The leagues that I am most knowledgeable about are rotisserie leagues, so my examples below will be based on those.  The other thing that I am most familiar with is scoring based on your position within a certain category of stats — I’ll explain more of that later.

No matter how your league works, you need to know how things are scored.  You MUST make your picks based on this scoring.  You can’t just pick the well-known names and expect to win.  If you pick Lebron, Kobe, Dwyane Wade, and Carmelo, you may get a whole lot of points scored, but who knows what that will translate into.

Since every league has different rules, throughout the rest of this blog, I’ll have to explain some different types of specifics and hopefully you Fantasy Leaguers will be able to translate it into your own rules and come up with a victorious strategy that works for you.

In most rotisserie leagues, you have a variety of different categories that you can get stats in.  The most common of these are points, rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks.  In addition, many leagues may also include turnovers, three pointers made, free throw percentage, and field goal percentage.

You are also allowed a certain number of players at a certain number of positions.  These positions may be fairly specific like point guard, shooting guard, power forward, etc, or they may just be general positions, such as guard, forward, and center.  In basketball the different positions don’t matter as much.  Players at most positions can get most of the stats, at least potentially.  Obviously, this isn’t so true in other sports, such as Fantasy Football.

Most rotisserie leagues give you points based on your position within a stat category.  If you had a league with 12 players, for example, you might get 12 points if you have the highest number of points scored, 12 points if you had the highest number of rebounds, etc.  Conversely, if you are the lowest in any of these statistical categories, you would have 1 point.

If you are in a league that works this way, this knowledge is of the utmost importance.

If you have 3000 more steals than the second place person, you get 12 points.  If you have 1 more steal than the second place person, you get 12 points.

You don’t need to get way ahead in a statistical category, especially if in so doing, you do more poorly in other categories.  In education terms, if you can get a B+ in every statistical category, you will most likely win.  You don’t need or want to get an A+ in one category if it means you get an F in another category or two.

What does this mean specifically for you?

When you draft players, make sure you pick players that will help you in a variety of categories and will not hurt you too much in others.  Since you are only shooting for B+’s, you don’t necessarily need to pick all high scorers in the first 5 rounds of the draft and forget about assists and rebounds.  When you are picking up free agents or making trades, make sure that they bring some of your low categories up to a B+ level rather than trying to get high scorers all the time.

For more specific information about drafting, trading, and selecting free agents, stay tuned to future tips.

If I had to tell you 5 players to pick up, I would pick the following (assuming their health was good):

Lebron James – He gets you points, rebounds, assists, and steals.  If your league counts them, he has good 3 pointers and field goal percentage, and his free throw percentage isn’t bad.  His turnovers are high, but sometimes you have to compensate for that category with other players who don’t handle the ball quite as much.

Kevin Garnett – High points, rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks.  Very high field goal percentage.  Decent free throw percentage.  Lower than average turnovers.

Shawn Marion – High points, monstrously high rebounds, high assists, very high steals.  Very high field goal percentage.  Good free throw percentage. Lower than average turnovers.

Steve Nash – Good points, decent rebounds for a point guard, very high assists and steals.  Very good field goal percentage for a point guard.  Very high free throw percentage.  High turnovers will always plague him because he is a point guard, but you have to live with that for a few of your players

Chauncey Billups – Good points, decent rebounds for a point guard, good assists and steals.  Good field goal percentage.  Insanely high free throw percentage (including the fact that he shoots a lot of them).  And he won’t kill you on turnovers.  The real beauty of Billups, in my opinion, is that he plays every game and is never ranked very highly in anybody’s polls (thus can be had in the third or fourth round and is better than some of the first rounders).

Honorable mention would be Andrei Kirilenko, but he has been injured too much of late to make the list.  If he is healthy, he is a worthy first round pick.

If I had to pick a few players to avoid, without being too wordy:

Shaquille O’Neal: free throw percentage, three pointers (if you don’t have free throw percentage, he isn’t bad, but now he is getting older)
Allen Iverson: field goal percentage, turnovers (if you don’t have either of those categories, he isn’t bad)
Tim Duncan: free throw percentage, three pointers, turnovers (again, bad based on categories you may not have)