Mid-Week Spotlight: Week 1

We're going to check in with our WK 1 Spotlighted teams mid-week and see how our prognostications are going.

Sour Snails vs 100AcreWoodPoohBears
Right now, as it stands, the Snails will handily win in PTS, AST, and 3PT. That's to be expected. What's surprising is that they're not that far ahead in STL (despite Ron Artest's 9 STL) and losing FT%. They have the edge right now, but swing category is TO -- they've got five more TO, mainly due to having played an extra two games.

The Pooh Bears have to be pleased that they're doing so well on the %'s and will go home with a win by easily winning REB and BLK, with a slight lead in both FG% and FT%.

We highlighted the potential return of Jason Richardson has a key to this week for the Snails but he's actually been limited by minutes and not done all that much. The key here has been Steve Nash with 80 PTS, 47 AST and 10 3PT in four games.

That kind of output is matched by the Bear's Shawn Marion (87 PTS, 40 REB, 10 BLK, 8 3PT). You know who looks good on this team? Chris Wilcox (14 PTS and 9 REB avg) and Brevin Knight (14 PTS, 7 AST, 2 STL avg). And it looks like Mike Bibby is back (51 PTS, 20 AST, 6 STL, 6 3PT), although he's parked on the bench this week. If that's not an argument for a mid-week lineup switch, I'm not sure what is.

Watch those TO and % numbers to see who'll win this battle.


Buffy versus Squirtle Squad
Buffy is playing at a 6-game disadvantage right now, which could cost him the win. He should be winning PTS handily but he's behind (364-388) and is going to need a big game from somebody to secure the category. Their opponents, Squirtle Squad, have pretty solid leads in AST and both of the percentages, although the Squirtles seem destined to lose in STL and 3PT. However, they are holding slight leads in PTS, REB, and BLK so they are sitting in the winner's seat.

Originally, we had predicted that these two teams would have to fight it out over AST, REB, 3PT, FG% and BLK but it's looking like Shaq and Chandler don't want to play this week so everything is up in the air. It's looking like Joe Johnson and Rashard Lewis will have to continue their great weeks for Buffy to mount a comeback.

As for the Squirtle Squad, it's looking like the played the wrong "Earl" this week, as Boykins is sitting with 43 PTS, 14 AST, and 3 3PT. Then again, Watson does have 13 AST and 2 3PT himself. Damn those little guys are looking killer. While Boris Diaw has been somewhat of a disappointment (39 PTS, 14 REB, 6 AST, 11 TO), bench players like Nenad Krstic and Jamaal Tinsley are just itching to get in the game for Brian. And that Brandon Roy, looks like he was taken none too early in the draft. The Squad is gonna have quite the PG crew (all acquired for good value) if Deron, Damon, and the two Earls keep this up.

Keep an eye on PTS, STL, and TO as we head into Sunday.

Rain Man!

We're only halfway through Period 1 (ggl spreadsheet) and already the league is going insane. Aside from the ridiculous numbers put up by some stars (Pierce's 19 rebounds, Quentin's five 3PTs, Okafor's combined 10 BLKs, Lamar Odom period), there are surprises all around the league. I've been scouring every stat line trying to find a "gem," only to see that they've already been drafted. Monta Ellis? Who are you? Anthony Parker, welcome (back) to the NBA! I need you Leandro!

Now that we've had two games' worth of evaluation time for each player, we're seeing some actual results that mean something. I've never looked at "minutes" so closely on a box score. Is my guy getting 20 or 30 minutes? Why is Doc Rivers ruining my Celtics -- in real life and fantasy? Did Gerald Wallace get hurt? Already?

I love this game.

Some tidbits from our first two games worth of action:

Sour Snails have put up 28 3PT already, almost double the league average. They're also proving to be killing in PTS and AST, mainly due to Nash and AI.

The Big Four of the Phanatics (Pierce, Vince, Lamar, Jefferson) are making the team tops in PTS and REB by a wide margin. David West might soon make that a Big Five.

