Are you new to fantasy basketball? Maybe you have played fantasy sports before but have been hesitant to try out fantasy basketball for one reason or another.
Well, here are five good reasons why you should take the leap and give fantasy basketball a chance if you’ve never played before:
1) Like any other sport, it takes time to learn.
Remember your first baseball draft? When you took players from your favorite team instead of the best available? When you took Peyton Manning No. 1 overall because “he’s the best player in the league”?
It happens.
Your team more than likely sucked, but since then you’ve crushed the opposition for a couple of titles. If you’re already a fan of fantasy sports, you should be a little more prepared to embark on a new journey than you were before. Even if you're not, there’s no reason to take the Ricky Bobby philosophy on winning and losing.
So go ahead, take your team’s starting five, get your college team’s up-and-comers. Maybe it’ll work out, maybe not. Either way, you’ll have the enjoyment of another fantasy sport added to your repertoire, and hey, there’s always next year.
2) The scoring is the same as fantasy baseball.
I would even go so far as to say that players are more easily compared in fantasy basketball than in any other league.
In fantasy baseball, pitchers convolute things. Looking at the pros and cons of a specific hitter versus a specific pitcher becomes completely relative to the makeup of one’s team. This leads to a lot of difficulties when ranking players and reviewing trade offers.
Football’s problems are much more obvious. Because it’s based on a point system, taking the best player doesn’t always translate to creating the best team. Of course, one can compare players by their average points per game, but these can be very ephemeral. Two one-yard rushing touchdowns will outdo a player who has 115 rushing yards with no touchdowns.
This is not to say that fantasy baseball and football are unfair. I just think the use of the same stats for every player in the game and the use of rotisserie scoring give basketball the best translation from on-the-court to fantasy scoring.
3) The schedule should not turn you away.
The spotty nature of the NBA schedule per team, therefore per player, can turn a lot of people off to fantasy basketball. It shouldn’t.
Sure, you don’t have a daily schedule like the MLB or a weekly appointment like the NFL. There’s no debating that. And it does stink to check your roster every day only to see that you only have one or two guys playing on a number of nights.
The solution: Set your roster in intervals. Every three days. Once a week. Something defined. The stability of playing time in the NBA means that you will rarely have a guy starting that doesn’t actually play, even if you don’t take the time to study your team every single day.
4) Of the Big Three, the NBA offers the smallest player universe, and therefore, the smallest number of relevant fantasy players.
This makes the amount of information that you need to be process much smaller. Not that you should stop visiting your favorite fantasy basketball site. You should never do that. Many people actually do the opposite with the NBA.
The smaller player universe means less information to wade through on a daily basis, so one can more easily extract the data that applies to them from their favorite site. A site like rotoprofessor.com/basketball, maybe?
5) It’s fun.
If you’ve played and enjoyed fantasy sports, you know this point already. I think it’s worth further emphasis, though.
Remember the feeling you got from buying Josh Hamilton cheaply this year? Or how about all the sympathy you’ve received since taking Matt Forte ahead of Chris Johnson last year?
There are conversations and debates that you can only have if you’re playing fantasy. It’s as simple as that. If you like basketball, why wouldn't you participate in something that simultaneously makes you more informed about the league and lets you compete against others?
It’s a win-win.
So with all that said, if you’ve never played fantasy basketball before, there’s no reason to be afraid. Give it a shot and see for yourself how much fun it can be. And of course make sure you're checking out the Rotoprofessor for all your fantasy analysis.
To view the first part of Will Overton’s Top 200 Rankings on Rotoprofessor, click here
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