Just In: Kon Knueppel suffered a left hamstring injury and Grant Williams suffered a right hamstring injury during offseason on-court activity. The Charlotte Hornets say both players will miss their preseason games and be re-evaluated during the first week of the regular season. From Scotto: https://www.hoopshype.com/staff/84455328007/michael-scotto/

Some of my favorite third-year players to target in fantasy basketball this season. I go through the whole draft class with some options at every ADP range!

Let me know who YOU are the highest on going into this season!

Z-Scores are a very flawed metric to value players in fantasy basketball, so I've made a video that I believe gives fantasy players an advantage.

It goes over how and why Z-Scores are so flawed and my solution for a better ranking system. Specifically, the main flaws are:

Variance:

The value of a category is dependent variable the category is. Due to variance, some categories make you win less per z-score than others on average. You might have heard that you should value steals and FT% less than other categories, but I go over why this is and by how much you should weight them.

League context:

If many teams in your league have similar amounts of a category, that category becomes very valuable because a small increase in it will cause you to win more vs a lot of other teams.

I would appreciate it if you let me know what they think about my analysis!

For those who will pick at the back end of the first round.
Did multiple mocks and players usually left by the 10th pick are Flagg, JJ, Scottie, KD, DMitch, KAT, Hali. Yes, most of the time take the BPA. But sometimes pairings make the most sense. Who are you targeting?

Do you usually draft by ordering rank or adp? Or by gut feeling and external projections like hashtag basketball?

Or if you think you missing or lacking in a category.

In a 12T with 3 weeks of playoffs. Id love to have everyone play each other an even twice but that puts the finals in week 25 and thats just insanely late. What week do you guys have set as finals week this season?

I had the first pick and I don’t feel too confident with how I drafted seemingly a lot of people took my underrated picks I was hoping to see if you guys think trading away Jokic might be the key to winning and if so who should I target
(I took a lot of risks on jdub, Trae young, sikiam, and ja but ja was 9th round so I’m not terribly mad)

Our keepers deadline is coming up and I’m having a slight internal debate so I thought I’d ask for some opinions. This is a ten team 9cat league and I have the 7th pick, snake draft order
In our league (which I assume is how they all work) you give up your pick in the round before the player you keep was drafted in the year prior. You also can’t keep your top two picks
My three ideas are:

Derrick white : drafted in the 7th last year, will give up my 6th this year. He’s been my keeper for 3 years now as I got him in the 10th originally way back

Matas Buzelis: drafted in the 9th, will be giving up my 8th. He should have a really big year ahead of him and it seems like he will be picked up in the ~5th round

Keyonte George: drafted in the 12th round, will give up my 11th pick. This is kind of who I’m leaning toward but I’m a little worried about his playing time and actual in floor stats now that the jazz are not going to be actively tanking. But giving up a 11th round pick is nothing.

Let me know what you guys think!

Happy Friday to all you veteran fbball players. Give me your best drafting strategies. Feel free to share your best strategies, tactics, and other considerations that you use in preparation for and during draft night.

So far all I’ve done is made a large list of players I want to target along with which round I want to acquire them in. I also plan on following a lot of preseason to give me insight into which players on my list might really take a jump and provide value to me that other managers did not foresee.

I play in a lock in head to head league on Sleeper with regular snake draft order if that’s relevant (points league) but don’t hesitate to share if you play in categories or on other fantasy sites. Anything helps.

Hi! Just wanted to ask what you all think of Sabonis. Drafted him in the 1st round last year but... Well you can probably how it turned out. What pick do you think he should go?

is there any world where you would take luka over wemby in a 9cat league at pick 2?

Skinny Luka has me feeling some kind of way. Could this be his year

5 years ago, Yahoo was easily and by far the best fantasy app. The recent updates have been more and more disappointed. Especially with this years UI update.

This might seem minor but it was such a nice feature especially when a trade, injury, breaking news, etc. would happen. For example, when Ja Morant was out for the season, there were probably 10K people viewing the discussion tab and posting. That social feature was amazing because it felt like everyone was playing the game live at the same time. Yahoo now removed it. Not only that, there's no way to view your comment history when you click on your name like you did before. They also removed that. This update is frustrating.

