Fantasy Basketball: The Punting Game

What makes fantasy basketball different from fantasy football is its scoring categories. In football, you get points from each player to total one number for the week. In basketball (and baseball and hockey, usually), you can select categories for your league that your players compete in.

In a standard league, there are nine categories: Points, 3-Pointers Made, Rebounds, Assists, Steals, Blocks, FG%, FT%, and Turnovers.

As you would expect, some NBA players are good in some categories, but not so great in others. You don’t compile raw value like in football, but you actually try to build a team – one where your players work together to win specific categories. For example, Dwight Howard is an elite rebounder and has a good FG%, but he is an atrocious free throw shooter. In football, all you’re looking for is production from your starters. In basketball, you want the right production from your starters.

This leads to the idea of punting categories. You can build your team in two ways: you can grab the best value at the time in your draft and hope to be competitive in all nine categories (Note: this is the best strategy in roto leagues), or you can focus on 6 or 7 categories and hope you are so elite in those than you can “sacrifice” the other two.

I’m a believer in punting (if you’re in a head-to-head league). In one league, I have Dwight Howard, Larry Sanders, Thad Young, and Andre Drummond. It's perhaps the worst free throw shooting squad to ever be compiled. However, I’m fine with this. Those guys, while terrible in FT%, are top of the league in FG%, Rebounds, and Blocks.

I've put together some tables for each category, with the help of some data from the awesome basketballmonster.com, to rank the top-10 players through the first week-ish of games (through 11/6 games). Obviously with just one week of data, this will change throughout the season. Hopefully through these tables, however, you can start to get an idea of how to build your team to optimize victories in categories. I will update them weekly and give some commentary on which players to focus on.

Punting Points

Punting 3PM

Punting Rebounds

Punting Assists

Punting Steals

Punting Blocks

Punting FG%

Punting FT%

Punting Turnovers