NFL Best Ball Strategy: How Far Should Zeke Fall?
On August 11, the first round of fantasy drafts received a jolt, when the NFL announced the decision to suspend Ezekiel Elliott six games for violating the league’s personal conduct policy. Zeke spent most of the offseason as a top-3 Best Ball draft pick, on Draft and on other sites. This news is clearly a hit to Elliott’s fantasy value, as six games was considered the higher end of the range of expected outcomes, with most drafters proceeding as if 2-4 games was the most likely outcome. Elliott’s ADP has fallen swiftly on the news, and I agree with the market that he no longer belongs in the top half of the first round – but how far should he fall? It’s not a straightforward question in the context of Best Ball, where the format makes it easier to cover for a player’s missed weeks.
Last year, Le’Veon Bell’s three-game suspension pushed his ADP down from the early first round, into the early-to-mid second round. Bell went on to average over 20 fantasy points per game when he returned, and generated a top-5 win rate. Elliott, however, is going to miss twice as many games, which is a lot more to overcome. The following analysis is my attempt to quantify the impact of Zeke’s suspension and find an appropriate Best Ball price tag for his truncated 2017.
Note: References to fantasy points in this article are in terms of PPR scoring. While Draft leagues use half-PPR scoring, I believe the conclusions are consistent across scoring formats.
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What are Nine Weeks of Zeke Really Worth?
I repeat it in most strategy articles: we want to focus on the bottom line. When we think about the value of a player, we should think about it in terms of how many points that player can add to our yearend score – those are the only points that matter.
Last year, Ezekiel Elliott scored 325.4 fantasy points between weeks 1-16 (the weeks that count toward our final score). That’s 21.7 points per game over 15 games. One of the great things about Elliott last year was his consistency, which I expect to carry over to this year, given the strength of the offensive line and the familiar supporting cast on offense. He generated a top-12 running back score in nearly three-quarters of his games, with an average of ~98% of his points getting used in Best Ball starting lineups last year.
To understand what those points really meant to Best Ball rosters, I compared the final scores of nearly 5,000 actual Zeke-drafting teams from 2016 public leagues to what those teams would have scored with Zeke removed from the lineup. The average team scored roughly 230 more points with Elliott on the roster than they would have without him. That number represents Elliott’s average Value Added, a concept also referenced in last week’s strategy article.
Converting the average 230 points of added value into a weekly score, we get 15.3 points per game. I don’t think we should expect Elliott to produce exactly what he did last year, but it’s worth noting that the consensus projection at fantasypros.com puts Elliott on a 316 point 15-game pace for this year, just shy of his 2016 production.
But What Does It All Meeeeeeeean????
We have found that a ~320 point 15-game pace with a weekly profile as consistent as Zeke’s, and an ADP in the first two rounds, adds about 15 points of value per week on top of the rest of the roster. I have to admit though that Value Added is kind of a convoluted stat. How can we make sense of it?
Let’s start by looking at the relationship between total scoring and value added. The chart below plots total points scored by each running back that was taken in at least 25 percent of drafts and scored at least 50 points in 2016, versus the average number of points they added to their Best Ball team.
Using an estimated 15 points per game of added value, we get a nine-game projection of 135 points of value added for the average Zeke-rostering team this year. To be a little more conservative, let’s call 15 the upper bound of our expected weekly value added, and call 12 per game (108 points of total added value) the low end. Here is the same chart zooming in on the area between 108 and 135 points of added value.
What this chart tells me is that a running back who scores between 200 and 233 points over 15 games will add roughly the same amount of value (between 108-136 points) to a Best Ball team that Zeke should add in his nine games post-suspension. Now we’ve gotten somewhere.
Pricing Zeke
Referring back to the consensus projections at fantasypros.com, which incorporate projections from four very reputable fantasy analysis providers, here are the running backs expected to score between 200 and 233 PPR points this year, along with the current ADP in Draft Best Ball leagues.
The running backs on that list have 12-team ADPs between 2.01 and 3.01. If they are the running backs likely to add a similar amount of value to our Best Ball team as Ezekiel Elliott, it makes sense for us to price Zeke in the same range. I tend to be on the conservative side when it comes to projecting fantasy points, so I am inclined to price Elliott at the lower end of the range.
Conclusion
In Best Ball, we are trying to piece together as many big games as possible, relying on our depth to cover up individual players’ busts. Elliott showed us last year that when he takes the field there is a very high chance of a “big” game, and he virtually never busted. This year, we start off with six bust weeks from Zeke, but there’s a chance they will be the only busts we get out of him all year. Having found that Elliott is likely to add as much value in his nine weeks as several of the running backs currently going in the second round probably will over the entire season, it makes sense to buy him in the same range. My advice is to not reach for Zeke in the early second round, but consider him toward the end of the round, and certainly do not let him slip past you in the third round if he makes it that far. If you do land the suspended stud, look to secure a running back whose points are more front-loaded, such as Jacquizz Rodgers or Darren McFadden, to help carry the load while you wait for Zeke’s return. As always, good luck this week everyone!