Give Me The Rock
this is fantasy basketball
Over the past couple of days, GMTR has revealed our all-star fantasy basketball rosters based on results through the all-star break. I took care of the Eastern Conference, while Erik handled the Western Conference. Well, what good are all-star rosters if you can’t play the game?
So, I went about doing just that using a fantasy basketball simulation program I’ve been developing for a while now. The program isn’t quite ready to replace the GMTR player rater, but it is in good enough shape to simulate an all-star game.
The Ground Rules (skip this part if you get bored by fine print… it won’t hurt my feelings)
So, each all-star team has 12 players – 5 starters and 7 bench spots. The goal is to find out which team would be more likely to win in a standard 9-category H2H fantasy league. Now, instead of just taking a player’s average stats for the season and calling it good, the program randomly selects a stat line from a player’s game log (excluding missed games) this season and uses that as their line for the all-star game. As a result, streaky players will be more inconsistent than those who put up good lines night after night.
The trickiest part for me was deciding what to do about minutes played. All these players are the stars of their respective teams and typically play a lot of minutes per game. If you just throw all their lines into a box score, you get a team that totals 400+ minutes and 200+ points per game. Instead, for this game I restricted the starters’ minutes to 30 and the bench players to 15 and adjusted their stat lines up or down (but almost always down) according to those minutes. For example, if the program pulled a stat line for a player where he played 30 minutes in a game and scored 30 points, then the adjustment down to 15 minutes would give him 15 points for the all-star game. While this resulted in a team that played a few more minutes than is actually possible, it is close enough that the final scores never really exceeded 150 points.
Now, anything can happen in a single game, so I simulated this all-star game 1,000 times. This will give us a definitive answer of which league’s fantasy all-stars are the best.
As an added bit of fun, I tracked each games “MVP” which was based on a rough weighted sum of the player’s points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks and threes, minus turnovers. The guy with the highest sum from the winning team was named the MVP. In cases where there were ties between the teams, the guy with the highest sum among both teams was named MVP.
The Results
The Winner: The West (503 wins, 420 losses, 77 ties)
Not too surprising a result given the depth of the Western Conference, especially at the all important PG position. Here is the final category breakdown of the 1,000 simulations:
Number of Category Wins for Each Team in a 9-Cat League
| FG% | FT% | 3P | REB | AST | STL | BLK | TO | PTS | Overall | |
| WEST | 449 | 776 | 734 | 415 | 440 | 245 | 520 | 453 | 643 | 503 |
| EAST | 551 | 224 | 267 | 586 | 560 | 756 | 480 | 548 | 357 | 420 |
| FG% | FT% | 3P | REB | AST | STL | BLK | TO | PTS | Overall | |
| WEST | 449 | 776 | 734 | 415 | 440 | 245 | 520 | 453 | 643 | 503 |
| EAST | 551 | 224 | 267 | 586 | 560 | 756 | 480 | 548 | 357 | 420 |
So while the East actually had advantages in 5 of the 9 categories when compared to the West, the West had huge wins in threes, FT% and points. With consistent wins in those 3 categories, all they had to do was win 2 of the 6 other categories to take home a win over the East. The only category in which the East consistently won was steals, which they beat the West 756 out of 1,000 times.
The MVP: LeBron
