Usage Rate
Usage is definitely an important – if not the most important stat for NBA DFS – but you can see how it is inherently flawed. If two-thirds of the statistic are negative by nature, can’t that be incredibly misleading when judging players? For example, a player can “use” a large number of possessions – 30-plus percent – but doing that with a high percentage of made baskets is obviously much different than just turning the ball over on 30-plus percent of your possessions.
This is a huge inefficiency in NBA DFS right now and one that can definitely be exploited if you’re willing to put in the work and research into finding “True Usage” or whatever you want to define it.
The best way to do this is to use NylonCalculus.com. On their site, they break down usage rate into several distinct, and incredibly useful categories: Scoring Usage, Play-making Usage, and Turnover Usage. In NBA DFS, a player can accumulate fantasy points in a variety of ways, be it scoring points, dishing out assists, grabbing rebounds, or however else. Raw usage – the kind you’ll see cited in every NBA DFS article – is very flawed because 2/3’s of it is negative. We don’t want players simply because they have high usage; we want players with high, positive usage.
Here is the top of NylonCalculus’ leaderboard in terms of True Usage:
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