DraftStreet NBA Strategy Guide

by Jon Bales (JonBales) Last Updated 2014-02-22 01:29:51

DraftStreet offers a variety of league types for all sports, including NBA daily fantasy basketball. In addition to the traditional salary cap-style daily fantasy basketball leagues, DraftStreet also offers snake drafts; both league types can be for just a single night or can extend to cover an entire week of NBA games.

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DraftStreet has unique and deep starting requirements in every sport, and basketball is no different. DraftStreet basketball strategy must be altered to reflect both those starting requirements and the site’s scoring system. Let’s take a deeper look at DraftStreet NBA strategy.

Note that the content below is intended for novice daily fantasy basketball players. If you have daily fantasy experience, be sure to check out our more intermediate and advanced material at GrindersU. The sport-specific sections are split into Undergrad, Masters, and PhD sub-categories. There, we walk you through topics such as building an NBA research foundation, using the Vegas lines to help you pick players, understanding game variance, and the best approach for winning tournaments. Just sort through the drop-down menus on the left side of GrindersU to take advantage of all of the free, in-depth content.

DraftStreet NBA Starters and Scoring

Regardless of whether you’re playing in a traditional salary cap league or participating in a snake draft, the starting requirements are the same—three forwards, three guards, one center, and one utility player. In snake draft leagues, you must add two additional reserve players.

One of the traits of DraftStreet’s starting requirements that a lot of players find enjoyable is that they are very loose; you don’t need to start a point guard and a shooting guard, for example, but simply three guards of your choosing.

In effect, every position except for center is a flex on DraftStreet; the guard position is a point guard/shooting guard flex, the forward position is a small forward/power forward flex, and the utility is a true any-position flex.

Flex positions create options. They reward intelligent owners who understand how specific positions perform from night to night and how that production compares to player salaries. For that reason, there’s an advantage to be had when playing daily fantasy basketball on DraftStreet; you must compare players at different positions, particularly for the utility spot, and that requires research time.

The NBA scoring on DraftStreet is unlike that on the majority of daily fantasy sites because players lose points for missed shots. That’s a drastic difference from the bulk scoring models and it should have a profound impact on your strategy.

Specifically, you need to be just as concerned with efficiency as bulk production when playing on DraftStreet. High-volume scorers like Carmelo Anthony have a lot of value when they don’t lose points for missed shots, but that value dissipates if they’re knocked for a low field goal percentage.
Penalizing for missed shots rewards the daily fantasy players who create projections. Most players have a natural idea of how many points players can be expected to score and how that affects their value, but few naturally understand how losing 0.5 points for a missed field goal or free throw affects a player’s value or how the change in scoring alters the value of scorers versus well-rounded players. Projections help sort that out.

Below, you can see how DraftStreet’s NBA scoring compares to the two other largest daily fantasy sites.

Everything is pretty standard other than the missed shots. Note that DraftStreet doesn’t award any points for made three-point field goals, and they also penalize a full point for turnovers. High-volume shooters who are turnover-prone really take a big hit on DraftStreet.

Daily NBA vs. Weekly NBA on DraftStreet

In addition to traditional one-day contests, DraftStreet also offers weeklong NBA leagues. The concept is the same, and there’s one really important piece of scoring information to keep in mind: players accumulate points throughout the entire week. You win or lose DraftStreet’s weeklong daily fantasy basketball contests based on total points, not average points or points per game.

That little alteration should have a monumental impact on how you approach weeklong leagues. Not only do you need to know how efficient each player can be expected to play over the course of the week, but you also need to project how many total minutes he will play.

Why is that so important? Because there’s a very strong correlation between minutes and fantasy points in the NBA. We have an entire GrindersU article on the importance of minutes in daily fantasy basketball. Even on an efficiency site like DraftStreet, your first concern when projecting players should be minutes. If a particular team plays one or two more times than another in a given week, that will result in a very large difference in player minutes, and thus total fantasy points.

Another concept that changes in weeklong leagues is variance. You can read a whole lot more about understanding variance in the NBA over at GrindersU, but the idea is that luck has more of a chance to “even out” over the course of a week. You might value specific types of players on a given night in daily fantasy basketball that aren’t as valuable over the course of an entire week.

If you’re seeking a stat that’s relatively fluky, such as steals, you’re much more likely to see a player perform well above or below his average in a given night as compared to an entire week. When projecting players for a weeklong league on DraftStreet, you can actually be more confident in your projections, even though there are more games. Again, your first concern should be expected minutes played, which has increased importance on the weekly level.

As always, make sure you get our DraftStreet NBA Incentives for free by signing up for the site through any of our links, and check out all of the content at GrindersU.