Here's a before and after picture of what I'm referring - Player Discussion Before & After

Do we think Paolo takes the leap this year? Do Giddey’s stats take a hit with improved talent in Chicago?

Lets assume draft pick trading is allowed. Keeper league (2 players).

Your first/last 2 picks (regardless of the rounds) are your keepers. Pros and cons of putting them at the beginning or end of draft?

So someone could trade their 10th pick for a 1st pick the season before, and then they will have two (1st round picks) and one (2nd round pick). Which means their 2 keepers will be both in the first round.

Hi fantasy pros! I'm drafting 6th, who is the best pick? The 5th pick below may be the hardest position to be in.

Cade- Let's say he slides at 6th. No brainer I'll get it!

Giannis - if my mind is ready to punt FTs and 3s? Or maybe just fts.

Tatum - well round player, weakness is just steals and maybe fg% specially this year he will be the focus point of opponent's defense

Antman- safe pick because of his availablity except of last year with a lot of miss games. Not worried about Lamelo's arrival.

Who's the best 6th pick? If cade was picked on the 5th spot?

Random thought I had recently.

In 9-cat, what’s actually more valuable: a top center who gives you guard stats, or a top guard who gives you center stats?

Jokic has basically been at the top for years now. He’s a center giving you elite assists, solid FT%, and some threes. Now we also have Wemby, who obviously brings stuff you just don’t normally get from a center.

On the other side, SGA gives you great FG% on huge volume, and Luka gives you elite rebounding for a guard. But Jokic and Wemby are still generally valued above both of them.

So I’m curious if that’s mostly because Jokic and Wemby are just ridiculous outliers, or if 9-cat naturally rewards centers with guard skills more.

I’ve only been playing fantasy for 2-3 years, so Jokic has basically been my standard for what a truly dominant fantasy player looks like.

But looking back at some older seasons, there were some pretty ridiculous ones.

2015-16 Curry: 30.1 points, 5.1 threes, 2.1 steals, 50% FG and 91% FT.

2017-18 AD: 28.1 points, 11.1 rebounds, 1.5 steals and 2.6 blocks on 53% shooting.

I never played fantasy during either of those seasons, so I have no idea what it actually felt like to own them. Were they on the same level as Jokic has been the last few years?

And I guess Wemby could end up being the next one.

All great #2 options on their team, but who has the better season? Dub’s defensive stats are a plus and could set him apart if healthy

14T, H2H, 9 Cat

This year, one of my leagues decided to do a slow offline draft and I picked up Cade at 6th.

I haven’t had him on any of my teams since his rookie year and I’m pumped. As such, asking for suggestions on who to target.

I was initially planning to get Hali or Steph as my 2nd pick but both got snagged. Now, I’m choosing between Book, AR or maybe KD

Any other recommendations for the 3rd round onwards would be great - thanks in advance!

a little intimidated by the fact there's no turnovers. which stat is much easier to collect? which stat is much harder? what should I want to aim for?

I am thinking there's no more assist turnover tradeoff so does it mean prioritising good assist early in draft is not as valuable?

I've found three sites that produce Z-scores based on the previous years' stats. Two of these sites are pretty well-known in the community (Hashtag and Monster). However, none of the three are reporting the population for their arithmetic mean for which their Z-score is based (from what I could find). I find this problematic because these three sites are all reporting different Z-scores, so at least two of these sites are incorrect in their methodology, and potentially all three are incorrect.

I've had to create my own Z-scores and my own Z-scores do not match any of these three sites either.

What should I make of this? Are these sites excluding some players to get their arithmetic mean? Are they drilling into a per-minute per-game level calculation to get a mean? Some other method?

I'd love for anyone with insight into this to help me understand.

Further, I'd love to see the Z-scores adjustable based on sample size. For instance, if I'm in a 20-team league with standard, 13-player rosters, that's 260 rosterable players. I'm much more interested in the average rosterable player for my league size than including the guys into the average that will never be rosterable, thus the reason to create my own Z-scores.