Archives for March 2016

March 21, 2016 Leave a Comment

The double-whammy: two fantasy sports playoffs decided on the same day

Mid-March is a fantasy sports’ lover’s dream (er, fantasy?): not only do we have the usual slate of March Madness bracket picks, but drafting for the fantasy baseball season is in full swing, AND both fantasy hockey and fantasy basketball playoffs begin. And don’t even forget the regular PGA tournaments. I don’t think there’s any busier or more exciting time throughout the entire year. You just need to hold on to your hat and hang on for the ride.

Amid this chaotic season, yesterday I was hit by a double-whammy. I made it into the first round of the playoffs in my Yahoo fantasy basketball league and my Yahoo fantasy hockey league, and the head-to-head matchups were close throughout the week. They were, in fact, too close for comfort, and it came down to the final day of the matchup – which was yesterday – to see who came out on top.

Well, I have both good and bad news to report on that end. First, the bad news.

Fouling out: failing to advance in the fantasy basketball playoffs

So close, but yet so far. Not long ago, I wrote about how I was able to turn around my fantasy basketball season after an excruciatingly slow start. That was a victory in itself considering that I was 18-36 in the Fall, and I know from experience that anything can happen in the playoffs.

I made it in as the sixth seed (12-team league) and was playing the third seed. The week saw my opponent and me exchange leads in our nine-category, head-to-head matchup, and by Saturday we were essentially at even strength in about seven categories.

When it comes to the fantasy playoffs, it’s all or nothing. Unless you’re in a keeper league, you need to be prepared to drop any player on your roster who will not help you advance to the next round. If this means dropping a good player on the last days of your matchup who doesn’t have a game in order to pick up a mediocre player who does have a game, then so be it. If you advance to the next round – and that’s a big “if” – you can figure out how to deal with what comes next.

With that in mind, I picked up three players late on Saturday night who had games on Sunday (Toney Douglas, Gerald Henderson, and J.J. Barea) and dropped three players who didn’t have games (Andrew Bogut, Kent Bazemore, and Josh Richardson). All together, I now had seven players in games on Sunday against my opponent’s five players.

Unfortunately for me, my opponent did the same at 2:52 a.m. (eight minutes before the deadline) and picked up two players who would start for him on Sunday. That turned out to be the difference, as I lost my playoff matchup by a score of 5 to 4. The categories were very close, with five categories being decided by differences of less than 10% as you can see below:

Category	My Score	Opponent Score	Difference
Points	704	715	1.5%
Rebounds	290	271	6.6%
Assists	151	146	3.3%
Blocks	33	36	8.3%
3PTM	80	72	9%

For me, the real killer was losing by three blocks. The two players my opponent picked up late on Saturday night, Cole Aldrich and Hollis Thompson, combined for four blocks on Sunday. Without that production, I would be the one advancing to the next round.

Adding insult to injury, I noticed that Anthony Davis was just ruled out for the remainder of the season. Davis is owned by the #2 seed in the league – the same team that I would be playing had I advanced to the next round in the playoffs! Salt in my wound as the fantasy basketball season approaches its quick end.

But now on to the good news…

He shoots, he scores! Advancing to the fantasy hockey semifinals

My fantasy hockey season progressed much better than my fantasy basketball team did this year. In my head-to-head, 12-team league, I ended the season with a record of 106-79-15 (.568), which was good enough for a third place finish. I was hovering around first/second place back in February, but problems in the goaltending category haunted me at season’s end and led me to slip down a few spots.

As the third seed, I was matched up with the sixth seed in the first round of the playoffs which began last week. It became evident that my poor goalie play – which had carried me through much of the season but which sputtered at the end – was spilling over into the playoffs. My goalie core of Sergei Bobrovsky, Braden Holtby, Craig Anderson, and Petr Mrazek simply was not performing as it should have been. Through the entire week, they managed a collective total of three wins with 2.95 GAA and .902 save percentage. That’s nasty stuff – and by “nasty” I mean putrid rather than “incredibly awesome”.

Anyway, I fell into a hole last week once my opponent got a shutout from Jonathan Quick (this is a 10-category league which includes shutouts). Fortunately, my opponent sputtered on offense, so even though I managed only 9 goals and 22 assists, I was able to best his 6 goals and 17 assists.

While this matchup did not come down to the wire quite as closely as my basketball matchup did, it was still competitive. I had to use all my allotted waiver wire pickups for the week in order to ensure my victory, which meant that I made a couple of pickups late on Saturday night so I could have starting players on Sunday.

On the final day of the matchup, I had eight players playing and my opponent had seven. The only close stat categories that could have gone either way in the final few days was goals (I won with a 9-6 advantage, with two goals coming on the final day), PIM (I held out with an 18-12 advantage) and wins (we tied with three each). Had my opponent made a move to pick up a goalie starting goalie for Sunday who would have won, we would have tied 5-5 and then the series would have been given to the winner of the tiebreaker (which would have been me because a 10-9 advantage in head-to-head games).

