I once only knew the art of winning ugly in Yahoo! fantasy basketball. I'd take the standard 9 categories and try to win the easiest ones. Nice and simple. I'm in, I'm out, minimal body count and it's on to next week. But only recently have I truly mastered the art of winning pretty.
My latest fantasy challenge has come with the good people of Fantasy Lounge Sports.
To give you a little background, it's a 16 team H2H league with 14 player rosters. It's also a five player keeper, meaning at the beginning of each season teams will choose the five players they want to carry over from last year.
In order to have a chance, before the draft I had to know what stats I had in my five keeper players and what I needed from the other nine. Since all stats have the same value, I had to differentiate between the pretty from the ugly.
In a standard league, you'll have your...
Positive cumulative stats: 3PTM, PTS, REB, AST, ST, BLK (The Ugly)
Non-cumulative stats: FG%, FT% (The Pretty)
One negative stat: TO (Don't let the "negative" fool you, it's still Pretty)
As you'll notice, the most stats to be won are ugly stats, hence the art of winning ugly.
Ugly stats are valuable because they are the most consistent stats you will find on a weekly basis. You can count on players who give you these stats in a three or four game week more so than your pretty stat players, whose numbers are most valuable when taken over a span of more than a few games.
What you'll often find in your standard league is a few managers who are very active, your casual managers who check in once or twice a week to adjust lineups and browse the waiver wire, and your inactive managers (aka dead managers).
In these leagues you'll commonly run into a stream manager. A streamer is a manager who adds players from the FA pool for the usual purpose of boosting their cumulative stats. In almost all leagues you'll find at least one guy scouring the waiver wire for players. I like to call this person the wire hog. The hog is a force to be reckoned with, the guy you hate to face come playoff time. When one manager sets out to win just ugly stats, they're making a stand. They're the blue-collar worker who isn't trying to be pretty, just flat out trying to win. Because of this stand, you know you're gonna be in a dogfight for six out of the nine categories available.
I'm successful in my little league because my team has a firm foundation in the pretty stats (good percentages + low turnovers). This assures me that regardless of who I face, I have a chance to win all 9 cats. And if I run into my wire hog needing a win, all I have to do is rotate out my 3 - 5 worst players on the wire on game days. In this match up, I have a pretty good chance to win the pretty stats and if healthy will be at the least competitive in the ugly ones.
The best part about winning pretty is I don't have to scour the wire on a daily basis. I also have the versatility to match up to all sorts of teams. Versatility is how I took my middle of the pack inherited team (keepers: Tim Duncan, Paul Pierce, Rasheed Wallace, Samuel Dalembert, Leandro Barbosa) and am a game and a half behind the top team, which is stacked.
Come playoff time, when it's balls to the walls, I know I've got a solid enough foundation to have the luxury of streaming out players and piling on the ugly stats without giving too much away.
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