Intro to Daily Fantasy Basketball
So… you want to play daily fantasy basketball, huh?
Let me start by saying that this is by far my favorite daily fantasy sport. While there is nothing like an NFL Sunday, I prefer the grind of the NBA season because it gives us more opportunities to succeed, as there are games every night for the better part of eight months.
This is meant to serve as a refresher course for daily fantasy basketball. If you already have plenty of experience in the sport, feel free to move on to the more advanced courses. However, if you are new to the sport or even if you are a novice NBA fantasy player, I highly recommend reading this course to get your feet wet. If you can take anything away from this course that will help improve your DFS ability, it will be well worth the small investment.
While I’ve been playing basketball ever since I could walk, that’s not the main reason why it is my favorite sport to play in daily fantasy. That honor belongs to the predictability of the sport. Over the last two seasons, teams in the NBA have averaged 93.9 possessions per 48 minutes. This blows the sample size of opportunity from other sports out of the water. In the NFL, an offense typically runs about 65 plays per game, but half are usually allocated to the run and the other half are allocated to the pass. The best running backs in the NFL see around 25 touches per game, while the best receivers are lucky to see 12-15 targets each week.
In baseball, hitters usually see between 3-5 at-bats each game. Can you imagine trying to predict the production of an NBA player if they only saw 3-5 shot attempts per game and points scored was the sole driver of fantasy production? Given the large sample size, fantasy production is much more predictable than it is in other sports. In the NBA, every possession provides an opportunity for points, rebounds, assists, blocks and steals – all of which contribute to fantasy production.
Daily fantasy basketball is a sport that is centered around value. You need production from every single roster spot in your lineup to have a chance to win each night. In fantasy football, we can get away with rostering a minimum-priced receiver that gets five fantasy points, as long as someone else on our lineup makes up the difference. In fantasy football, there are going to be zeroes and negative fantasy points (on FanDuel) every single night, yet we can overcome it with the help of the other players in your lineup.
The NBA is a different animal. If you get a zero from one of your players, to quote the great Dan Back “you are just going to lose.” Scoring is much easier to come by in the NBA, as a decent score is usually around 250 points. If one of your players puts up a dud, you are basically kissing any chance of cashing in your leagues goodbye.
In the NBA, fantasy production all comes down to opportunity. I like to break opportunity down into three different areas:
1. Minutes
2. Usage
3. Peripheral Stats
We will dive into each of these in more detail in another course, but they are terms that you need to get comfortable with if you are going to play fantasy basketball.
Minutes played are as important as any predictive statistic that you are going to find in the NBA. There is a linear relationship between minutes and fantasy production, which should be obvious, because the longer a player is on the court, the more opportunity he will have to score points and get assists, rebounds, blocks, and steals.
Usage is defined as “A metric that estimates the percentage of his team’s possessions a player “uses” while he is in the game.”
If you are a statistics nerd such as myself, you probably want to know the formula, so here it is:
USAGE = {[FGA + (FT Att. x 0.44) + (Ast x 0.33) + TO] x 40 x League Pace} divided by (Minutes x Team Pace)
Simply put, a player’s usage rate tells you how involved he is in his offense. The higher the usage rate, the more the player has the ball in his hands and consequently, the more chances he has to score points or dish out assists.
A player’s usage rate is a great predictor of offensive statistics – points and assists, specifically – but this only takes care of half of the fantasy production equation. Players also get fantasy points for rebounds, blocks, and steals. I like to refer to these as peripheral stats.
A popular saying in golf is, “You drive for show, but putt for dough.”
I’ll tweak that a bit for fantasy basketball and say, “You score points for show, but get peripherals for dough.”
Yeah, it’s a lame saying, I know. However, if it helps you remember to target players that can contribute in all areas of the stat sheet, then it was worth reading.