The Draft Strategy

You have to crawl before you can walk and you have to be able to make a lay-up before you can shoot 3's (unless you are Andrea Bargnani), so this week we are going to cover the fundamentals of fantasy basketball draft strategy. Yes, we all want to find the diamond in the rough sleeper pick, we'll get to that eventually, but first let me ask a very basic question.

If I offered you three cheeseburgers twice a week, or two cheeseburgers four times a week, which would you take? If you are Gilbert Arenas you'd probably flash a gun and intimidate me into giving you all the cheeseburgers, but if you aren't an overrated, overpaid, ball hog with a bizarre sense of entitlement then you'd probably just take two cheeseburgers four times a week and thank me for being so generous.

So where am I going with this? Winning a fantasy basketball championship in a head-to-head league is all about having your team peak for the 3 or 4 weeks that the playoffs are going on, and winning those weeks is not about having the best players, it is about having the players that will give you the most cheeseburgers. Chauncey Billups is ranked as the 18th overall player according to ESPN's projections, he is slotted 10 picks ahead of Tyreke Evans, a similar point guard. But during the three weeks of my league's fantasy playoffs Chauncey plays a total of 9 games while Tyreke plays in 12. I suck at math so bear with me, but I'm pretty sure that means that if you carry the 1 and divide by the reciprocal of Tyreke’s Jersey number, then invert the remainder of Chauncey Billups’ shoe size, divide by two, reduce that fraction to its lowest common denominator, and then ask Matt Damon who actually wrote Good Will Hunting, you come to the conclusion that Chauncey will have to put up 133% of the stats Tyreke needs to put up in those weeks to break even. So even though Chauncey is rated higher I am definitely going to pick Tyreke ahead of him in my fantasy draft.

Know your playoff schedule and use it to your advantage because if you play in a league with people that don’t (and most people don’t) you will have a huge advantage. I’d much rather limp into the playoffs as a 5 seed and destroy the competition than stroll in as the #1 seed only to discover that Carmelo Anthony and Chris Paul have two game weeks in the first round of the playoffs.

So…. You are too lazy to go looking through the schedules for every NBA team, so am I. Here’s a quick NBA schedule grid cheat sheet that makes the job so easy that you have no excuse not to do it.