A Look at Position Eligibility

Categorized as: Author: Patrick, Fantasy Basketball, Fantasy Basketball Strategy
Posted on: October 25th, 2008

Anyone who has played in fantasy leagues on more than one site (such as Yahoo/CBS/or our friends at Real Sports Bloggers) knows that each one defines player position eligibility differently (sometimes by a lot). For example, here is how Yahoo defines position eligibility (they just make shit up) versus CBS, who I believe requires a player to start 5 games at a position before he gains eligibility there (there is one small problem with that plan however – and I think all the bench players have something they want to say).

Anyway, what this all means is that a guy who is classified as a PG/SG on one site might only be a SG on another, or a C in one league might be a PF in another. And since we know that positions are important when it comes to drafting and player value, it becomes an advantage to understand how different leagues classify positions and how scarce the various positions are in your specific league.

Thanks to the wonders of Basketball Monster, I took the top 156 fantasy players in the league last season (why 156? Because that’s their default size – 12 teams, 13 players per team) and added up the total number of players who qualified for each position. And I didn’t just use some generic positions – this year Basketball Monster provides actual player positions for some of the major sites.* For this post, I looked at the positions for Yahoo, CBS, and ESPN (though BM provides a few others).

Below is the table of positions for the three sites. It is the count of players who are eligible for each position (PG/SG/SF/PF/C). If a player has dual eligibility, say he’s classified as a PF/C by Yahoo, he would be counted twice, once as a center and once as a power forward. The last column is a sum of the 5 positions. It is the total number of positions that the 156 players qualify for.

Another interesting was to look at the table is in terms of percentages – the percentage of players who qualify at each of the positions. The last column is the average number of positions per player (or the last column in the table above divided by 156).

Not surprisingly, Yahoo comes out on top as the site with the most generous position eligibility. The average Yahoo player qualifies for 1.5 positions. Anyone who has played on Yahoo will attest that that is the Truth (who, by the way, is classified as a GF by Yahoo). ESPN, who classifies Pierce as a SF only, is actually pretty close to Yahoo in its generosity with an average of 1.4 positions per player. CBS, which classifies Pierce as a SG only (which is strange since he starts at the 3) averages a miserly 1.0 positions per player. In fact – at least according to Basketball Monster – only 2 players in the list of 156 were given dual position eligibility. As someone who has played in CBS leagues, I’m not sure if that is quite correct, but it’s pretty close.

While Yahoo and ESPN are fairly generous in their eligibilies, not all positions are equally represented – Yahoo loves its shooting guards, for example. 37% of (decent) players in Yahoo leagues qualify at shooting guard, while only 25% qualify at center.

Still, while fewer players qualify at center than the other positions in Yahoo leagues, CBS plays the role of Ebenezer Scrooge when it comes to centers – only 15% of players in CBS leagues qualify at center. Makes gambling on Yao Ming’s health a little easier to take.

So what does this all mean? Well, let the mad rush for a center in CBS leagues begin! Center is the scarcest position on all three sites (and in just about every league would be my guess) so it is good form to reach for a center no matter what league you’re playing in (and especially leagues that start 2 centers).

Guards are slightly more plentiful than forwards in Yahoo and CBS leagues and, at least in my opinion, it’s pretty easy to find a decent guard who will give you some steals and threes in the late rounds of Yahoo leagues. In ESPN leagues, there seem to be about the same amount of guards as forwards.

It’s also important to remember that the more players who are dually position eligible, the less important positions become. It’s much easier to find to find a PG/SG/SF/PF/C in Yahoo leagues than it is in CBS leagues, so therefore position has less of an effect on player value in Yahoo leagues. It still matters somewhat for the reasons mentioned above, but it becomes much easier to mix and match players when half of them qualify at multiple positions.

*I’m not really sure exactly how Basketball Monster calculates site based positions – if they approximate it based on a set of conditions or if they actually get the data straight from the sites themselves. I also don’t know if these positions are from this season or the 2007-08 season. If I were a better man, I would have asked, but being the lazy ass that I am I figured whatever they do is good enough for me and this post.

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