RADIO
Fantasy basketball coverage is typically pretty dead now that the fantasy basketball season is long past. Most NBA fans have had the playoffs to focus on -- at least the handful of series that have been fantastic like Golden State / Oklahoma City, as opposed to the many series this year that have been either lopsided (most of the 1st round in the West, Cleveland vs. anyone in the East) or a painful show of bad basketball (Raptors-Pacers springs to mind). With the Finals coming to a close by this weekend, games will wrap up and we'll enter the fantastic, ridiculous, and often hilarious portion of the year that is the NBA offseason.
A lot of player movement will happen between now and the NBA season, but it's never too early to start speculating about fantasy basketball. I for one am ready to kick off our offseason coverage, so we'll get going with a round-up of pieces from around the web that I've found interesting and a few of my own thoughts.
The NBA Draft
Check it out: DraftExpress Mock Draft, Updated June 7, 2016.
Before we hit free agency in July, we'll have an opportunity to get excited about some of the kids coming into the league. NBA draft hype is already in full-force on sites like DraftExpress, where you can find excellent player profiles and mock drafts that will give you a good idea of where players might go. I like the mocks on more independents sites like this better than ones like those created by people with better connections like Chad Ford of ESPN Insiders. I think the quality of mock drafts as a tool for predicting quality of NBA play is harmed by being sourced on hype from player agents and misdirection from front offices. Sites like Draft Express do a better job of conducting a consistent evaluation of talent to figure out who is good and deserves to be drafted into the league.
That's not to say sites like this are perfect, though. I think they still end up susceptible to group think on certain players. They've moved up University of Washington PF Marquese Chriss to third overall in their latest mock. Chriss has been flying up draft boards lately as people rave about his athleticism and raw potential. However, a player like him is extremely risky at 3rd overall, while I believe his upside relative to other potential top picks is being overrated.
Check it out: Marquese Chriss is the Boom-or-Bust Prospect in the 2016 NBA Draft by Kevin O'Connor.
As Kevin O'Connor wrote for SB Nation back in April:
However, there's a naturally high probability that Chriss never does develop into a go-to scorer, so he'll need to improve as a passer. As a freshman he was a record scratcher: when he got a touch, the ball stopped, and he'd get tunnel vision. Even when he did decide to pass, he was inaccurate and bound to commit careless turnovers.
Chriss' assist-turnover ratio (26 assists, 69 turnovers) is troubling, similar to the underclassmen seasons of comparable forwards like Stromile Swift, Michael Beasley, Al-Farouq Aminu, Derrick Williams and Anthony Bennett. Beasley was a 19-point-per-game scorer before his career went off the rails and Aminu has tremendous defensive versatility, but the others have been essential busts.
That's a spooky sounding group of NBA busts. I think a lesson linking all of these athletic freaks with unpolished games is that it's a lot harder than teams have imagined it is to teach a raw big man to be a skilled basketball player. Some relatively raw athletic freaks pan out to be stars, but it seems the more common anecdotal examples are wings like Giannis Antetokounmpo and Kawhi Leonard, rather than big men like Bennett or Williams.
The flip side of overrating the ability of athletes to develop basketball skills is that people assume athleticism is set in stone and cannot be improved in the same way as basketball skills like shooting and passing. As a result, players with awesome basketball skills are often knocked severely in the draft process if they are perceived to have poor athleticism. I think this is a faulty assumption, especially in this modern world of sports science and personal trainers. Being a kid on a college campus full of temptations can often lead to issues with fitness and athleticism that will turn around when the player becomes a paid professional athlete in competitive work environment of an NBA team, complete with personal trainers and dieticians.
Of course you'd rather have the more athletic guy, all things being equal. Players with low athleticism are starting further behind in athleticism, so you need to be sure about their other skills, their intellect, and their work-ethic. And you certainly can't assume improvement to an NBA level of athleticism will happen with every so-called poor athlete. But too many otherwise smart people assume a prospect's level of athleticism is completely static.
Check it out: It's All About the Game by Buster Ducks.
On the topic of the NBA draft in general, this an interesting take on draft strategy that highlights principles that fantasy sports draft strategy junkies will find familiar. The author (Buster Ducks) names two key factors in drafting well in the NBA that are often seemingly ignored by poorly drafting teams: contract rules and positional scarcity. You should really read the whole piece, but here's the down and dirty on how the concept of contract rules affect value and upside in the draft.
Contract rules in the NBA currently make the most valuable contracts in the NBA players who are superstars who are worth more than a max contract, and decent players on a rookie salary. As a result, NBA teams should be trying to find superstars and trying to find players who can be contributors on their rookie deals. Raw players who will take years to develop and will likely only top out as below max players who will be overpaid free agents by the time they develop are poor picks, but often made by NBA teams when they should be taking NBA ready guys.
Where teams get it the most wrong, Buster Ducks theorizes, is assuming it's an either/or between "high upside" young guys who have a bigger chance of becoming a guy worth more than a max contract and "low upside" older guys who are more likely to be NBA contributors while they are still on their rookie contracts. Based on his ranking of the top 20 players in the 2015-16 NBA season who played at least one year in college:
...there were 4 Freshmen, 7 Sophomores, 5 Juniors, and 4 Seniors. So by year, there’s really no reason to prefer freshmen to other players, and there’s really no indication that Freshmen are “higher upside”. In fact, if you take a closer look at the Freshmen, you’ll discover that two were 19 at the start of their freshman season (Love and Jordan) and one was 20 (Whiteside). The only 18-year-old who went on to become a top player was Kevin Durant.
So buyer beware when you're in a dynasty league. Assuming a player has a greater chance of becoming a star because he's only 18, or a lower chance because he's 22 has not turned out to be the case with the league's current crop of stars. NBA teams might make a mistake in sacrificing the chance of an NBA contributor on a rookie contract for a false hope of greater upside, but you don't have to make the same mistake in your keeper league and dynasty drafts.
Dynasty Leagues
I'll wrap things up with a plug and a teaser for what's to come in RotoBaller's offseason NBA coverage.
Check it out: The DynastyBBall Podcast.
Jordan Schultz over at DynastyBBall is doing some great work attempting to fill the void online in year-round fantasy basketball strategy and rankings for dynasty basketball league managers with his website and podcast. I participated in the startup draft for the 20-team Official DynastyBall League that took place at the beginning of last month. I've been holding off on it, but in the build-up of offseason fantasy basketball content following the conclusion of the NBA Finals and the lead-up to the NBA Draft and free agency, I'll be writing about my own approach to NBA dynasty leagues -- how I value players in a dynasty league and why I drafted the players that I did.
