I'm occasionally asked to perform the ultimate act of expert service: introducing fantasy basketball to a teenager.
When introducing fundamental principles of winning fantasy management in a simple, Lombardi-esque way? I tend to crib from Benjamin Graham's classic The Intelligent Investor.
(And if attempting mental activation of a sullen 13-year-old buried cortex-deep in his Nintendo Switch, try leaning into the classic hook: "hey ____, do you like money?")
Graham's concept of value investing isn't too far off from Billy Beane's concept of Moneyball. Both encapsulated in Wee Willie Keeler's timeless quote: "hit 'em where they ain't."
(And when a man hitting .424 wants to give you life advice? Listen.)
As fantasy managers, we hunt for unidentified pools of value. Offroad metrics that secretly contain the key to fantasy overperformance. When we roster enough players that outperform their draft-day valuation? We win. When we roster enough players that underperform? We have to get one of those Matthew Berry tattoos, or whatever fresh degradation he prefers.
How does one quantify fantasy value? Our preferred currency: by round.
We want fourth-round picks that play like second-rounders. 12th rounders that deliver fifth-round production. (Or if in a salary cap league: a $1 player that plays like a $10 player.)
We find that in a competitive 12-team league, serious contenders roster at least 12-15 rounds of added value. And of course, the higher the round, the more weight gets tacked to said value. A third-rounder that plays like a high second-rounder means a heckuva lot more than a 10th rounder playing like a ninth rounder. Moral: all of this is easier to grasp in a salary cap format.
After managing fantasy basketball teams for a year or two, you'll begin to sense these pools of hidden value organically. Just remember the dynamics of undervaluation are constantly shifting.
Ten years ago? Rostering a power forward that shot 40 percent from behind-the-arc was akin to finding a unicorn at Petco. Today, it's the expectation.
I thought I'd cue you in on a few players who have overperformed over the last couple of seasons and a couple of new names on said list.
I have a soft spot for helping managers new to fantasy basketball. Usually friends or friends of friends that got hooked.
Of the significant categorical fantasy metrics? These days, friends, I am all about FT%.
I don't mean FT% in the classical sense, as in "per Basketball Reference, Kiki Vandeweghe is currently 28th all-time in free throw percentage at .8717." I mean FT% in the ESPN Player Rater sense.
As you know, our quantification of FT% as a fantasy category is weighted by volume. The number of free-throw attempts and successful conversions.
As of this writing, Zach LaVine is ninth in the NBA with a (classic) 95.6 FT%. But he's first in FT% on our player rater with a 3.70. Why? Because he's getting to the line more often than the eight players ahead of him in classic FT%.
LaVine's gaudy 95.6% classic FT%, weighted across his high-impact 6.4 free throw attempts per game, makes him the number one fantasy producer in free throw percentage. Because LaVine is registering a higher impact on your fantasy team's overall performance at the free-throw line.
Over the past couple of seasons, in terms of categorical scarcity, I've gotten increasingly mindful of how Player Rater FT% drives unidentified value. I'm so cognizant of its impact; I'm getting night sweats just typing this because I'm broadcasting my critical winning strategy.
This season, I tried to draft solely by Player Rater FT% in a few drafts. I used this methodology in mixes of various formats: Points, Roto, snake, salary cap because I want to see if Player Rater FT% can align unidentified valuation across Points and Roto formats.
Last season, I started narrowing my focus onto FT% when I primarily played within ESPN's grand new Points system. I struggled early on because my fantasy brain is calibrated via 20+ years of Roto scoring.
Without realizing it, I quickly began using FT% as a hack to translate a player's Roto value into Points value. And more often than not? The hack clicked. Because I realized that many of my favorite underrated, sleepers and light sleepers tended to align around FT%...regardless of format. So I decided to use this season to test FT%, only on a broader scale.
Here are some of the underrated FT% players I targeted this draft season:
One thing you may notice: other than Horford and Olynyk, where are the centers? Reason: for centers, elite FT% value drives overperformance more than any other category. The only reliable top-40 centers in FT%: Jokic, Embiid, KAT. End of list. It's such a stark differentiator; there are no early-round bargains at center.
Why is Al Horford such a steal? In fantasy, across any format, you can quantify his overperformance easily via FT%.
What does that above list also contain? A cornucopia of current overperformers...across both Points and Roto.
Butler, LaVine, Powell, Barnes, Horford, and Bridges are all in the range of solid steals to significant thefts. Even Cole Anthony is making some early noise.
And yes, it's early. But one of the best aspects of aligning via FT% is the deep, wide sample size of the stat and the cadence at which it occurs. We're talking about players that attempt five-to-ten free throws a night. That's a steady drumbeat. FT% lacks polarity. It doesn't lurch back and forth like blocks.
It's like I tell my two recalcitrant children: "do you like money? Because I'm going to win a bunch of it next April."