The Great Debate

Most fantasy basketball leagues run daily lineup changes. We've always used weekly lineup changes and we've debated the issue quite a bit before starting this league. Here's our rationale for choosing weekly versus daily lineup scoring.

Churning
In a normal H2H league with no limit to how many games played your team can have [See: Games Played], most people would choose to "churn" their lineup by just clicking along to each day and getting as many players as possible to play each week in an attempt to out-game the opposition. In a non-keeper league, this is a great idea as the bottom of your roster is probably filled with marginal players so you might as well dump them to pick up another marginal player who has more games scheduled that week.

For us, churning won't be as much of a factor because every man on our roster is valuable. They are all keeper players and potential stars or at the very least, contributors.

The traditional defense pro-churning is that an owner runs the risk of dropping a potentially good player if they run their roster ragged by pulling and pushing players into their lineups every day. The negative, and risk, to churning then is: You drop someone good, he might get taken by the opposition. This opinion does makes sense, to an extent. For the most part though, anyone player who is being churned isn't likely to be that good anyway. I'm not gonna lose any sleep over someone picking up Brian Skinner after I've already used him up for the week. Nobody's dropping a good player for churning purposes and the chances of you not wanting to drop a marginal guy just in case he gets really good is pretty slim.

I don't see the positives of allowing churning, especially with the way our league is set up. We decided it's not worth doing daily lineups for churning purposes since our keeper league is built to be low-churn anyway.

Starting Lineup
Because we only have ten players eligible for play each week, our bench acts like a holding que, sort of like a practice squad if you will. Since we are playing such a long keeper length (3 years), people like to speculate and grab young players that may not be ready to contribute now, but could grow into powerhouses in the future. These young players can sit on the bench and learn from the starters.

If we went to a daily lineup however, young players would be forced into action as both teams try to churn their way to victory. This can hurt a team who is hoarding a few young studs on the bench. Changes the draft strategy (which we already conducted) doesn't it?

Also, having an injured player on your roster/bench brings down your available players each week. If you are waiting on Grant Hill and Pau Gasol to come off the injury list in two months, you'll stuck going 13-on-15 until they get back. A pretty big disadvantage.

That's one reason we chose weekly over daily; in order to maintain a true starting lineup and not to extend our entire roster to 15 playable players each week, which could hurt teams with young and injured players.

Strategy
Many owners have said that they enjoy added strategy of micro-managing their basketball rosters each day. They like the ability to go in there and sub in a guy for extra REB if they are a little behind going into the weekend. While I agree this is strategy, I'm not certain it's actually "added" strategy.

Making your lineup decisions earlier in the week is just as strategic as doing later in the week. How many times have you really been able to affect the outcome of your week by subbing in a guy for a few extra PTS? Usually you just ride the best players and hope for a big game from someone to catch up.

With locked (weekly) lineups, if you think you're going to be close in REB and BLK but likely to win handily in 3PT and STL, you can choose to take out Smush Parker for Darko on Monday. In fact, it can be argued that by having to make, and stand by, your weekly choices, this forces more strategy and foresight into the process. You have to actually scout out your opponent and then enter into the battle with a lineup that can't change. If you can change players daily, you just keep the games played number high and hope for the best; you don't really have to pay attention to who you're playing each week since your whole roster is available to you.

It's nice to be able to simulate real-time strategy during daily lineups and there's something to be said for switching players mid-week -- in order to simulate the changes a coach might make at, say, halftime -- but in my experience, people aren't strategizing as much as maximizing their roster.

If you have bench players who can make a difference in a close category, chances are, you should already be playing them. Right?

Playoffs: You've seen it, I've seen it. Two teams face off in the playoffs, last game of the season on the line. They're picking up every player with any sort of playing time each day in order to try to push through a win. That's not good managerial work, that's just busy work. We won't have this issue since we will have full keeper rosters throughout the season and the post-season, but it's something to note. I hate that playoff churning for a few extra points.

All of this is a personal preference of course. Some people like daily, some people like weekly. As with everything, there are advantages and disadvantage to both. For our purposes, we're going weekly. There's always room for change if we decide that most of us would prefer daily lineup changes, but for now, it's weekly. The only problem we're going to encounter with daily changes is injury issues [See: Injuries] and to a lesser extent, games played. But the latter problem is unavoidable with any lineup system.

I just wanted to lay down some of the thinking that went behind the decision to go with weekly lineup changes.