The NBA Schedule Part 3: Daily Schedules

Categorized as: Author: Patrick, Fantasy Basketball, Fantasy Basketball Draft Guide 2010, Fantasy Basketball Strategy
Posted on: October 26th, 2010

Part 1 looked at weekly schedules. Part 2 looked at the fantasy playoff schedules. Now, lets talk about daily schedules. Many fantasy leagues allow lineup changes to be made on a daily basis, which lets teams to respond to injuries quickly and have a more fluid lineup compared to weekly change leagues. It also opens up a wonderful collection of ways to potentially game the system.

Any NBA fan who has been forced to spent time with his wife and kids on Thursday nights because his team never plays understand that games are not evenly distributed across all days of the week. Some days tend to have a lot of games, others not so much. Here is a summary of games scheduled by day of the week for the 2010-11 season.

Number and Percentage of Games by Day of the Week for the 2010-11 Season

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It should not be a surprise only 5% of games take place on Thursday, which is traditionally the lightest day of the week for the NBA. On the other hand, Wednesdays and Fridays have a ton of games scheduled; those two days account for 43% of all games on the season.

So, how can you use this information to your advantage if you play in a daily league?

Since Wednesdays and Fridays are packed full of games, you’ll often find yourself sitting guys who could play on those days because your starting lineup is full, while having an empty starting lineup on Thursdays. However, the way individual team schedules work out, some teams have a lot of Thursday games while others literally have none. Here is the breakdown of games by day of the week for all the teams in the league:

The Dallas Mavs, with 10 games, play the most on Thursdays. This is followed by the Denver Nuggets and the Miami Heat, both with 9 games. The Celtics, Magic and Blazers each have 8. Since many of the Thursday night games are nationally televised, teams expected to be good have the majority of these Thursday night games.

On the flip side, the teams with the most Wednesday/Friday games include Toronto (44), Detroit (41) and Philadelphia (41). One guess what these teams have in common. For comparison, Portland has the least amount of Wednesday/Friday games with only 25.

For fantasy purposes, one way to maximize the amount of games you can get out of your team in daily leagues is to own a lot of players who play on days other than Wednesdays and Fridays (preferably on Thursdays). The larger your bench, the easier it will be to implement this strategy and the more opportunity you’ll have to get those guys in the lineup.

Sure, you could stream players to get extra games on off days, but you’ll generate less hate in your league by forgoing the add/drop strategy for a more nuanced method. Plus, many leagues are now putting caps on the amount of moves a team can make in a year. If that is the case, focusing on owning a number of players who tend to play on off days is a sneaky way to out-game your opponents. It’s just a minor strategy in the grand scheme of things (and a good schedule isn’t going to get me to draft Greg Oden for example) but given a choice between 2 guys of equal value, go with the one with the friendly schedule.

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