Now that I’m in the semi-finals, my goalies need to pick up the pace if I want to advance to the finals. I led the league in goalie wins this year, but if I can’t scrape together more than three this week, I probably won’t be advancing. At the same time, I can’t exactly drop any of my goalies because all those that are on my team are established leaders on their respective teams. I may end up picking up a fifth goalie as a type of “scorched earth” tactic to overwhelm my opponent in goalie categories, but at this point I’d like to see how the first few days of the matchup progress.

Final thoughts

This double-whammy put a scare into me. I was looking at the prospect of having both my hockey and basketball seasons end on the same day. While it was a cruel way to lose in basketball by a handful of blocked shots, there’s only so much you can control in fantasy sports on any given day (or even any week). At least for now I’ll still have hockey, so I need to focus on one day at a time. Hopefully I’ll be in the finals by next week and vying for that championship trophy.

March 18, 2016 1 Comment

I scratched and clawed my way into the fantasy basketball playoffs

Sometimes in fantasy sports, it’s an uphill battle all season long. That’s what it was like for me in my 12-team, head-to-head Yahoo fantasy basketball league this year. I had to scratch and claw my way through it, and it paid off in the end.

Disappointment early on

Emerging from the draft with a weak team (according to the given projections), I lost to my opponents in five of the first six weeks of the season. What went wrong? Two things come to mind: injury and underperformance of key players.

My draft targeted four top players: James Harden, Klay Thompson, Rudy Gobert, and Nerlens Noel. Of these four, only Harden played consistently on an elite level; the others played well but were streakier in their production. At this point in the season, each of these players’ seasonal rankings was worse than their preseason rankings: Harden (pre-season ranking of 3, in-season ranking of 4), Thompson (12, 18), Noel (23, 70), and Gobert (13, 132).

I can certainly accept the performance of Harden as being acceptable, and even Thompson’s performance wasn’t that much lower than his pre-season ranking would indicate. The real pain on my team came from Gobert and Noel. I should point out that Gobert was injured for the entire month of December, which caused him to take a hit. That was a huge blow. Otherwise, I’m not sure there was much I could have done differently, apart from looking at other projections at the beginning of the season. My players underperformed, which is a risk for all fantasy players. It’s just a shame when it occurs for your team and it happens with multiple players.

With that said, I was able to pick up players off waivers during the season who outperformed based on preseason rankings. These include Marvin Williams (pre-season ranking of 200, in-season ranking of 27), Nikola Jokic (219, 47), Andrew Bogut (119, 72), and Gary Harris (222, 74). I have had these players on my team for a good part of the season so they have really helped my team and have compensated for the underperformance of my stud players.

Lessons learned

I mentioned earlier that I lost against my opponents in five of the first six weeks of the season. Around the beginning of December, I was sitting with an ugly record of 18-36 (.333%). However, things started turning around in week 10; between that week and up to the present day (week 19), I have beaten my opponents in every single week. With a record of 89-80-2, I was able to make it into the playoffs with the final spot (#6 seed).

What lessons can I learn? In retrospect, did my drafting philosophy of talent concentration fail? I don’t think it did. In fact, it may have been what saved me. Although my four stud-players didn’t perform up to their pre-season rankings, they did compensate for one another; when one player was performing poorly other players might be performing strongly enough to help me in other areas.

Also, the fact that all four of these players are still on my roster as we approach the end of the season is important. Almost all of the rest of my roster has been modified since draft day. Had I used more of my auction dollars on lesser talent instead of the four key players I did use it on, I would probably have ended up dropping the lesser talent and therefore have wasted my auction budget.

Concentrating talent in few roster spots during an auction draft is an important tactic because it is inevitable that talented players will emerge on the waiver wire over the course of the season. It is also inevitable that some drafted players do so poorly that they need to be dropped.

In my opinion, the best way to craft a winning team is to use the majority of an auction budget on top-tier players and fill in the remaining roster spots with low-priced role players or prospects. This does not translate into a superb team from the beginning, but requires a manager to monitor the waiver wire, or negotiate with other teams to upgrade on the periphery. As new talent emerges and is picked up, “dead weight” may be dropped from the team.

As my fantasy basketball season has shown, using a talent concentration strategy is a season-long process. Injuries occur, and players do not perform up to expectations. However, it can produce positive results when approached with a discerning eye for new talent and a patient disposition.

