Fantasy basketball - going old school, who's interested in help?

While I am playing FBkB this year and did a H2H last year, I am not a fanatic about it. Did this tool used to be more valuable when Sporting NEws/USA Today had theri salary cap leagues?

Another Q, I purchased the inaugural Basketball Prospectus 2009. Any idea how good it is for fantasy purposes?

any way to attach a pdf document or jpg in a thread here? If I could do that I could better explain the chart. If you played fantasy basketball a while back (like 7-8 years ago) you might recognize it. There are many copycats but they fail to explain things very well. Plus mine is color coded which makes finding patterns easier to recognize.

A drop down menu on a web site would help a lot with the chart.

yes it was good for salary cap because back then Sporting News had a game that went on total weekly points, rebounds, etc but salaries were based on season averages from the year before IIRC. You could spot guys that had a ton of 3 game weeks throughout the season which really hurt their value. I always tried to get guys with 4 game weeks and then mixed in subs when their 2 game weeks popped up. You could pick up bench players weeks ahead of time because you could see their corresponding upcoming schedules. It was also great to make trades because you could unload a star player that finished the season with a bunch of 3 game weeks in a row.

On a funny note, rotonews or rotowire or whatever it was called then always copied my game schedule to their site and made it look like their own work. I always had teams in alphabetical order as it made them easier to spot for me. That’s the way they would list them too- to the T. I think one week I had a mistake about the number of games one team had- guess who also had the same mistake listed? It was kinda funny.

The drop down menu is needed to compare teams and also to be able to adjust for scoring formats that had different start days. Mine always started on Monday but some other leagues had scoring formats that started on Saturday, Wednesday, etc.

I always got a lot of flack back when I started about how the weekly schedule made no difference as the schedules would all even out over the course of a season. But some teams would have as many as 12-13 four game weeks while others would only have 8 or 9. In a 25 week schedule that could make a lot of difference. It was just the case of taking advantage of a small sample size. 29 teams playing also added to the mix as at least one team was off every night. For some reason the West Coast teams seemed to have more 4 game weeks, maybe that is different now.

that picture came from a magazine the chart was in- Fantasy Sports Magazine, a Krause product. Back in the day when there were 29 teams. The lock out killed fantasy basketball back then. I was told by Greg Ambrosius that Krause printed about 110,000 magazines that year and ended up trashing most- like 90k.

Someone already has a grid: http://givemetherock.com/2009/10/11/2009-10-fantasy-basketball-schedule-grid/

The file is actually blocked from my work so I can’t view it, but I assume it’s very similar.

The guy has a similar color coded grid with dates and teams by alphabet. But he misses the boat when he asks whether a consistent schedule or more extreme schedule is better. It would depend on the scoring structure but if it is weekly totals with no games limit then the extreme schedule is much better. Tha’s the reason for the chart in the first place- to manipulate the schedule because of its small sample size. The trick is to grab players early that have corresponding schedules. For instance, when your star players have 2 game weeks already have a mid tier player with a 4 game week to start. The only exception is superstars and there are only about a half dozen of those guys in the league.

But in total points leagues a good player that averages 20 points, 8 rebounds and has a ton of three game weeks is not much better than an average player who averages 15 points and 6 rebounds but has a lot of 4 game weeks. Their totals at the end of the week are about the same. That’s why drafting a star player with a lot of 3 games weeks can kill you- someone else can take a player a couple rounds later who will produce the same weekly totals.

And you can trade away guys who finish the season with a bad schedule. That’s just a few things off the top of my head. Except that with 30 teams the teams with 4 game weeks is not as volatile as it used to be.