While the East came out the loser, LeBron still racked up the most MVP awards with 244 out of the 1,000 runs. The West was led by a more balanced attack, with 4 of the 5 starters winning MVP at least 100 times. Here is the list (since bench players’ minutes were capped, they were never able to win the award):
West
Kevin Durant (131 times)
Tim Duncan (123)
Kobe Bryant (111)
Steve Nash (108)
Dirk Nowitzki (59)
East
LeBron James (244 times)
Dwyane Wade (143)
Chris Bosh (55)
David Lee (19)
Rajon Rondo (7)
The Box Score
Despite that fact that it’s a made up game with made up rules, I did compile a box score for the “game” made up of averages from all the runs. I wouldn’t take it too seriously (as I stated above, the total minutes played by the teams is a little off), but in case you were wondering what each player did in the game:
The West
| Player | FG | FGA | FG% | 3P | FT | FTA | FT% | TRB | AST | STL | BLK | TOV | PTS | |
| Steve Nash | PG | 6.0 | 11.5 | 53% | 1.6 | 2.5 | 2.7 | 94% | 3.0 | 10.1 | 0.5 | 0.2 | 3.4 | 16.1 |
| Kobe Bryant | SG | 8.0 | 17.3 | 46% | 1.1 | 4.6 | 5.6 | 82% | 4.2 | 3.5 | 1.2 | 0.3 | 2.4 | 21.5 |
| Kevin Durant | SF | 7.4 | 15.2 | 48% | 1.2 | 6.5 | 7.5 | 87% | 5.6 | 2.3 | 1.2 | 0.8 | 2.9 | 22.5 |
| Dirk Nowitzki | PF | 6.9 | 14.4 | 48% | 0.5 | 5.4 | 6.0 | 89% | 6.2 | 1.9 | 0.8 | 1.0 | 1.4 | 19.6 |
| Tim Duncan | C | 7.2 | 13.7 | 52% | 0.0 | 3.8 | 5.1 | 74% | 10.2 | 2.9 | 0.6 | 1.7 | 1.7 | 18.4 |
| Jason Kidd | PG | 1.4 | 3.1 | 43% | 0.8 | 0.3 | 0.4 | 63% | 2.1 | 3.8 | 0.7 | 0.2 | 1.0 | 3.9 |
| Deron Williams | PG | 2.6 | 5.5 | 47% | 0.4 | 1.6 | 2.2 | 74% | 1.7 | 4.0 | 0.4 | 0.1 | 1.3 | 7.4 |
| Brandon Roy | SG | 3.2 | 6.5 | 49% | 0.4 | 2.0 | 2.6 | 78% | 1.8 | 1.8 | 0.3 | 0.0 | 0.8 | 9.1 |
| Carmelo Anthony | SF | 3.9 | 8.6 | 46% | 0.3 | 3.3 | 3.8 | 87% | 2.5 | 1.5 | 0.4 | 0.0 | 1.3 | 11.6 |
| Zach Randolph | PF | 3.2 | 6.7 | 48% | 0.0 | 1.5 | 1.9 | 79% | 4.6 | 0.7 | 0.2 | 0.1 | 0.8 | 8.1 |
| Marcus Camby | C | 1.6 | 3.4 | 46% | 0.0 | 0.5 | 0.8 | 60% | 5.6 | 1.4 | 0.6 | 0.9 | 0.5 | 3.7 |
| Marc Gasol | C | 2.3 | 4.0 | 59% | 0.0 | 1.7 | 2.5 | 69% | 4.0 | 0.9 | 0.4 | 0.7 | 0.8 | 6.4 |
| Total | 53.7 | 110.0 | 49% | 6.4 | 33.7 | 41.2 | 82% | 51.5 | 34.8 | 7.4 | 5.8 | 18.5 | 148.1 |
The East
| FG | FGA | FG% | 3P | FT | FTA | FT% | TRB | AST | STL | BLK | TO | PTS | ||
| Rajon Rondo | PG | 4.8 | 9.2 | 52% | 0.2 | 1.6 | 2.8 | 59% | 3.6 | 8.0 | 2.1 | 0.1 | 2.4 | 11.4 |
| Dwyane Wade | SG | 7.8 | 16.6 | 47% | 0.9 | 5.5 | 7.3 | 75% | 3.8 | 5.4 | 1.5 | 0.9 | 2.6 | 21.8 |
| LeBron James | SF | 7.7 | 15.3 | 51% | 1.6 | 6.2 | 7.9 | 78% | 5.5 | 6.4 | 1.3 | 0.8 | 2.8 | 23.0 |
| Chris Bosh | PF | 7.2 | 13.6 | 53% | 0.1 | 5.9 | 7.5 | 79% | 9.5 | 2.0 | 0.6 | 0.9 | 1.9 | 20.3 |
| David Lee | C | 6.8 | 12.2 | 56% | 0.0 | 2.7 | 3.3 | 82% | 9.4 | 2.8 | 1.0 | 0.3 | 2.1 | 16.1 |
| Brandon Jennings | PG | 2.5 | 7.2 | 35% | 0.7 | 1.2 | 1.6 | 76% | 1.6 | 2.8 | 0.6 | 0.0 | 1.1 | 7.2 |
| Andre Iguodala | SF | 2.2 | 5.1 | 43% | 0.4 | 1.5 | 1.9 | 76% | 2.7 | 2.2 | 0.6 | 0.1 | 0.9 | 6.3 |
| Joe Johnson | SG | 3.2 | 7.1 | 45% | 0.6 | 1.2 | 1.4 | 85% | 1.9 | 2.0 | 0.4 | 0.0 | 0.8 | 8.4 |
| Gerald Wallace | SF | 2.1 | 4.4 | 48% | 0.2 | 2.0 | 2.6 | 78% | 3.9 | 0.7 | 0.5 | 0.3 | 0.8 | 6.7 |
| Josh Smith | PF | 2.7 | 5.2 | 52% | 0.0 | 1.4 | 2.4 | 57% | 3.7 | 1.7 | 0.7 | 0.9 | 0.9 | 6.8 |
| Brook Lopez | C | 2.8 | 5.6 | 49% | 0.0 | 2.0 | 2.5 | 79% | 3.7 | 1.0 | 0.3 | 0.7 | 1.0 | 7.7 |
| Al Horford | C | 2.4 | 4.3 | 57% | 0.0 | 0.9 | 1.3 | 71% | 4.0 | 0.9 | 0.3 | 0.5 | 0.5 | 6.0 |
| Total | 52.4 | 106.0 | 49% | 4.7 | 32.2 | 42.6 | 76% | 53.4 | 35.9 | 9.9 | 5.7 | 17.9 | 141.7 |
Tags: LeBron James, NBA All-Star Weekend
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