Fantasy basketball strategy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Some decisions are easy – if they offer you Nikola Jokic for your Nikola Mirotic, you take it and run, you don’t need anyone to tell you that. Most trade offers and waiver decisions are not that black and white however, and the answer is very context dependent – it’s hard to give an answer without a big picture look at your team and your league first.

Each week we will be taking a team from one of you – our readers – and doing a statistically driven analysis of the team compared to the rest of your league. We will look at the strengths and weaknesses of the team, at where they sit in the standings and what the expectations are going forward should be. We’ll then focus on what kind of moves can help this team position itself better to succeed in their league. Our goal is to show our readers how to assess those “Should I take this trade?” and “Should I pick up this player?” that don’t fall neatly into a yes/no answer.

If you would like your team to be featured on Roster Doctor, please tweet me @KentShen_RB and I will follow up with you.

Team of the Week

Our team of the week comes from Dillion P., from Toronto, Canada:

Team Name: Grand Theft Otto

Current Record and Position: 45-36-0, Third Place

League Settings: 10-team Snake Daily, 6-team playoffs, Standard 9-Cat, PG/SG/G/SF/PF/F/C/C/Util/Util

Current Roster:

Z-score stats courtesy of www.basketballmonster.com

Diagnostic:

As champion last season, Dillion started the season going straight for a punt points build, more to prove that he could win with it rather than seeing it as the open strategy on draft day. He opened the draft by targeting bigs early, but the draft didn’t play out according to plan and he defaulted to a best player available plan the first few rounds.

As an aside, this illustrates the dangers of forcing a strategy pre-draft – if the draft doesn’t shake up the way you want it to, you could end up with an awkward fitting team that is all over the place. I prefer to stay open in the early rounds of the draft and commit to a strategy mid round when you have a better idea what the other drafters are going, and move into an open archetype. Dillion forced punt points to challenge himself and prove something, so his goal was different than simply winning the league, but most of the time, it is much better to avoid going into a draft forcing a strategy.

Luckily for Dillion, he was able to trade his way into players that worked in his build. He moved Kyle Lowry for Draymond Green, one of the best players in the game for a punt points build. He then sent John Collins and Jaylen Brown for Aaron Gordon, another great trade up for his team.

Even with these good moves, Dillion’s team looks to be a bit too balanced across the board with few truly elite categories, which could end up hurting him in matchups against other top teams. Blocks stands out as an elite category, with Capela, Durant, Turner and Green anchoring it. All of the other categories aside from the points punt fall into the range of slightly below to above average, with only FG% standing a bit above. Depending on how our matchups look, we should be looking towards stacking up on certain categories via trades.

Opponents:

Our matchups against the top teams look pretty rough. As currently configured, we are a pretty big underdog to Bodak Melo, and a dog to From the Depths as well. Our elite blocks look to be pretty marginalized as the top teams in the league all range between average to punt in the category, and our strong FG% also won’t be as effective as it could be as not a single one of the other contenders are strong in that category. We will have to make some changes in order to try to beat the other contending teams come playoff time.

Bodak Melo looks like a very solid punt percentages team that is stacked up fairly strongly in 5 of the 6 counting stat categories. From the Depths looks like a more focused punt points team than ours. Both have multiple elite categories that will be hard pressed for us to contest.

Gameplan:

The focus for our game plan is to take our surplus in blocks and field goals and try to bolster the categories that we should be able to contest to help in future playoff matchups.

Let’s begin:

Dangle Myles Turner as trade bait: Out of the four guys anchoring our blocks category, Myles Turner seems to make the most sense to trade. Dealing Capela is bad because we need his rebounds, and we are ok with his poor FT%, as 3 of our opponents are elite in the category and we won’t be able to contest it vs them. We need KD for the 3s, FG% and boards as well and Draymond provides out of position assists and steals that we need as well. Turner is our worst rebounding big, whose value also is most tied to his blocks, a category we have a tremendous surplus in that we can deal away. I would be targeting 3s and rebounds, our most contestable categories. Players I would be targeting as part of a deal would be Kevin Love, Khris Middleton, Paul George or Nikola Vucevic.

Continue fortifying Boards and 3s:  We aren’t done looking at these categories yet, as these look to be the best ones to target to steal away from the two teams we are projected to lose against. One of Elfrid Payton or Ricky Rubio could be moved as well as Austin Rivers for more help in those cats. Guys like Trevor Ariza, Nicolas Batum or Tyreke Evans would be some good targets to look at.

Roster some matchup breakers: A matchup breaker is a waiver player who’s strengths in a certain category can break open a certain category in a given week – meaning they can break open a category that is supposed to be close between two teams. From the looks of it, FT% is going to be a category that can be broken vs Bodak Melo and possibly even stolen from From the Depths. Luckily for us, Danilo Gallinari is one of the few existing matchup breakers for the FT% cat, and he is on our wire. We should be looking to stash “The Rooster” using our IR spot to help in these matchups come playoff time.

Outlook:

While Dillion looks to have some tough matchups coming up, they aren’t impossible to beat. With a couple trades and a game plan, he should be able to position himself well for the rest of the season. Good luck!

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