Changes…
Deals…
Pickup steals…
Everyone loves sit! Ok, maybe I could point to some that seem to be overly cautious when it comes to shaking their rosters a bit but still…

It’s hard to deny that what makes us love fantasy basketball is a possibility to actively managing our teams with a couple of various ways. Many of rookie managers even might be proud when they reach first deals in their leagues. Some collect them with a real pleasure…. Hell, even Yahoo! gives medals for such achievements!

… Yes,you’re absolutely right suggesting that there are awesome tools (tu link do rankingów) waiting to help you evaluate players in roto. Yes, you may precisely choose a sample period that will bring stats serving as calculation base. I’ll tell you more – you’ll be able even put your projections here as well. The problem is that even the most precisely predicted value is not always the best indicator in roto competition. How comes?

What in case when you’re well ahead of rivals in one of the categories?
What if you decide to punt one or two?
What if you have much more toloose in one of categories than to gain in others?
What if you finally found a partner to deal with but don’t know how to make him (her??) believe the deal makes sense for both sides?

That’s right! When you’re dealing in simple fantasy point leagues it almost always means that one of you – you or your partner will want to forget that deal soon. Everything comes to who of you was lucky enough to get better value. Formulas like h2h or roto let you shake hands with your deal partners, wish them all the best and REALLY MEAN IT (as long as they finish the season behind you of course)! And this happens because you and your partner are usually at different positions and you may often have completely different needs.

Examples? Here you have one.Let’s say that you roster is loaded with perimeter players and you’d like to add a bit of frontcourt power. And somehow you talk to a manager 76’s alike, holding a bunch of centers and really strong in big stats.

You keep on your bench a player named Michael Carter-Williams. You don’t need his steals, points or assists because the rest of your perimeter players provides you with enough such stats. His weaknesses and not strengths matter here and prevent him from being inserted into your lineup. You don’t want your FG% to get further damaged. You don’t want your free throws to get killed as it’s always a sensitive cat. You’d love to get rid of this player.

On the other hand, Robin Lopez seems to be expendable on your partner’s roster. The team is overkilling field goals, rebounds and blocks so there’s no need to strengthen them beyond that. So why not swapping those similarly ranked players? Your partner would surely welcome MCW, benefit from his pros and quite easily absorb the cons, as he’s far ahead in FG and far behind (to the point where he already punted the category) in FT. Big players usually don’t generate a lot of turnovers so there’s a bit room for those coming with Carter-Williams also. In your case getting rid of those is a plus alone, not to mention the fact that Lopez, although not as valuable as he was a year ago, still means a good help in your frontcourt with his efficient game and solid blocks.

This example looks obvious but it’s definitely a good one and easy to describe. And your mission as a roto (and to some degree H2H as well) manager is to constantly look for such possibilities based on current balance of power in your league. In order to do it you need to possess two types of information:
1. What’s the real balance of power for now.
2. How to achieve the best possible position in your league by making roster changes.

And no… Typical roto league standing is not enough to answer the first question. Current standing in a category just says how was your production in comparison with your competition up to date. What it doesn’t say is that someone (including you) may have already make changes which were designed to drastically alter the situation soon. Simply saying – the best picture you could get here is a projected view of the “end of season” standing reflecting both the production gathered up to date and estimated achievements expected from current rosters.

Of course, you can decide that you’ll use your excel sheet and calculate everything by hand.In reality though it’s a way reserved for the biggest freaks only. And amount of time required for that grows drastically if you want to do it for more than one league. So as such calculations need to be provided to you on a weekly (at least) basis – you definitely need a dedicated tool for that.

And here comes fb-ninja.com with our tool called Directions. Once you log in and import you Yahoo! roto league data, it’s active immediately as a part of your league’s view.

As you can see this tool is no joke as its tab is equally important to typical ranking lists. So once you know how your current standing looks like go ahead and read the future. Looking overwhelmed by the options available? No worries, here’s how to make the tool work.

In order to analyze the direction of your team please do the following:

  • 1. Select your starters by unchecking those players who are least likely to make your lineup.
  • 2. Select corresponding size of you competitor teams. Either Top10 players (if in Step 1 you’ve selected 10 players) or full roster if you prefer to look at whole teams.
  • 3. Last thing is to select the period to be used for projecting final results.
  • 4. Click „Get directions” and let us do the work for you.

Results comprise of two tables. First one is projection of average results in each statistical category based on criteria selected above.

Second shows the change compared to current average results. So this table shows you how changes in each statistical category translate to actual roto points gains or losses.

Obviously, changes shown in the second table should get smaller as the season progresses unless the competition is really, really hard until the very end (which is not unusual in roto leagues) .

Is it directions tool a crystal ball then? A fortune teller maybe? Of course not. It doesn’t predict injuries or future roster changes in your league. By the way – this is the reason you should use it quite often to be aware of the most up to date picture. Also it relies on the input data you choose.

If you take a short period of time (say – last week) as a base and some players had outlier games in it, then yes, projections could be impacted.

If you choose a longer period, then you could miss on hot players that recently started to switching gears.

The directions tool just add another critical view to your manger’s desktop. Used wisely provides a good ground for planning roster moves… in other words – the part we like the most in fantasy.

Posted in Fb Ninja tools, featured