me, but I think “The Chosen One” should be able to hit more than 7 out of 10 free throws.

The point is that percentages are something to think about before you get in the heat of the draft: FT shooters in the 80-85% range can be some of the best in the league when they take enough shots. Make a list of ten guys you can target during a draft if it looks like your team is going to going to need either free throw or field goal percentage help.

Field Goal Percentage

Field goal percentage works in much the same way as free throw percentage, only the number of shots players take is more normally distributed and the difference between actual FG% and EFG% isn’t as great. For example, here are the top 10 EFG% last year.

The Best Fantasy FG Shooters in 07/08

And the player with the worst field goal percentage for fantasy purposes last season? That would be Gilbert Arenas, with an EFG% of 38.7%. He was right below Jamal Crawford, Larry Hughes, Stephen Jackson, and Jamaal Tinsley.

For More Info: Effective Free Throw Percentage

Many of you have either heard of or played Cyberdunk - the “world’s biggest basketball MMORPG” (I’m taking their word for it since I only know of two). Both Nels and I played it for a while and I think we stopped for the same reason – the game simulator was not good. You can only take so many 160–40 wins or losses before the game seems a little silly.

Cyberdunk is in their 6th season and it’s possible they’ve had improvements to the sim (I haven’t played since the 4th season). But, that’s not why I’m here. I’ve recently started playing a new basketball game that has been seriously draining my time over the past couple weeks: Court Rivals.

I’m always hesitant to recommend stuff on GMTR, partly because I don’t want you to hate me if you think the stuff sucks, but mostly because I never get paid for my recommendations. But after getting to know the ins and outs of the game, I’m fairly confident that if you visit GMTR, you’re going to like Court Rivals.

Like Cyberdunk, you basically create and develop your own basketball player. You’re in charge of his* training and what team he plays for. There are a number of different training categories and you can mold a player in different ways based on the way you train him. And unlike Cyberdunk, the simulation seems pretty realistic. In fact, my team recently pulled off a pretty big upset, beating a higher ranked team by the score of 100-98.

On the downside, there isn’t too much to do in the game right now besides train your player and play in games. There are no contracts (you can leave a team anytime), no money system to speak of (hence no contracts), and no betting or equipment. Maybe this will change in time, I don’t know. But Court Rivals does the one thing that’s an absolutely necessity – its games are fun and competitive.

Court Rivals also has a nice perk for new players. At the end of a season, everyone’s stats are rolled back (decreased) based on a certain formula (not all the way back, but significantly), meaning that new players don’t start sooooo far behind the veterans that they can’t complete at all.

Season 2 of Court Rivals is ending in 3 days, so if you are interested, you should be able to sign up for the start of season 3. Sadly, my team – the Ripe Mature Cows – currently has a full roster. But it is extremely easy to start your own team and begin recruit players. And with the season 3 rollback, your team will be competitive right from the start. So, if you’re looking to waste even more time at your computer - check out Court Rivals.

But wait – there’s more! If you still want to know more about Court Rivals before signing up, you can read a couple interviews with Kevin Kazimir (the wizard behind the curtain) on both And One and With Malice.

* or her, I guess. Nothing is stopping you from creating a seven foot tall woman.