Dam for a Stream before it's a River?

Categorized as: Author: Nels, Fantasy Basketball
Posted on: January 3rd, 2009

How many leagues have I been in where someone has actually employed the strategy of streaming?

I didn’t think this was an actual problem but people in both the Readers’ League and the Monster League there was a discussion about Daily lineup changes with a Max Moves and Max Games limit instead of Weekly lineup changes with no limits.

The crazy thing is, I am starting to think they may be right. In this post I am going to attempt to analyze and perhaps philosophize. Yes, even with those boobs up there.

What are the reasons I like the weekly lineup changes? (for Head to Head)

First of all, it makes it easier. You only have to set your lineup once a week – set it and forget it. I thought – and still do – that having daily lineup changes makes it easier for novice fantasy owners to get trounced because they will more easily forget to change their lineup every day, or forgot to set it in advance of a vacation or something.

But then I realized: if you add the Max Games limit, a manager can’t just fill their starting lineup with players who are playing that day or they’ll run out of games about 3/4 of the way through the season at the latest. If your schedule happened to work out so that you could actually play someone at every position every day, with a Max Games limit of 82, you’d be out of games almost exactly halfway through the season. And so, the Max Games limit with Daily lineup changes, it would seem, still prevents the “Whoever has the Most Games Wins” scenario while I strive constantly to avoid, while also adding some extra strategy in the vein of: should I play two extra games this week to try to win 8-1 or should I save those two games and just take a 6-3 win?

I’m not sure why I started with the Max Games limit, when the real point of contention is Streaming. That is, when a manager basically picks up and drops players so that everyone is on Waivers and other managers are forced to wait to pick someone up and perhaps use their Waiver priority for no good reason. I think a more loose definition of Streaming is when there are Daily lineup changes but no limits, which allows managers to pick up and drop players on a daily basis to make sure they have someone starting at each position every day. Of course, having Daily lineup changes with neither a Max Moves nor a Max Games limit is just asking for Chaos of the Worst Variety.

So, is a Max Moves limit better? I guess that depends on how I’m defining better. It is technically better at limiting Streaming as defined above. With a Max Moves limit, there is simply no way to stream players past a certain point, and since the people who use streaming to try to gain an advantage are the kind of people who will do whatever it takes to win, they must certainly realize that attempting to stream with a Max Moves limit will put them at a disadvantage when they run out of moves before all the other managers in the league.

On the other hand, a Max Moves limit in a league with daily lineup changes does nothing to alleviate the problem that, given two equally matched teams, the manager whose players are playing more games in the week will win. In fact, in some instances, it would discourage a manager from picking up a free agent who has 4 games to replace his current bench warmer who might only have 2 games. With weekly lineup changes, maximizing games played is a legitimate part of fantasy basketball strategy. With daily lineup changes, maximizing games played is only a matter of remembering to look at and edit your roster every day.

My conclusion, therefore, is: in a Head to Head league with Daily lineup changes, a league commissioner should add both Max Games Played and Max Moves limits. If the league has Weekly lineup changes, then those limits become unnecessary.

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Tags: Fantasy Basketball, Fantasy Basketball Strategy