March 14, 2016 2 Comments

Fantasy baseball auction draft review for a 12-team league

The 2016 fantasy baseball draft season is upon us and I have taken in several drafts over the past week. Last night, my Yahoo Pro League had its auction draft. It turned into one of the worst drafts since my 2015 ESPN fantasy baseball draft, but this one soured for reasons that were out of my control. More about that later. Here is my team:

Budget			$260
1.	(5)	Bryce Harper (Was – OF)	$49
2.	(8)	Nolan Arenado (Col – 3B)	$44
3.	(11)	Josh Donaldson (Tor – 3B)	$46
4.	(23)	José Abreu (CWS – 1B)	$35
5.	(36)	Freddie Freeman (Atl – 1B)	$17
6.	(38)	A.J. Pollock (Ari – OF)	$38
7.	(97)	Masahiro Tanaka (NYY – SP)	$9
8.	(117)	Jason Motte (Col – RP)	$1
9.	(167)	Billy Burns (Oak – OF)	$5
10.	(209)	Steven Souza Jr. (TB – OF)	$1
11.	(229)	Andrew Cashner (SD – SP)	$1
12.	(231)	Mike Fiers (Hou – SP)	$2
13.	(236)	Blake Swihart (Bos – C)	$1
14.	(242)	Steve Cishek (Sea – RP)	$1
15.	(248)	Robbie Ray (Ari – SP)	$1
16.	(253)	Wei-Yin Chen (Mia – SP)	$1
17.	(256)	Josh Harrison (Pit – 2B,3B,OF)	$2
18.	(258)	Clay Buchholz (Bos – SP)	$1
19.	(263)	Denard Span (SF – OF)	$1
20.	(266)	Matt Moore (TB – SP)	$1
21.	(269)	Ian Kennedy (KC – SP)	$1
22.	(272)	Jedd Gyorko (StL – 2B,SS)	$1
23.	(274)	Alex Wood (LAD – SP)	$1
Unused			$0

The stars

I practice what I preach in terms of talent concentration. With five of my first six picks (Bryce Harper, Nolan Arenado, Josh Donaldson, Jose Abreu, and A.J. Pollock), I drafted top-20 batters. With these players, I have a team core around which I will be able to construct the rest of my team throughout the season through waiver wire pickups and possible trades.

It was an expensive strategy since I spent $212 on these players, which was around 82% of my entire budget; however, chances are slim that I will ever need to drop any of these players because the probability of top production from them is very high. Other managers who drafted more average talent for lower prices are more likely to drop their players at some point during the season, which means the dollars I will have spent on my draft choices will go further.

The scrubs

Despite my success with getting star players on my team, there is one gaping hole in my roster – pitching. My top pitcher is Masahiro Tanaka, followed by Wei-Yin Chen, and then Mike Fiers. These are hardly pitchers around which a championship can be built. Further, my top relief pitcher is Steve Cishek, followed by Jason Motte. So what happened?

Ideally, I would have pursued a top pitcher or two with my fourth or fifth pick in the low-$30 range. As it happened, however, I was not able to get to my computer for the draft and therefore had to draft via my cell phone because a dinner I was at went long. I couldn’t see who was still on the board or do analyses of my positions, so I had to draft based on intuition. Further, during the few seconds after I got home, logged off my phone, and then was about to log on to my computer, my team autobidded $17 for Freddie Freeman. I am not high on Freeman to begin with, and he also replicates some other stat categories that I already had. Therefore, that pick more or less torpedoed my chance at getting my desired pitchers.

A few other picks of mine were auction bait; in other words, these were players I drafted after nominating them with the hope that some other team would take the bait and bid on them. It’s a means of enticing other players to fill their roster with undesirable players so that they finish their drafts more quickly, and it also directs them away from certain player positions. Jason Motte and Steven Souza were two such players whom I nominated despite not wanting them. I will drop them soon and pick up alternative options very soon.

The strategy going forward

Right now, my pitching is my greatest obstacle. If I don’t do something, this will drag me down throughout the season. I spent the latter half of my draft trying to find pitchers with prospects of quality, assuming all things go well. These are pitchers such as Mike Fiers, Wei-Yin Chen, Clay Buchholz, and Matt Moore. I also picked up Robbie Ray because of his darkhorse potential. Whether I hold on to him for the duration is up in the air. Right now, I have nine starting pitchers on my team. Going forward, I am going to hold on to as many as I can for as long as they produce, but I will start to trim them as needed.

I will also be in search of improving my relief pitching. I have already put in a waiver claim for Fernando Rodney (dropping Jason Motte), but I would like to add perhaps two more relievers down the road. Relief pitching seems to be one of the more volatile positions in MLB, so I can afford to wait and see how baseball rosters develop over the month of April.

Overall, I’m a bit displeased with my draft because of what happened when I wasn’t able to be at my computer for the start of it. Nevertheless, with enough care and attention I should be able to overcome my team’s weaknesses and improve it through waivers.