Fantasy Basketball: Patrick Beverley Is Quietly Having a Terrific Season
Did you know Patrick Beverley is a top-60 fantasy basketball player this season? No one would blame you if you didn’t.
Indeed, despite the fact that the Houston Rockets guard has netted his fantasy owners a strong profit on his average draft position outside of the overall top 130 (per FantasyPros ADP data), Beverley continues to get more attention for his defensive peskiness than his fantasy production. Meanwhile, he’s posting one of the quietest fantasy breakouts in recent memory.
How can a guy who plays starter minutes on one of the most talked-about and superstar-driven teams in the league manage to be so productive yet receive so little attention?
Bev and Butter
The lack of fanfare over Beverley’s excellent season likely stems from the fact that he doesn’t contribute much in the points column, and scoring tends to be our default metric for player assessment -- both for the real life game and for fantasy.
Indeed, the Houston guard has averaged just a hair below 10 points across each of the last two seasons. It’s almost as if Beverley, a noted defensive provocateur, knows just how to get box-score hounds riled up, toeing the line between single-digit obscurity and double-digit excellence.
But in all seriousness, despite the modest totals, what makes Beverley such an effective fantasy scorer is that he clearly knows his strengths. Look at his attempts percentage (%FGA) by shot type from this season, along with his make rate (FG%) from each spot.
| Shot Area | %FGA | FG% |
|---|---|---|
| Restricted Area | 22.8% | 55.9% |
| In The Paint (Non-RA) | 16.9% | 40.6% |
| Mid-Range | 7.1% | 34.5% |
| Three Pointers | 53.1% | 39.1% |
The three-pointer is clearly his bread and butter, accounting for over half of his attempts across the season.
In other words, Beverley’s low scoring and lack of overall field goal efficiency seem very much by design. For all of his unruliness on the defensive end, offensively speaking, he is very much a system player, with almost 90 percent of his massive share of three-pointers coming off assists.
Great At Nothing, Bad At Nothing
So Beverley isn’t exactly a bad shooter -- he just attempts easy twos so infrequently that his overall field goal percentage is heavily weighted by his serviceable if not spectacular three-point make rate.
In fact, what makes the Houston guard such a strong yet underappreciated fantasy asset is not so much that he excels in one particular category but, rather, that there are no categories where he poses a significant negative, outside of the aforementioned points scored.
Check out his category value splits according to numberFire’s fantasy rankings algorithm.
| Z-Score | Reb | Ast | Pts | Tov | FG% | 3PM+Stl+Blk | FT% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1.13 | 0.02 | 0.46 | -0.82 | 0.41 | -0.36 | 1.22 | 0.2 |
The boost in rebound value is a real boon for Beverley. He’s averaging just under six boards per game this year after hovering around four boards per game over the past three seasons. The numberFire metrics have him as a top-15 contributor in rebound value among guard-eligible players -- and the last guard-eligible player to incur a positive value score from his rebound output.
But that’s Pat Bev for you -- always living on the line.
Value Going Forward
In a way, Beverley seems like a more subdued version of what fantasy owners expected from peak Danny Green, albeit with less scoring upside.
And it’s because of this lack of scoring that, come time for next season’s drafts, it’s very likely Beverley will once again find himself pushed well into the later rounds in favor of splashier assets.
But what he lacks in upside, he makes up for with a strong, reliable floor. As a “get what you pay for†top-80 asset on a fast-paced and productive team, Patrick Beverley should be a fantasy mainstay for the foreseeable future.
