Thursday, October 29, 2009

Why Auto Draft Is Best For NBA Daily Fantasy Games

This is the third season I'm trying my hand at fantasy basketball. The previous two years, I just felt I didn't have any edge over the competition, and it was a "rolling dice" scenario at best.

From the first to the second year, FSL changed their roster size from seven to nine. This helped reduce the possibility of duplicate rosters, but it still seemed all the regulars had several similar players each night.

Now going from the second to third season, I have the added advantage of my daily fantasy projections to help choose the best roster. I'm hoping my mathematical model will give me an edge this season.

However, there's going to be those nights where everyone picks the same. Just two nights into the current season, I've already seen exact duplicate rosters from two of the best opponents (with 12 games on the schedule, no less)!

I've been playing both salary cap and auto draft over on Fan Duel, and I think auto draft is a superior product for basketball. With a 9 player roster and no overlapping picks, I feel this is a much more skillful game. Even though there is no cap, there are some great disparities between 1st and 2nd (or 3rd/4th) choice at a given position.

It is a different skill than picking 9 players to neatly fit into your cap, but I think it's a stronger component to success, making cap games seem more luck oriented.

Maybe I just like the fact that there will be 9 unique players on each roster, and I won't have seven identical players as Tippy, Bonds, Kaiseroll13 and Primetime420. That gets old pretty quick.

1 comment:

Blinders said...

We will be rolling out an Auto type draft for heads-up leagues next week. I think it will be pretty popular as you suggest.