Starting 5: Advanced Player Stats - Wednesday, January 14th
The Starting 5 Series will provide Grinders a quick look at the day’s top positional plays, analyzed through the lens of our Daily Research Tools.
Today we’ll take a closer look at the Advanced Player Stats tool. We can use this tool to delve deeper into what makes a player useful when he is on the court. This is also an area where it’s easy to get lost in mountains of data. For that reason, casual or new players either ignore this information, or they don’t know what to do with it and analyze it incorrectly. Using advanced statistical information isn’t a necessity for success, but it certainly can help you when it is used correctly. Let’s take a peek at who the advanced stats lean us toward on this large slate Wednesday.
Point Guard – Chris Paul, Los Angeles Clippers ($9,900 on FanDuel)
The easiest of the advanced metrics to look at is player efficiency rating, or “PER.” This represents a formula created by John Hollinger to account for pace and team averages and merge that with a player’s performance when on the court. It’s a simple way of accounting for the overall productivity of a player. You can sort by this column on the tool page, and this is what you get:
Notice that Chris Paul is the fourth-highest guard on the list, despite having what many would term a down season by his standards. He is behind only Russell Westbrook, Stephen Curry, and James Harden in this category. Paul’s struggles have been a bit overblown, and the Clippers have also had a fair share of blowouts in recent games. With his FanDuel price now below $10,000, this makes as good a time as any to hop back aboard the Paul bandwagon.
Shooting Guard – James Harden, Houston Rockets ($10,700 on FanDuel)
In the chart I just posted above, you will see that Harden ranks just above Paul in terms of PER. He also stands out in several of the other advanced statistical metrics. Simply looking across his full bar of percentages will show you just how much he means to Houston’s offense. Let’s focus in just on his numbers:
The results are staggering. Harden accounts for 26% of Houston’s points, 13.2% of their rebounds, 32% of their assists, 19% of their steals, and 20% of their blocks. Granted, Dwight Howard has missed a lot of time due to injury. However, these numbers are still amazing. They show just how much Harden operates as the linchpin of the Houston attack, and he has the ball in his hands a lot. Expect him to be worth his high price tag against a sometimes sloppy Magic team this evening. He’ll have his fingerprints all over the game.
Small Forward – James Johnson, Toronto Raptors ($4,900 on FanDuel)
By this point, you may be thinking that all these advanced stats look cool, but what good are they if the only players that come up are studs? Obviously, it’s impossible to build a daily fantasy team solely on the Chris Pauls and the James Hardens of the world. We need value plays! Let’s delve into some of those at the small forward spot, with the help of some additional tools from the advanced player stats page.
The eFG% metric is one that attempts to correct for the increased value of the three-point shot and provide a “true” field goal percentage for players. (On a somewhat related note, the TS% metric also adds free throws into the mix). When you sort the forward pool by these metrics, you notice quite a few less-than-household names in the list.
One key theme to most of these players is that they generally do not play heavy minutes, but they are capable of putting up fantasy points in bunches when given the chance. James Johnson is a great example. He has excelled in a starting role over the past two games, and he ranks highly in both the eFG% and TS% metrics. He also owns 25.63% of Toronto’s blocked shots this season. The eventual return of DeMar DeRozan will hamper Johnson’s value some, but expect DeRozan to be eased back into action (which could happen tonight). Still, expect Johnson to get plenty of run and wreak havoc on the Sixers.
Power Forward – Marreese Speights, Golden State Warriors ($5,300 on FanDuel)
Though it appears that Marreese Speights has lost his starting spot with Andrew Bogut now healthy, this is not exactly a big hindrance to Speights’ fantasy value. He is a key cog in the Warriors’ second unit, and his usage soars when he comes off the bench. That brings us to another popular advanced metric in usage rate, and this is the one most people are familiar with.
Speights is seventh among all forwards in usage rate this season, and all six guys ahead of him are perennial All-Stars. Speights even has a higher usage rate than Anthony Davis, Dirk Nowitzki, and Pau Gasol. His 114.9 offensive rating (O-Rat column, which shows points created by a player per 100 possessions) is also above league average. Even though he’s coming off the bench now, don’t sleep on Speights.
Center – Marc Gasol, Memphis Grizzlies ($8,400 on FanDuel)
The advanced stats page also has a feature where you can sort by “touches” instead of true statistics. This allows you to see just how often a player has the ball in his hands. Obviously, the more a player has the ball, the greater his opportunity to put up a big game. What came as somewhat of a surprise to me was seeing Marc Gasol as the easy leader among all centers in touches per game. In fact, he averages 5.5 more touches per game than top fantasy center DeMarcus Cousins:
Now, on average Gasol isn’t as efficient with those touches as Cousins, but having the ball 71 times per game gives Gasol a high floor to go along with a relatively high ceiling. In fact, there are only three other centers that average more than 58 touches per game, and that is a full 13 touches less than Gasol. He remains a solid play despite the return of Zach Randolph, and I look for him to continue his solid year against a beatable Brooklyn front line that will be without Kevin Garnett on Wednesday.
Even if using this page is not currently part of your research routine, I would encourage you to play around with it. You never know when you will come across something that will help you out. In the current landscape of daily fantasy sports, information is always at your fingertips. You just need to know how to access it, interpret it, and use it to your advantage. That comes with patience and practice. Hopefully this series will help guide you in that direction.