5 Tools to Improve Your Fantasy Basketball Team
Fantasy basketball advice exists everywhere you might look to find it. Whether you’re clicking on a link in the sidebar of the page while setting your lineup or searching for “Start/Sit Advice” on Google, the problem I’ve had for years is finding advice that can be directly applied to my decision making process.
Thankfully, there are some new tools available that allow fantasy basketball managers to tailor advice specifically for the leagues that they play in, be they the daily leagues that have lit the web on fire as of late or the head-to-head and rotisserie leagues that have been around for a couple of decades. These sites don’t ask you to trust the opinion of some random fantasy basketball writer or beat reporter, but allow managers to quickly and easily acquire analysis tailored specifically for any league or any combination of players and to research and gather information based only on what you want to see.
My current go to source for player analysis. There’s a quick and easy player ranking tool, suggestions for waiver wire pickups, and a team scheduling tool that allows you to plan out weekly start/sits and player rotations to maximize your counting stats in head-to-head leagues.
For those daily fantasy players, Hashtag’s Team Twitter Feed is a must. It organizes the players, team officials, and beat writers for all 30 NBA teams so fantasy owners can quickly check for injuries or to see whether any potential high cost stars are going to be resting for the second game of a back-to-back before selecting their daily lineups.
Pros: The Out Of Position Stats tool is a feature that’s both useful and difficult to find other places. It’s a ranking of players who rack up non-traditional stats for certain positions. It’s nifty tool, especially for raiding the waiver wire to bone up on a few categories for which you might run short for a particular stretch of games.
Cons: The site can be difficult to navigate, especially with that pesky floating bar at the top of the page that never goes away while covering up the top of the page as you scroll down. There’s also some lag in updating certain tools with current stats, making it less useful for daily fantasy analysis.
That’s where this next site comes in handy:
The best team analyzer I’ve found, allowing any owner to plug in a specific combination of players and select the appropriate statistics to analyze the strengths and weaknesses for that particular team based on any date range. An absolute must for daily fantasy guru’s trying to find the best squad for their money.
Pros: As customizable a set of research tools as you will find anywhere. Everything updates daily and the Player Screener tools is useful for finding players with a particular skill set.
Cons: Site design can lead to a lot of scrolling in windows. No option to export to a standalone spreadsheet program for further analysis.
Another current favorite among fantasy owners of all stripes is Speedette, a website that allows anyone to build a playlist of different web content based on any topic or subject. There’s a great fantasy basketball playlist built by Speedette Sports that includes content, both print and podcast, from fantasy sites that update frequently. Each NBA franchise also has a team-specific playlist of news, opinion, and analysis on each individual team that are great sources for deep dives to find up and coming players that might be great waiver adds.
Pros: Speedette Sports put together a great playlist of fantasy sites specifically for the information you need on a daily basis. I can slam through all the breaking news that’s fantasy relevant in a heartbeat using the built in keyboard shortcuts.
For a quick look at all the sites you need to see Speedette beats the pants off your current RSS reader.
Cons: Analysis tools aren’t here as this site focuses on aggregating news and editorial. You can add analytics sites to your playlist, however, and find out in real time when each of them update.
Trades you say? You need to evaluate some trades? Here’s a couple of good options for just that:
The Fantasy Pros tool does a good job looking at player-for-player, straight up, trades, giving you good looks at the stat-by-stat effects of the trade on your team.
Pros: The most in depth trade tool you’ll find.
Cons: No option for looking at swaps that include multiple players or are unbalanced, which is why I’ve included the next tool.
While it’s not as in depth as the Fantasy Pros tool, Fantasy SP allows you to look at multiple players and also evaluate unbalanced trades, which make up the bulk of the trades that are made in my leagues every year.
Pros: Support for analysis of multiple player or unbalanced trades.
Cons: Not as in depth as the Fantasy Pros tool in terms of analysis.
Each of these sites serves a particular research niche for any fantasy basketball owner in any style of league. Even Jimmy Butler can’t claim the improvement my fantasy skills have made this season since employing these tools.