Eric-A looks like a certified genius with Raja and Quentin throwing in 3PT, it looks like his team is well rounded and so far, dominant in the both the %'s.

Funk Coalition is dead last in STL, a category they need to win for small ball. Whoops.

The Poobic Heirs are shooting 54.5 FG%, with roster containing Kobe, Ricky D, Hinrish, Kevin Martin, and Rasheed. This could be an all time high for such a perimeter orientated team.

Pogiboys can't shoot a lick from outside the arc, four 3PT so far this week. Q had more in one game... The next lowest team has 12 3PT in the same span.

The Pre-Season rankings are all wrong. It's not about who averages what over the course of a year, it's about who gets hot when. Strategy and foresight (and big games) will always win the day!

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.

Commissioner Speak: Injuries

The Problem
Injuries are a bitch. Injuries that occur to you during the week can be a double bitch. Right now, we are set up for weekly lineup changes, so that means if say, Baron gets hurt for a few games on a Tuesday during his first game of the week, you are stuck with his big fat zeros for the rest of the scoring period. That can really hurt. With daily lineup changes, you can just sub the injured guy out and roll right along. With weekly lineup changes, that's a bit tougher.

Analysis
We have a few solutions for this problem, none of which we've implemented yet because we're not sure what the best solution is.

(1) "The Substitution Method" -- Allow one sub per week.

The details of how this would work could get a bit murky but it would essentially allow an owner to pull out a player at any time during the week for a player from his bench. There are two ways to do this:

(a) You can only pull out an injured player mid-week. They have to leave the game they were playing and can't re-enter that game to be considered injured.

(b) You can pull out any player mid-week even if they're not injured. This then allows you to take out an under-performing player for a hot one on the bench. This option is clean, neat, and could add an interesting strategic dynamic.

The problem with this solution is that the Commish(es) would have to re-set the scoring when a person is pulled. And currently, with weekly lineup sets, you can only take out a player's entire scores, not just say, his scores from Monday and Wednesday, and then add in the scores from another player for Friday and Sunday.


(2) "The Trust Method" -- Just set the system to daily changes but only allow non-injury related lineup changes on the pre-set date (Monday).

Then if a player gets hurt, the owner can just take him out and insert the sub for the rest of the week without messing up the current (or historical) scoring.

The tremendous downside of this is that owners must be aware of what is going on with their opponent (even if the IR switch is declared publicly) and stay up to date on both of their lineups.

Plus, owners have to remember to set their lineups ONLY on Monday. We're not sure this can be enforced the whole season. It depends on how active and attentive we are as a group.

(3) "The Half and Half Method" -- Allow an IR substitution only early in the week.

Owners can sub in for an IR player only on injuries that occur during the early part of the week (Monday-Wednesday?). This will eliminate missing an entire week's worth of games while still giving owners a chance to make up for some of those IR games.

The question is, what do we do with the sub's stats from the early games? I say we just let all of the new player's stats count, and eliminate the old player's. This kinda sucks, but it's the easiest way to do it.

Or we can fill out depth charts and designate, say, one or two players each week as subs, and the owner can only put in that pre-determined player. Thus we don't have the "benefit" of hindsight when choosing subs from the bench.

We're not considering allowing owners to use an injury sub for every injury during the week, just one substitution at most.


Conclusion
The thing we need is a way to deal with the mid-week injuries that can really cripple a team. We want the solution to be easy to enforce, easy to update, won't allow for lineup "cheating," and will allow for an injured player to leave while getting a useful sub in from the bench. Since no elegant solution has presented itself, we're currently leaving the injury situation at status quo. If your guy gets hurt, too bad.

We are considering any of the aforementioned options, while leaving the door open for suggestions. Keep in mind that we need simplicity and fairness. If we don't settle this issue soon, we're just gonna ride with weekly lineup changes with no substitutions -- for better or for worse. So speak up if you have an opinion.

