2013/14 NBA fantasy player valuations
It’s that wonderful time of the year again, where NBA fantasy seasons are kicking off to put an end to the productivity of everyone taking part. This year marks my first serious fantasy league - the league has 14 participants who will all be taking it seriously because each person has $50 on the line. It’s also going to be my first experience with an auction draft, which means I need to do some research. So effectively my productivity has already taken a hit even before the season has tipped off. I’m sure I’m not the only person, as the draft is probably the single most important event of the fantasy season. Finally, the last of my firsts is that this year marks my first foray into the head-to-head fantasy format. So far I’ve spent some time preparing myself for draft day, so I will cover that work here rather than the day-to-day team management here.
One of the most important realisations I’ve made in my experience with fantasy basketball is that the strength of your team is highly dependent on how the other teams in your league are set up. It’s important to have a team that takes advantage of key weak categories in your league, which also means that the value of certain players can be highly influenced by what key areas of weakness exist within your league. Due to this, I’ve set up a trade engine that reflects each players value by considering the current team’s projected performance (against the other teams in the league ) before and after the proposed trade in question. This valuation engine will continue to be helpful throughout the season as a means of evaluation trades. Some trades can be beneficial to both parties, and these are the trades that are important to identify. Unless you want to be a troll and waste everyone’s time (including your own).
I soon realised that I could also build a valuation engine for the draft to be used to draft the best team for a once-and-done approach, but once you consider that you can trade players throughout the season it’s clear that success in the draft should be measured by the (fantasy) dollar value of the team you’ve drafted. Even if your team isn’t properly set up immediately after the draft, having valuable trade pieces enables you to attain a better team in the longer run via a few smart trades. So the question changed slightly from ”what is the best team I can set up given how the other teams in my league are set up” to ”what is the most valuable team I can afford?”. Winning the draft now becomes more about investing wisely, and the best drafter is the one with the most bargains. It is also going to be key to use up the budget completely, so you don’t necessarily want to wait too long to get a team full of steals. You may want to score some stars, and fund them by surrounding them with bargain sidekicks - but all of this can be summarized in two main rules:
1. Don’t overpay for anyone on your team. 2. Spend as much of your budget as possible.
If you manage to achieve both of these, you will have had yourself a very successful draft.
The most important piece of information you need to achieve this is a fair valuation of each player and I’ve tried to tackle this problem by means of simulation. Using the standard (because I’m cheap like that) ESPN cheat sheet valuations as my starting point, I’ve simulated 1000 affordable combinations of players and then compared their projected performance. I’ve then isolated the top 5 percentile (top 50) of teams based on their projected performance relative to one another and compared the ratio of teams including each player in the pool of 1000 to the proportion of teams featuring that specific player out of the top performing teams. For instance, if LeBron (valued at $70 initially) was a member of 50 of the 1000 of the randomly generated (affordable) teams - he might have then gone on to feature in 5 of the top 50 performing teams. LeBron’s feature ratio for the randomly selected pool would be 5% (50/1000) and his feature ratio in the top performing teams would be 10% (5/50). Such a result would suggest LeBron was under-priced at that particular valuation, and his valuation would increase (along with all the other undervalued players) by $1 at the end of that iteration. The over-priced players would receive a reduction of $1 in their valuation (provided they weren’t already valued at $1) while the fairly priced players wouldn’t see a change in their valuation. This details one iteration, and the process was repeated 50 times. The rational for only needing 50 iterations is that I’m assuming ESPN are not off by more than $50 in their valuation of any player. After the 50 iterations are complete we can analyze the valuations at the end of each round to ensure that a level of stability was reach after 50 rounds, and if so we can be fairly comfortable that the players are fairly valued. This method is neat because it accommodates for a few things that are very difficult to quantify - such as the “replaceability” of certain players who excel in rare categories as well as the number of teams in the league to some extent.
Here’s an illustration of the player valuations over the entire 50 rounds:
It is clear that some players’ values have changed significantly from their starting point (or relative to ESPN’s valuations) while others have stayed relatively stable over the process. Notice that James and Durant stand atop this list and are relatively inseparable in terms of fantasy value, but more importantly their values seem to have plateaued well before the final valuation. This is true for most of the players that have been valued here with the exception of some stellar players who are starting the season injured (Bryant, Westbrook and Rondo in particular). Because I’ve only considered per-game stats, productive players that won’t feature for a large part of the season will be severely overrated as the projections assume all players play the same amount of games. I didn’t address this issue because my league is set up in the head-to-head format, but it would be a key (and simple) consideration to make for rotisserie leagues. That said, these player valuations should be reflective of value in rotisserie leagues too.
Other things to consider are that I’ve only looked at the top 200 players (according to ESPN projections). I felt 200 players was about right as my league will consist of 14 teams or 182 players. The 18 extra players provide a little flexibility for teams to be constructed in different ways based on player preferences within the league. Clearly injured players need to be considered more carefully, mostly for how much of the season they’ll be contributing for. I gambled on Rose last year, and it didn’t pay off - so if you’re drafting an injured player be aware of the inherent risk. I haven’t factored these considerations into my valuations so beware that any injured players will be substantially overrated here if they don’t play near a full season of basketball. The final caveat to these valuations is that I’ve assumed the league is set up with the standard categories (FG%, FT%, PTS, REB, AST, BLK, STL, 3PM).
Here are the 50 most valuable fantasy players (based on their final valuations):
Again, Bryant and Westbrook are overvalued here due to their injury statuses. The other thing the chart above illustrates is that their are some players that ESPN have overvalued (most notably Love, Gasol and Ibaka) and many that have been undervalued. For the most part the players here have been undervalued, but by varying amounts and so the true player value can be thought of in terms of how much each player has been undervalued. That most of the players here are shown as undervalued is due to the number of teams in my league. Whereas ESPN's draft valuations are based on a league of 10 teams, mine are based on a league of 14 teams which creates more competition for the better players.
Also see the valuations of players valued 51-100,101-150 and 151-200.
Another thing to keep in mind is that it might not be easy as it sounds to spend as much of your budget as possible, especially if you’re in the business of making wise trades. Some players are likely to be (at least close to) accurately valued by other participants in your league, and others will be wildly under-or-overvalued. If you bide your time for too long waiting to pick up a team full of thoroughly undervalued players, you will have a valuable team but chances are you will also have a lot of money left over. That left over money is a waste. What you want to ultimately do is draft the most valuable team based on the players’ inherent values. To do this it is helpful to have an idea of how much other people are likely to be willing to play for certain players. Now that we’ve already fairly valued all the players we can look at what combinations of players perform best, and this can provide an indication of what strategy to pursue in the draft. We can easily compare the new valuations to the starting point and see which players were gravely undervalued by ESPN (and perhaps many other players in fantasy leagues if they’re going by those ratings) and identify which players could/should be prime targets in this year’s draft. The easiest way of illustrating this is by looking at the differences between my player valuations and the ESPN valuations. The other consideration is to look at the combinations of players that provide you with the most valuable team under the assumption that ESPN’s valuations provide an indication of what price you’re able to secure them for. Although you probably won’t be able to get all of these players for those same prices, it still offers a useful indication of some team options you might want to consider. For instance, this team was the most valuable affordable team (values based on my valuations and affordability based on ESPN’s).
This alone demonstrates how my opinions have changed on just about every single one of the players on the list with the exception of Durant (we all knew he was stellar).
Finally I’ve put together a cheat sheet with some information to help you out in this year’s draft. Follow these tips and you’re bound to end up with a solid fantasy team, and with some luck you might be able to really stick it to your friends this year.
Happy drafting.