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
We’re trying something a bit different this week in NBA Trend Testing. In each of the previous weeks, I’ve created a Trend that attempted to match players who are in a positive situation for whatever reason. You can also use the Trends tool to match players who are in negative matchups, so that you know who to avoid that night. You might not even be sure whether something will lead to a positive or negative matchup before you create the Trend. That more or less describes the Trend I created this week, where I look at teams who are on a road trip.
If you were to create a Trend that very simply matched road teams without any other filters, you would find that there is a slightly positive Plus/Minus on FanDuel. Does it make any difference whether the team is playing in Game 1 of a road trip or Game 6 of a road trip? Maybe, I don’t know. That’s what I intend to find out this week.
The filters I used to create this Trend were:
• Home/Away Streak: The team has played home/away between -9 and -3
• Salary: The player’s average salary is between $5,000 and $12,800
Essentially, we are looking for rotation players that have played three or more road games consecutively. Note that I did not include any back-to-back filter on this, meaning that some of the results may be back-to-backs, but many won’t be. We’ve already looked at how back-to-backs affect value in other articles and I didn’t want the results to be skewed by B2Bs in this case.
Results
3/7
On 3/7, the Kings were playing their fourth consecutive game away from home against the Hornets. This game was not a back-to-back and the team had a relatively short trip from San Antonio to New Orleans between games.
Looking at the results, only Darren Collison really disappointed. I wouldn’t have expected much from him anyway, but he did qualify with a price tag over $5,000. Rondo missed his implied point total by about a point and a half, Rudy Gay exceeded by a handful of points, and Boogie obviously smashed value.
Boogie’s ownership level is almost always high on FanDuel, while Gay and Rondo both had ownership levels under 7% on this seven-game slate. I’m not going to make any judgments yet because this was the first night that the Grizzlies’ entire starting lineup was out, which obviously had a huge effect on how people approached the slate.
3/8
On 3/8, the two matches were the Hawks and Nets.
Atlanta was playing their fourth consecutive game against the Western Conference, but had been off since their 3/5 matchup against the Clippers, meaning they should have been relatively well-rested. Still, @UTA is not an ideal matchup and with 12 teams in action, the Hawks were an easy team for most people to avoid.
Jeff Teague did surprise and exceed his implied point total by 14 points, rewarding the 4.5% of teams who took a chance on the point guard. The Jazz have been a more difficult matchup for opposing frontcourts and Millsap and Horford ran into tougher sledding.
This was a really interesting part of the schedule for Brooklyn. Their matchup in Toronto was their eighth consecutive road game, but they had preceded the game with three days of rest after playing Denver on 3/4. Brook Lopez abused Jonas Valanciunas, forcing the Raptors to ride Bismack Biyombo for most of the game, but that was not enough to prevent Brook from posting a huge fantasy night. Thaddeus Young was more of a letdown, underperforming by around six fantasy points.
3/9
The Rockets were three games into a road trip on 3/9 when the arrive in Philadelphia. This was another night where ownership levels were greatly influenced by the Grizzly Effect. Ariza, Howard, and maybe even Beverley were probably underowned for a plus matchup against the 76ers because everyone was on Chalmers and JaMychal Green, while some took a Grizzlies stack even further than that. In turn, Harden’s ownership may have been driven up slightly because most of the field was rostering the same value plays, leaving money to spend up at SG.
Back to the Rockets, they had two days of rest after their 3/6 game in Toronto. If you did go heavy on Houston, you likely had a good night. Each of their four most expensive players exceeded their implied point total, while Dwight and Harden nearly made it to 100 combined fantasy points (99.9).
3/10
The Hawks’ road trip continued last night with another difficult matchup in Toronto. On a four-game slate with limited options available, only Millsap exceeded the 20% ownership threshold in this GPP. Horford and Teague technically each exceeded their implied point totals, but Atlanta was pretty uninteresting from a fantasy perspective last night.
Conclusion
Overall, 11-of-16 plays exceeded their implied point total, which is pretty good. One thing I noticed over the week is that teams on lengthy road trips had time to rest before their next road game. We didn’t encounter any teams who were playing in the second half of a back-to-back and in several cases, teams had three or four days of rest between games. I think this is probably one reason why the Plus/Minus was higher than I would have expected (+1.49 over 2,000 results).