Here's my two cents: I'm personally of the opinion that you do have to factor propensity for injury into a player's value. It's obviously very harmful if you consistently lose players each week, especially mid-week. That can just kill your team and your record.

Nobody can predict or control injuries, and being unable to swap an ailing player out (on a mid-week or daily basis) is a bit unfair. So some sort of solution would be nice. For now though, we go status quo just because we're not sure where to lay the responsiblity for manual IR-related moves -- onto the commissioners or the owners.

If we leave this unsettled, we're gonna have some issues with teams losing because a fourth of their roster got hurt during the week. Can we live with that?

Commissioner Speak: Games Played

The Problem
In rotisserie style, you have a 82-game limit on each position, which works to balance people's games played (GP) numbers out. However, in H2H leagues, it's always a problem matching up schedules. How do you make sure one team doesn't play more games than their opponent each week?

The two solutions are to either (a) average out a player's stats over how many games they played that week or (b) impose a games cap for the week.

Option (a) is clearly superior but no league provider does this -- we've emailed a few of them to ask why not, no answer yet. Option (b), allowing you to set up a games cap per week is an okay compromise but it has some serious disadvantages. Once you reach that cap number, you don't accrue any more points for the week. Kobe went off for 81-points during the last game of your week? Whoops, already reached the cap, sorry. ESPN.com works around this by allowing any games played on the same day of the cap lock to still count. Of course, this can still result in lots of GP gaps, if with a slightly better variation.

Another partial solution used in conjunction with Option (b) is to take the best, say, 35 games of that week. But this rewards inconsistent players and is not a good option either.

Analysis
Our choice, given that we can't do averages, was to just let it ride. So, what happens then? In WK1 of our season, Evan will be facing off against Alvin with a -7 games disparity. That's essentially two whole players worth of games. Ouch. Maybe Evan could fix this disparity by inserting some of his bench players but the fact of the matter is that his top ten guys are just playing less games this week (31 games), while Alvin's guys are playing an exorbitant amount (38). Some quick numbers:

This shows a sampling of teams and how many games they have set up for the next two weeks.
WK1, WK2 - Owner
34/50, 35/51 - Jon
34/51, 34/50 - Eric L
34/49, 36/53 - Roger
31/53, 32/53 - Evan
38/56, 36/54 - Alvin
36/49, 35/52 - Brian

This quick analysis shows that the average GP per week should be around 33-36 games, with a high of 38 and a low of 31. It just so happens that Evan is facing Alvin this week, making for a slight aberration of games played. For the most part, the difference in GP between any two opponents should be 2 games -- which isn't too bad.

Notice that the second number after the slash represents how many games are available for the entire fifteen man roster. So assuming we went to daily lineup changes, you could hypothetically get 50+ games in a week (barring schedule overlaps), perhaps making a difference in that disparity, but it's not worth having to shuttle people in and out all week long.

This was one of the reasons we chose to go with weekly versus daily lineup changes [See: Weekly vs Daily]

Conclusion
So while it sucks that we can't do averages, we have to make do with what we can. For the most part, you just play your best players and go with it. If it comes down to 2 games from Caron Butler versus 4 games from Danny Granger, maybe you go with Granger, but there's a chance those two games won't make a huge difference -- especially if you're talking about a superstar versus an average player.

It becomes part of the strategy then, to balance your GP number each week. This isn't ideal but to be quite frank, a few negative games played disparity weeks shouldn't kill your team. We go 21 weeks in the regular season; if your team sucks, you're losing regardless of a few low GP numbers -- except in out of the ordinary weeks. Right?

And to be honest, since we'll have pretty consistent rosters throughout the season, the GP for each player and each individual week should balance out. Evan's looking at the short end of the stick for two straight weeks, but that should fix itself over time. Hypothetically...

NBA.com User Tip - Go to MY TEAMS tab >> TEAM RESULTS link >> Change the Stats drop-down box from Fantasy to Standard to see Games Played value.

Alternately, just count up how many games you have each week from your lineup page. Use a calculator, I do.