With our Trends tool, you can see current and historical matches for players in matchups that meet the specified criteria. This makes it pretty easy to track performance within the result set. In this series, I thought it might be cool to take it one step further. I will be creating a Trend early in the week, playing the “Current Matches” in my lineups throughout the week on FanDuel and then reviewing the Trend at the end of the week.

This Monday, I created the following Trend:

Description

If you’ve read any of my previous articles, you probably know that I am a big proponent of using the Center spot on FanDuel to gain an advantage in GPPs. Across the big two sites, Center on FD is the only one where you are limited to a single player. On DK, you can use the UTIL slot to add a second center and on FD, all other positions let you roster two players.

Because everybody is limited to one, and only one, center on FanDuel, on nights where there is a clear value play or an elite option in a plus matchup, ownership becomes pretty top-heavy at the position. It’s then pretty easy to find other players in good spots with greatly reduced ownership levels. This week, I tried to exploit this with a trend aptly titled “Good Centers…But Not Too Good”.

 

The filters I used were:

• The Player’s Projected +/- Percentile is Between 80 and 89
• The Player’s Position is C

We are intentionally bypassing the very upper tier of value while hoping to pound the second tier at reduced ownership.

As a side note, I think this trend could actually be constructed differently at various points in the season. If the goal is to exclude the most highly-owned center, maybe early in the year, a Vegas filter would be the best predictor. At this point in the season though, I think most people are familiar enough with where players should be priced and which matchups are good/bad, that we’ve gotten pretty good at identifying a “strong value” (Projected Plus/Minus).

Results

The screenshots below are from teams I entered into FanDuel’s $5 Layup

2/8

 

Well, I pretty much got what I wanted here. Despite a less than ideal matchup, we had Vucevic ranked high in Projected Plus/Minus because he had been playing well and the Magic would be without one of their primary offensive options (Tobias Harris) during this game. I was able to get him at 2.9% ownership and he responded with a monster game. The team who won this GPP stacked Vucevic with his more highly-owned teammates, Aaron Gordon and Evan Fournier.

KAT’s ownership was somewhat high, but that’s not the whole story. I think you need to consider Gorgui Dieng’s ownership to really put this into context – Dieng was 23.9% owned on 2/8. I don’t know that this is really going to happen too often moving forward, but I love the idea of paying up for KAT in GPPs on nights where I expect Gorgui to be one of the one or two most popular plays. I’m going to consider this a W for the trend as Dieng was in the 92nd percentile for Projected Plus/Minus while KAT was in the 80th, and Dieng appeared on over twice as many teams.

2/9

 

This slate was more a cautionary tale than anything else. The whole point of this trend was to locate the “second tier” at the center position by matching guys ranked in the 80th-89th percentile in Projected Plus/Minus. Well, on this five-game slate, there weren’t any players ranked above 90 in this category. In other words, Gortat and Plumlee WERE the top tier. Gortat’s ownership sort of reflects this, as he was the most highly-owned center on the evening.

Even if you have a strategy that works well in one scenario, you can’t just blindly apply it across every slate. Each slate possessed its own challenges and nuances.

2/10

 

This was a really interesting slate to look at through this trend’s perspective because of Jahlil Okafor. But first, let’s look at the guys who actually qualified for the trend.

Dieng’s price had come up a little and the matchup was a little bit worse on 2/10 than it was on 2/8, so he fell down into 80th-89th percentile and within range to match this trend. His ownership also came down quite a bit, yet he still exceeded his implied point total by about 15 fantasy points.

Pau just barely exceeded his implied point total although he was not a GPP-winning play by any means. I still don’t really hate the play because the long list of injured Bulls meant that Pau would have all the opportunity in the world. The problem was, instead of rising to the occasion, Chicago was run out of the gym by the Hawks.

The top-rated player in the upper-tier was Cousins, who ranked in the 98th Percentile for Plus/Minus in a matchup against the 76ers. As we’d expect, that made him the most highly-owned center, appearing on about a quarter of the teams in this GPP:

 

Now we get to Jahlil Okafor. By the time we got to tip-off, Okafor was ranked at the 96th percentile in Projected Plus/Minus. BUT he didn’t get there until 6:45 p.m. ET, about 15 minutes before tipoff, thanks to late breaking Nerlens Noel news. As a result, he only appeared on 5.2% of the teams in this tournament, despite the excellent matchup.

A lot of the people in this GPP probably simply did not get the news in time. For others who got the news, it wasn’t enough to move them off of their center. Even without Noel, does Okafor become a better play than Boogie @PHI? Without the benefit of hindsight, that’s a tough call to make, I think. If Okafor was a point guard, for example, I think his ownership would have been much higher, but remember, you only get one center on FD, and there were plenty of good ones available.

As a result, I’m starting to think that, on FD, moving onto a center who benefits from late breaking news is an even better play than it initially appears, particularly on a night when other solid options are available. Those who made the switch over to Okafor in the closing moments before lock on 2/10 were certainly rewarded:

 

2/11

Ironically, 2/11 was another short slate (this time, two games) and Miles Plumlee and Gortat were again the highest-rated plays in terms of Projected Plus/Minus Percentile, while the 90-99 level was empty. And it played out almost exactly the same as 2/9 with both players finishing right at their implied point total.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, a week with two short slates makes it a little hard to get a good read on the results. On the medium-large slates, I was able to avoid the centers who were 20% or more owned, while finding solid plays in the next tier. But I’d really want to give this trend more of a fair shake before coming to any hard conclusions. If you do want to recreate this trend for yourself, I wouldn’t have too much concern based on the high overall Plus/Minus of +3.65.

Thanks for reading NBA Trend Testing through the first half of the NBA season and as always, if you have any of your own trends you would like to see featured here, let us know @FantasyLabs or @wmonighe!